Who’s in the kitchen:Mushrooms can grow on you

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Mushrooms are one of my favorite foods. They’re an irresistible source of extraordinary flavors, textures, and aromas.

They can be baked, fried, sautéed, mixed with meat, chicken, turkey, eggs or a myriad of vegetables.

I love them in my baby lamb chop appetizer, mixed into my stuffed baked potatoes, sautéed and baked into a quiche, mixed with caramelized onions and smothered on rib steaks and veal chops, and stuffed into Cornish hens, all of which I love to serve on Friday nights when having company.

Everyone I know loves mushrooms, that is, except for my friend David Weber. His wife, Aviva, warned me that he didn’t like mushrooms. But in the 29 years since I met him and Aviva in Forest Hills, I never remember him turning down my baby lamb chops in pastry dough, which were stuffed with mushrooms and smothered with mushroom sauce. Just goes to show, even to those who dislike mushrooms, if prepared properly, they can taste really good!

Most of us don’t realize that mushrooms are not plants. They were reclassified in the 1960s as fungi. The part of the fungus that we see is only the “fruit” of the organism.  The living body of the fungus is a mycelium, made out of a web of tiny filaments called hyphae. The mycelium is usually hidden in the soil, in wood, or another food source.

All mushrooms are fungi but not all fungi are mushrooms. Fungi also include yeasts, slime molds, rusts and several other types of related organisms. There are an estimated 1.5 to 2 million species of fungi, of which only about 80,000 have been identified.

In some ways, mushrooms are more closely related to animals than to plants.  Just like us, mushrooms take in oxygen for their digestion and metabolism and “exhale” carbon dioxide as a waste product.  Fungal proteins are similar in many ways to animal proteins.

 Mushrooms grow from spores, not seeds, and a single mature mushroom will drop as many as 16 billion spores!

Here are some more interesting facts about mushrooms:

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