Urban Foraging

Our family LOVES pickled mushrooms. Really loves them. I remember one year our then 4yo dd asking for pickled mushrooms for Christmas and doing a gleeful dance around the living room when she got her very own jar in her stocking. You used to be able to buy them at the store but not any more. I found this recipe in a traditional Ukrainian cookbook and made it every year for one of our 12 dishes for Christmas Eve supper. (click on the photo for the recipe, I used the 6x version today)

JUST NOTICED: THE 6X VERSION NEEDS 3 CUPS OF WATER IN THE BRINE, this isn't listed in the penciled-in listing, please add.


When we were in the grocery store yesterday my dd saw three bags of fresh mushrooms on the discount shelves. PLEASE MUM!!!!

(This is where the urban foraging comes in :D taking advantage of finds like these. No one here has shown up with mushrooms at the farmers' market so I felt comfortable purchasing these for home processing from the store, I NEVER buy my strawberries from the store no matter how cheap they are as people do grow them locally.)

I've made batches of these mushrooms to store in the fridge before but today I got bold. There is really no reason that pickled mushrooms shouldn't be able to be canned, I figure. They have vinegar ... they are hot ... why not?? (I've used my pickle recipe to pickle carrots and green beans with great success, this should work too.)

So first we washed them, strained them, boiled them for 15 minutes in salt water (using pickling salt) Here they are in my 12 quart pot just as they went in.


And after cooking for a while, they shrink down to about half the size! The water can be saved as mushroom broth for soups.


Once they were cooked I packed them into jars with minced onion and garlic, covered them with the brine and left out the vegetable oil called for in the original recipe. It would effect the acidity of the recipe and I wouldn't trust it. Also it made the mushrooms a bit 'greasy' in the fridge method. I understand the reason it was in the original recipe to act as a seal between the mushrooms and the air, unneeded in these soon to be canned ones.


Then added hot lids and processed them for 20 minutes. They all sealed and now we'll open one a month to see how they work out.


They just look SOOOOO yummy! A note, I did try this recipe with canned mushrooms and with fresh one year to compare the two. The pickled fresh mushrooms were way, way, way better!