Drying mushrooms in the electric dryer: how to dry the mushrooms

Dried mushrooms have high nutritional valuevalue, rich aroma and taste, perfectly retain their useful properties. With the help of an electric dryer, you can make a good supply of mushrooms for the winter, spending very little time on it. To get a quality product, you need to know which mushrooms are suitable for drying, how to properly prepare them, dry them, and, of course, how to store them properly. Almost all edible mushrooms can be dried, but it is still better to use tubular types for this:

white;
boletus;
podberezoviki;
oil;
flyworms.

When dried, these mushrooms have verypronounced taste qualities, which cannot be said about lamellar species. Saffron milk caps or russula, honey mushrooms and chanterelles acquire a slight bitterness after drying, which is quite difficult to get rid of. Dried marsupial species, such as white truffles and morels, have a very good taste. It should be taken into account that when dried, mushrooms lose a significant amount of weight, so the output is no more than 10% of the original volume.

Proper preparation

Mushrooms for drying are a mustfreshly picked, without wormholes and rot. Old mushrooms, with a dried-out cap or wrinkled mushrooms should not be collected, much less dried. It is also not recommended to wash them before drying - this will prolong the drying time and worsen the taste of the finished product. It is enough to remove leaves, soil residues and other debris from the mushrooms, and cut off damaged areas with a knife. To prevent the surface from darkening when cutting, the knife should be made of stainless steel. Mushrooms are dried whole only in the air, but for the oven or electric dryer they must be cut into small flat pieces. The stem of the birch bolete is not suitable for drying, so it is cut off right down to the cap; for aspen mushrooms and porcini mushrooms, only the bottom of the stem is removed, everything else is dried. Small mushrooms can be left whole or cut in half, and large ones are preferably divided lengthwise into four or five parts, the thickness of which should not exceed 10 millimeters.

Drying process

An electric dryer is the most optimaloption for harvesting forest gifts. Thanks to the well-thought-out design, drying mushrooms takes little time, does not require constant presence and control. Having set the required temperature and time, you can do your own thing while the equipment is working. So, each tier of the electric dryer is filled with chopped mushrooms in one layer, straightened and leveled pieces. Set the temperature to 55 ° C, time - from 2 to 6 hours. The thinner the slices are cut, the less time it takes to dry mushrooms in the electric dryer. To speed up the process, you can periodically change the trays. It should be borne in mind that a small amount of cutting dries much faster, so if you put two or three trays in the electric dryer, and not all five or six, you need to check the readiness after two hours, otherwise you can overdry the contents. It is not difficult to determine the degree of readiness of the gifts of the forest: if the pieces spring slightly when bent, do not break, look completely dry, the electric dryer can be turned off. If the plates bend very easily and look a little damp, they need to be dried further. Mushrooms that are left too long become very hard, darken, and may fall apart. They are not suitable for cooking, but they are good for making mushroom powder: grind the overdried pieces in a coffee grinder, add 10% regular salt and mix thoroughly. Pour the resulting mixture into a glass container and close tightly.

Storage Rules

It is known that mushrooms easily absorb foreign substances.odors, improper storage can completely spoil this product. So, after drying, the mushrooms need to be cooled to room temperature and placed in glass jars or boxes made of thick cardboard. The room where they are stored must be dry and necessarily ventilated. The permissible air humidity is 70%, in more humid rooms the preparations will mold. Instead of cardboard boxes, you can use gauze bags for storage, hanging them on shelves or hooks on the wall. Periodically, dried mushrooms need to be sorted out, throwing away rotten or moldy pieces. As a rule, they are stored for no more than a year, then the taste decreases, the aroma disappears.