Sake Mushrooms

We bought a lot of mushrooms from Costco over the weekend which meant I needed to look for some new ideas for mushroom sides. It was good timing as this recipe for sake mushrooms from 101 Cookbooks was waiting for me in my blog reader. They looked delicious, the recipe sounded easy, and I had all the ingredients at home already (or workable substitutes). 

Ingredients:

For the mushrooms, we needed:

- 8 large white mushrooms ($1.25)

- 1/2 cup of flour ($0.30)

- 1/2 tsp sea salt ($0.05)

- 1 cup of sake ($1.25)

- 1 tbsp olive oil ($0.10)

- 1 tbsp butter ($0.25)

The recipe also included a topping of miso butter which needed:

- 1 tbsp butter ($0.25)

- 2 tsp miso ($0.30)

- 1 tsp toasted sesame seeds ($0.05)

This mushroom side dish ended up costing about $4. Most of that is from the sake and the mushrooms. I think if we were to just marinate the mushrooms in sake (instead of using it for dredging - spoiler for how this dish turned out), the dish would be much more cost-efficient. It didn't make a huge portion of mushrooms (a decent amount for a side dish for 2), so $4 isn't that cheap (in my opinion). Sometimes you can get a good sized side of mushrooms at a restaurant for $4.

Process:

Since I was simultaneously working on poached eggs and polenta, making these mushrooms was a team effort for A and me. Being able to share the kitchen tasks certainly helped with timing and eating dinner before 9 pm!

Cooking process: toasted sesame seeds; ready to dredge; dredged mushroom slices; olive oil and butter heating up; mixing up miso butter; cooking mushrooms in the skillet; partway through the cooking time; after attempting to flip the stuck mushrooms over

We followed the procedure almost exactly as given in the recipe here. Basically you dip the mushroom slices in sake, dredge them in flour and then cook them in a single layer in a skillet with olive oil and butter, flipping them over when ready. The miso butter is just a mix of the ingredients (once the sesame seeds are toasted). Instead of dotting the mushrooms with butter, I mixed the miso butter into the mushrooms like a sauce. It was thick and didn't really dot very well. The recipe sounded simple in theory but didn't turn out to be as easy as we thought it would be.

We had two big issues, one in prep and one in cooking. The prep issue was that the flour started to clump and get doughy and sticky. Just like with the onion rings, the flour didn't coat as lightly and cleanly as we thought it would. I always read these blog posts where people dredge different ingredients through flour and it never looks clumpy. What are we doing wrong? The cooking issue was that the flour fell off a lot of the mushrooms (and clumped up in the pan too) and they just got brown, without that browning adding a lot of flavor. What did I do wrong?

Review:

The flavor of the mushroom dish wasn't bad, but all the effort of dredging and inclusion of the flour didn't seem to add anything whatsoever. The miso butter was pretty good and very buttery, but it would have been better just mixing that into sauteed mushrooms. We both didn't think flouring the mushrooms was worth it (time or effort). If we were to do this in the future, I think we would just saute the mushrooms (after marinating them in sake) and mix in the miso butter afterwards, or maybe just saute them in olive oil, butter and miso from the beginning. But we won't do the flour step. I guess I'm not really sure what its purpose was as it didn't seem to add anything (unless we were doing it wrong). Perhaps I'm just not meant to dredge things.