Decide for yourself whether to salt the bitters cold or hot. I offer a choice of recipes from my grandmother, a zealous housewife, who prepared amazingly tasty and nutritious dishes from any, even second-rate products.
She cooked champignons most often, but did not disdain bitter mushrooms - conditionally edible mushrooms. I marinated and salted it in different ways. We devoured them with pleasure on both cheeks: with onions and sunflower oil, fried or boiled potatoes. Salty bitters in winter are something.
Why do you need to soak mushrooms and how to do it
These mushrooms contain bitterness, so they are not eaten without additional processing. Before cooking, mushrooms are always soaked in the same way as milk mushrooms. Simple and accelerated methods are used for this.
Let's look at the simple soaking method first. Put the bitter mushrooms brought home into a basin, add water and let them stand for a while. After pre-soaking, it is easier to clean the caps and legs from dirt and debris.
Prepare a container for soaking from a non-oxidizing material. Sort out the mushrooms. Cut out wormholes, remove damaged parts and dirt. Trim the legs, leaving a stump no more than 1 cm long. Pour the selected and purified raw materials into prepared containers and add water.
Mushrooms should remain in water for at least 5 days. Bitter substances will be released into the water, so you will have to drain the water three times and add fresh water. By the end of the week, the milk mushrooms can be salted.
Modern housewives are always experimenting. To speed up the soaking process, they began to use citric acid and salt. Take 1 kg of cleanly washed, trimmed milk mushrooms. In 1 liter of water, dilute 1 tbsp salt. l. and citric acid - ⅓ tsp is enough. Pour the salted and acidified solution over the mushrooms. There will be no bitterness after 3 days. The water will have to be changed 3 times every day. Each time you need to add salt and citric acid.
Solim
We've dealt with soaking, and now we'll find out how to pickle bitters. Let's consider both options:
- Hot ambassador.
- The pickling is cold.
Hot salt
The mushrooms are soaked, they no longer contain bitterness. We begin salting the bitters using the hot method. Take an enamel pan and place the mushrooms, caps down. Add some salt to the water and pour it into the pan. Cook for 30 minutes. Stir occasionally to prevent it from burning.
Salt mushrooms You need it with dill and garlic. Before storing, place the dill in a basin, add cold water, rinse and rinse. Peel the garlic. It can be sliced or used as whole cloves.
Suitable containers for salted mushrooms would be:
- Enameled pan.
- Enameled bucket.
- Glass jars with a wide neck.
Place the boiled mushrooms tightly in a prepared container, sprinkling them with salt and garlic. 2 tablespoons of salt per 1 kg. You need to put dill and a load on top.
The brine should completely cover the corned beef. If it is not enough, add salt water.
At home, mushrooms are salted for 7 days. It turns out very tasty if the bitters are cooked hot. It’s good to eat them on weekdays, and such a snack will decorate the holiday table.
Cold pickling
Now let's try to prepare salted bitters according to the cold pickling recipe. Salt, as with the hot method, we will take 2 tbsp per 1 kg. l. Seasonings you will need:
- garlic;
- dill;
- cherry leaves;
- peppercorns (black);
- caraway.
The mushrooms are already soaked, the jars (pan) are washed clean with soda and rinsed with water. The greens are sorted, washed in running water, cut into pieces of a convenient size. The garlic is peeled.
Place the mushrooms caps down. Sprinkle the layers with salt and spices. Place a weight on top so that the mushrooms are all covered with brine and do not darken. Cold-salted bitters will be ready only after two months.
Let's marinate
When sorting through the mushrooms you brought home, put the small mushrooms in a separate bowl - you can use them to make pickled bitters. The legs will have to be cut off completely, and the caps will need to be soaked in the traditional or accelerated way before marinating.
The norm of spices and other products for preparing 0.5 liters of marinade, calculated for 1 kg of raw materials:
- Vinegar - 0.06 l.
- Sugar - 2 tbsp. l.
- Salt - 2 tbsp. l.
- Pepper - 10 peas.
- Laurel - 3 leaves.
- Cloves - 5 pcs.
- Onion - 2 heads.
- Carrots - 1 piece.
Peel the carrots and chop into thin strips. Cut the peeled onion into small half rings. Pour all the ingredients prepared in advance, except vinegar, into the water.
Cooking after boiling does not take long, just boil for a couple of minutes. At the very end, pour vinegar into the marinade. Prepared mushrooms that have been soaked for a week should be boiled for half an hour. When everything is ready, drain the water.
Place the bitters tightly into prepared jars and pour in the hot marinade. In winter, bitters prepared according to this recipe will be a good addition to any vegetable or meat dish.
All the recipes suggested above do not require great culinary skills. The quality of salted and pickled mushrooms depends on the preparation of the raw materials. Well-washed and soaked bitters in any type of pickling will delight you with their original taste.
