New-School Sautéed Mushrooms | Cook's Illustrated (2024)

Efficient method

Initially piling all themushroomsinto the pan with water and briefly steaming them causes them to collapse rapidly.

Minimal oil

Sautéing themushroomsafter they've steamed and collapsed means that they can't absorb much oil—½ teaspoon is enough to prevent sticking and encourage browning.

Flavorful sauce

Vigorously simmering a little butter with chicken broth ensures that the fat emulsifies, creating a flavorful sauce that clings well to themushrooms.

To explain, let me start by recounting what typically happens when you sautémushrooms. You heat a little oil in a skillet, throw in the sliced fungi, and toss them around. Pretty soon, there's no oil left in the skillet, so you add a little more to lubricate the pan and encourage the browning that creates loads of new, rich-tasting flavor compounds. Butmushroomssuck up oil like sponges, and you find yourself adding more and more. Then, just as browning seems to be getting underway, themushroomsstart to release their abundant moisture. Only once all their jus has evaporated—which takes a lot of time and frequent stirring so that the process happens evenly among all the slices—can browning start in earnest. But by that time, you've already added so much fat to the pan that you may as well have deep-fried themushrooms.

The problem is thatmushroomsare full of air pockets that readily absorb oil. And all that water they contain thwarts browning. To yield meaty-tasting, well-brownedmushrooms—not spongy oil receptacles—I'd have to start by quickly ridding them of all that air and water.

So I loaded up my 12-inch nonstick skillet with a little more than a pound of sliced white buttonmushrooms(enough to yield about four servings) and ¼ cup of water. I cranked the heat to high and, sure enough, within moments the liquid in the pan turned gray—proof that themushroomswere giving up their jus. After only 5 minutes and just occasional stirring, that liquid had evaporated and the mound ofmushroomsI'd started with had reduced enough to fit in a single layer across the skillet's cooking surface.

From there, I proceeded with a typical sauté method, drizzling several tablespoons of oil over themushroomsto speed browning and letting them sizzle over medium-high heat until they developed good color.

But, surprisingly, multiple tablespoons of fat now seemed like way too much. Instead of readily soaking up the oil and leaving just enough to lubricate the pan and encourage browning, as they do when sautéed the typical way, themushroomsdidn't absorb much oil at all. In fact, much of the oil remained in the pan, so themushroomscooked up grease-slicked.

I ran a series of tests in which I incrementally decreased the amount of oil I added to the pan after the water evaporated, and I was stunned to discover that a mere ½ teaspoon was all I needed to prevent sticking and help accelerate browning. Why? Because while rawmushroomscontain air pockets that readily soak up oil, cooking themushroomsbefore adding oil collapses those air pockets so that they can't absorb nearly as much.

Now that I had a method for sautéingmushroomsthat was not only efficient but also downright lean, I felt justified in lavishing themushroomswith a glossy butter-based glaze.

Once they were well browned, I lowered the heat to medium and pushed themushroomsto the sides of the pan to clear a space. In went a tablespoon of butter and some minced shallot and rosemary to lend the dish depth and fragrance, followed by red wine and cider vinegar to deglaze the pan.

I gave the contents a stir to evenly coat themushroomswith the sauce, but on closer inspection I noticed that themushroomswere coated with droplets of fat—a clear sign that simply tossing the butter-wine mixture with themushroomshadn't thoroughly emulsified the sauce.

The problem was that there was very little sauce compared to the volume ofmushroomsin the pan, which made it difficult to vigorously stir the mixture and incorporate the butter. So, going forward, I added ½ cup of chicken broth after the deglazing liquid had evaporated, and I let the buttery broth simmer until it had reduced by about half and the fat had emulsified into the liquid.

ADD WATER FIRST; ADD OIL LATER

Steam cooks the mushrooms quickly, so they collapse and release liquid. After the mushroom jus evaporates, we add just ½ teaspoon of oil to brown the mushrooms.

ADD BROTH; REDUCE TO A GLAZE

We sauté aromatics in 1 tablespoon of butter, deglaze the pan, and then simmer the mushrooms in ½ cup of broth until it reduces to a silky, emulsified glaze.