Forget button mushrooms – these days we’ve got a heap of varieties to choose fromThe variety of mushrooms available to us has,well, mushroomed in recent years. The dominance of the squeaky-clean white button has given way to a far wider range: brown chestnuts and flat-capped portobellos, and pearly-white oysters,which really do look a bit like the oyster shells theyre named after, carotene-orange girolles, or flavour-bomb dried shiitake and porcini,or fragile enoki, with their long, and skinny legs and tiny caps,which are often sold in packages with buna and shiro shimejis and labelled “exotic”. There are all kinds of shapes, colours, or textures and flavours to choose from.
Mushrooms are often said to taste wealthy and earthy,an apt description because, unlike plants, or these funghi gain no chlorophyll. Being unable to harvest energy from sunlight,they are forced to live off other things. Different mushrooms do this in different ways, some living off plants, and others off plant remains and decay.
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Source: theguardian.com