Mushrooms: Retain Flavor; Make Concentrated "Paste"

Whoa- 3 weeks into the New Year... guess I better mention what I've been up to. In the kitchen, I pulled out an old recipe for Cream of Mushroom Soup, and updated it a bit. It began as a fancy French recipe for "Duxelles" (mushrooms); Jacques Pepin featured the recipe on one of his cooking shows back in the eighties. (Long before Food Network...) After a few experiments, I dialed in a new recipe that turns a mass quantity of fresh mushrooms into a concentrated puree of mushroom paste, full of flavor. I freeze extra portions of the paste, and can whip up some quick and easy recipes in minutes.

We got a case of mushrooms a few weeks back (cheaper that way); I turned practically the whole case into the puree. Husband Tom was pleased that the case he'd picked up at the produce market didn't go bad on us. (You know how easily mushrooms can do that...) I processed 'em, then cooked batches of puree down to a somewhat dry paste. Takes up less space in the freezer, but is quite handy for sauces and soups, that can be made quickly at a later date.

The recipe on my website goes into detail as to exactly how to make this concentrated mushroom stuff. Meanwhile, I discovered in my experimenting that you don't want to cook the mushrooms down too far. For one of my earlier batches, I thought I'd see what would happen if I continued to dry out the mushrooms in the oven on extremely low heat. Oops. That resulted in a concoction that was just a little too dry. I had to reconstitute the hardened paste, then needed to re-process, in order to soften and dissolve the chunkier parts of the mix. That didn't exactly fit in with my goal of making less work, not more...

Now that I've made the recipe a few times, I know how to cook the mushroom puree down to the right consistency; I also know how to carefully mix it back into whatever soup or sauce I'm making. Slowly adding boiling water seems key. Takes a little effort to learn the process, but now that I have it down, we can throw a Cream of Mushroom Soup together within minutes at The New Deli. It's always nice to be able to make something in a pinch, that tastes so good!