Marinated mushrooms

Overview

Marinated mushrooms are small whole mushrooms cooked briefly, packed hot into jars with a mixture of vinegar and oil, and processed in a boiling-water canner. The formulation is the preserving step as much as the heat: the acid, the oil and the seasonings are specified together, and the jar and the process time follow from that combination.

The version here is the tested home-canning procedure published by the US National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP). It is a technique description and a formulation, not an ingredient guide, and it sits in the same family as the Eastern European vinegar-pickled mushrooms recorded elsewhere in this collection.

Method

Mushrooms are chosen small, with caps under 1-1/4 inch in diameter, and kept fresh and unopened. Their stems are trimmed to 1/4 inch so each cap keeps a short stem. A short simmer in water with lemon juice firms and cleans them before they meet the marinade.

The oil, vinegar, herbs and salt are heated together, the onion and pimento are added, and the mixture is brought to a boil. The mushrooms go into hot half-pint jars with a quarter clove of garlic and two or three black peppercorns, then are covered with the hot marinade, leaving half an inch of headspace. Jars are sealed and processed in a boiling-water canner.

The NCHFP procedure is a hot pack in half-pint jars. It does not use a pressure canner: this is an acidified, oil-based product processed at boiling-water temperature, and the process time rises with elevation.

Process and elevation

The source gives four process times for half-pint jars in a boiling-water canner: 20 minutes from sea level to 1,000 ft, 25 minutes from 1,001 to 3,000 ft, 30 minutes from 3,001 to 6,000 ft, and 35 minutes above 6,000 ft. The time is set by the elevation of the kitchen, not by the size of the batch.

The procedure asks the cook to read the NCHFP guidance on boiling-water canners and on the basics of home canning before starting, if it is a first attempt.

Safety and limits

The source gives no storage guidance and no storage duration. Appearance, smell and taste cannot show that a sealed jar is safe, and this page makes no such claim.

The tested formulation is specific. The source lists the mushroom size, the vinegar strength, the oil, the herbs and the jar size, and it warns in effect that those belong together. Other oil and vinegar mixtures, other mushroom species and wild mushrooms fall outside the tested scope. The Oregon State Extension scope for the same method is commercially grown button mushrooms.

Related methods

Vinegar-pickled mushrooms, which are brined or marinated without the same oil and herb base, are recorded as a separate preparation. Pressure canning of plain domestic mushrooms in jars uses a different thermal process and is a different method.