Mushrooms and Breakfast!

Part of exploration with breakfast I could not ignore the fact that mushrooms where my favourite ingredient to a successful breakfast. All the places I had encountered did mushrooms in some way or other and I really wanted to experiment.

Getting decent mushrooms is hard. Anyone that knows anything about mushrooms knows that compared to our European and American cousins of cooking we in Australia have been limited in access to great mushrooms. Our mushroom supply is limited and all through my younger life I was stuck with eating either Asian dried mushrooms or button mushrooms.

But now, in this day and age we are now able to get relatively good mushrooms from supermarkets and on the often occasion mum and papa stores at our local shopping locals. The most common new bread of mushrooms is the Swiss brown which is mildly nutty and very similar to button mushrooms but gives a firmer texture. Other Asian varieties that are on the menu are the shitaki, white oyster and enoki. One of my favourite is portabello which is a large burger replacement mushrooms that is at time hard to find.

Regardless there are many ways to cook and eat mushrooms and each to their own. But the issue that I have many times seen mushrooms wasted by overcooking and incorrect methods of cooking mushrooms.

Mushrooms are in fact  full of water themselves and I see two most common mistakes. The first and most lethal is over crowding the mushrooms, placing to many in the pan to cook and sweating them. There by causing the mushrooms to stew instead of frying. Its frustrating when you end up with stewed mushrooms on toast, that are way to moist and lacking in flavour.

The second mistake that I often see is that people cook these wonderful types of mushrooms like button mushrooms, assuming that they need to flavour them to death to achieve anything great. Most of these other variety of mushrooms have there own distinctive flavours and should be embraced. Of course there are methods to influencing these mushrooms to give us there full flavours through the right cooking methods.

Swiss brown on toast!

• Handful Swiss brown mushrooms – sliced thinly
• 1/2 Crushed garlic
• Salt + Pepper
• 25g butter
• 1/2 Birdseye chilli (optional)
• Wedge of lemon
• Teaspoon water

In a medium heated no stick pan, place the a small hand full of thinly sliced (2-3mm) swiss browns in and fry for a 30 seconds. Once cooked on one side you can toss the pan and move them around. Toss in 1/2 a crushed garlic clove, 1/2 a chilli finely chopped and cook for a further 2 minutes. You should see the water coming out of the mushrooms. At this point add your teaspoon of water, salt and pepper to taste and finally add the butter. You should see a coat of buttery, mushroom goodness ooze around the pan. At this point taste this butter goodness, and further season to taste.

Toss the mushrooms around the pan and make sure they are coated with this oozy buttery goodness, serve on 1/2 cut piece of toast. Take your other 1/2 of the toast and make sure you get all of the buttery goodness from the pan and serve as a side.

Repeat the process of all servings. Serve hot and enjoy.