Content
- Clean and wash chanterelles - tips and tricks
- Pre-clean even collected chanterelles in the forest
- Roughly clean and wash chanterelles - That's how it works
- Then prepare or preserve fresh chanterelles
- Classic kitchen trick: Clean chanterelles with flour
- Tips
Washing chanterelles is an option to clean them carefully
Clean and wash chanterelles - tips and tricks
Every year between June and November, you can enjoy delicious, fresh chanterelles in sparse mixed forests. Particularly attractive are rarely committed forest roads, at the edges of which a lot of moss grows and also has plenty of sunshine. Here, the yellow fruit bodies often hide in the moss pad - but once you have found one, others are not far away. Chanterelles always occur in groups. The tasty mushrooms are often heavily polluted and must therefore be properly cleaned and often washed. How this works, we explain in the following article.
Pre-clean even collected chanterelles in the forest
You should pre-sort the mushrooms already found in the forest - and sort out the False Chanterelle, for a single copy can spoil a whole dish! - and rough plaster. Specimens that are already very ugly, for example, are already very dark and / or already have a rubber-like consistency, leave you right in the woods. These are no longer useful for consumption. Even very large copies do not take you home. Cutting through the length as with stone and other tube mushrooms is basically not necessary, as chanterelles are rarely attacked by maggots. However, you should already remove the coarsest dirt as well as any food and other damage.
Roughly clean and wash chanterelles - That's how it works
Arrived at home, the chanterelles are the same to clean. Like all mushrooms, they only last for a short time and should therefore be processed immediately. Take the small mushrooms one at a time and cut off the lower part of the stalk. Carefully check the hat with a small knife and carefully scrape off dirt and any forest residue. Then put the mushrooms briefly in a water bath:
Instead of bathing the mushrooms, you can immediately put them in a sieve and rinse vigorously with a hand shower. But no matter how you wash the chanterelles, the mushrooms should only come into contact with the water for a few seconds. Otherwise, they will quickly soak up the wet and get an uncomfortable gummy consistency when frying, not to mention the loss of flavor and taste. Maybe you already heard or read that you should not wash mushrooms in general: Basically this is correct. On the other hand, chanterelles are heavily polluted - hidden deep in the moss - and can only be thoroughly cleaned by washing.
Then prepare or preserve fresh chanterelles
After cleaning and washing, you can blanch the chanterelles and then freeze them. The small mushrooms can also freeze raw, but then often bitter. If you want to continue using them right away, you can taste them in the simplest way: Fry small diced onions in bacon in a pan. Add the raw (not blanched!) Or frozen chanterelles and a hefty dash of cream and a teaspoon of sauce stock. Let the sauce boil briefly and then simmer for about ten minutes.
Classic kitchen trick: Clean chanterelles with flour
Since chanterelles often have a lot of hard-to-remove dirt, you can also clean the mushrooms with the help of this old kitchen tricks.
Required materials:
To clean the chanterelles with flour:
Put the chanterelles to be cleaned into the freezer bag and add one to two tablespoons of flour. Seal the pouch - especially pouches with a zipper are convenient for this purpose - and, by gently shaking, spread the flour evenly until all mushrooms are covered with a thin white layer. Put the floured mushrooms in the sieve and rinse the flour and flour with cold water. As the dirt adheres to the flour, it is also removed at the same time. Drain the mushrooms well on some kitchen paper.
Tips
Instead of washing the chanterelles, you can only tackle stubborn dirt with a moistened kitchen towel. This has the advantage that the mushrooms do not absorb so much water - washed chanterelles are always clean, but leave off a lot of water when frying and therefore rather stew in their own juice. Washing is therefore only useful if you want to prepare the mushrooms with a sauce.