In writing the recipe for Cheesy Mushroom Pie, I mention dry sautéing. I ransacked older posts looking for instructions to link on how to dry sauté mushrooms. I’m sure I’ve written this down before—I certainly refer to the process enough. But, it doesn’t seem to be here. This is an important skill for any amateur mycologist (see Gourmet Delicacies for Free: Foraging for Mushrooms).
Dry sautéing works well to cook most wild mushrooms. Very few of the mushrooms we harvest should be eaten raw; apparently, some people do, but we play it safe. We use this method to cook mushrooms initially; how far we take the process depends on how much additional cooking they’ll get in the dish in which we use them.
I learned about dry sautéing from David Arora’s indispensable book, All That the Rain Promises and More (paid link). The book tells very specifically how to prepare mushrooms this way. I’ll tell you how we do it, in my own words:
Clean the mushrooms, then slice them thinly, ¼ inch or thinner. We try to keep the pieces fairly uniform in size, but that doesn’t seem to matter too much.
Place the mushrooms in a pan over high heat. This is a small batch of mushrooms: one each, chanterelle, bolete, and hedgehog (Photo: Sarah A. Zeiger).