It's been a while since I posted anything mushroom related. So here is another mushroom jerky experiment for this #fungifriday by @ewkaw
One of the best mushrooms to use for jerky is wood ear. You can buy this from Asian grocery stores easily and it also grows wild on various dead trees over here. It is an easy mushroom to identify as there are no real poisonous lookalikes. This batch is from the store as I have a little baby to take on walks with me now and can't go crashing around in the weeds of the forest looking for wild wood ear.
I spotted another interesting mushroom at the Asian grocery store. This is white fungus and it is somewhat similar to wood ear except this is much more dry and crunchy when dehydrated. My experiment will be to boil this together with the wood ear in hopes of making a crunchy chip rather than a chewy jerky. For taste this has none and it will absorb spices easily.
I threw in a few tomatoes, the wood ear, the white fungus and various chili spices and some lemon to make a tangy and spicy flavor. After boiling it for about an hour the taste of the spices and anything else in the mix will be absorbed by the fungi.
The next step is to blend it into a mash. I also like to taste the mixture a bit here to see if it needs more salt or seasoning. Be careful on adding too much salt as dehydrating will concentrate the salt taste later on. I basically add just enough salt or soy sauce until I barely taste it.
This is what the blended mash looked like on the drying sheet. Try and spread it out evenly in thickness across the sheet so you don't end up with thick wet areas later on.
Here's what it looked like after it finished drying. I broke it apart into chip sized pieces. The white fungus really added a bit of extra crisp texture and the tomatoes and lemon juice added a nice zing to the chili mix.
I also kept a few of the wood ear out of the blender and dried them. This is what it looks like fully dried out and the spices got concentrated on it after it lost all its moisture. They taste great and crunch like a chip. Plus you get the benefit of the medicinal qualities of these mushrooms as they have anticancer and antitumor compounds in them.
I also bought some king oysters from the store. These mushrooms have a nice thick texture for soup, grilling and they work well for jerky strips too.
I slice them about a couple millimeters thick.
Then they go into a sauce pan with whatever flavor you can envision. This time I made a sweet barbeque honey mustard flavor. I let it boil for about an hour to let the bbq flavor fully soak into the mushroom.
After a taste test of one of the boiled strips I decided it was not salty or spicy enough and sprinkled salt, black pepper and some cumin on top of them.
This is what they ended up looking like after drying. The texture of these is a bit more chewy like jerky. One tip is to not let them dry too much though as they will get really tough and crispy depending on how thick you sliced them. I usually just dry them for 7 hours in the dehydrator instead of 10 hours with the wood ear. This will ensure they keep a somewhat jerky texture.
That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)