vs.
A while back I did a piece on the great mushroom experiment, I promised to revisit the story and so here is the follow-up. In the original piece I took two mushrooms of relatively the same size and cooked them in the same pan, one with salt and one without salt. In the first piece there was minimal difference between the mushrooms. Today I sat up a similar experiment, but decided to do whole pans of mushrooms to see if more mushrooms affected the results. The original question posed was does salting mushrooms cause them to take longer to brown? In the first test the finding was no and I have to say the findings stayed the same in this round. Here’s the setup - non-stick pan, medium-high heat, pan full of mushrooms. The mushrooms were allowed to cook until they were brown. Here are the photo results.
Unsalted mushrooms in pan.
Unsalted mushrooms browning. (7 mins.)
Salted mushrooms in pan.
Browning salted mushrooms. (5 mins.)
The interesting finding here was the salted mushrooms took only 5 minutes to brown. For those of you thinking well if they were cooked second then the pan was hot, not so fast, I preheated the pan for the first set of mushrooms to counter this point. I tried to find research on this topic, couldn’t find anything really. I looked at McGee’s On Food and Cooking, but there is not mention of salting mushrooms and it’s effects on cook times. I did find out a couple of interesting facts on mushrooms though. Mushrooms are 80-90% water. Since mushrooms are not plants they have no chlorophyll and can not get energy from the sun. They must life off of other living things. The part of the mushroom that we eat is called the fruiting body. This part lives above ground and releases the spores that allow the mushrooms to reproduce. Because the fruiting body is so important to the mushrooms survival some mushrooms are poisonous.