I am using porcini mushrooms for the first time, in a recipe for the gravy in Jagerschnitzel. We found the dried variety at Whole Foods*, and I will only be pounding a few of them into submission to add to the regular mushrooms in the brown gravy. Reportedly, they have an intense umami flavor (yay!) that will be great. But I will only be using about a third of the bag, so I had the obvious question: Once the bag is opened, how do I preserve the rest? Do I seal them tight in a second bag and freeze them/refrigerate them? Do I cut/pound them all up fine and get them into some sauce or gravy that I can store? Can I just close the bag with a shrug and put them back on the shelf for 2 or 20 or 200 days?
Update: Answer: Put bag in bag. Cool dark place. Freezing or refrigerating meh.
Give me clever answers if you know them, but the part I want to bring to the AVI League is what I found when I tried to DuckDG the answer. I was getting irritated at the tone, repetitiveness, and banality of the answer and thinking "Why do people think that ChatGPT is worse than this? If this is the competition for many questions, give me the machine, because it's more efficient!"
Which led immediately to Wait a minute. What if this is ChatGPT? It has that feel. What do you think? Is this a lazy but required-to-be-obsessive human being trying to fulfill a contract writing an article about culinary interventions, or is this ChatGPT?
*We wander over to Big Joe's Foods (Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and the Biggest local Hannaford's are close to each other in Bedford, NH, so we nicknamed the group that) occasionally, mostly because of trying to find unusual gluten-free things like pie crusts or canned soups. But Whole Foods is organised in a way that is so unfamiliar to us that we can't find things. If we did all our shopping there, as some of the Bedford, etc, folks do, we would just learn it intuitively (like hitting a slider). But we don't, so we don't. It has taken an unfortunate number of wandering around experiences to learn that our best strategy is to ask someone the moment we get in the door, e.g. "Where are the porcini mushrooms?"
That lazy human is using ChatGPT and getting paid by the word. Getting paid by the word in this case is that the more words the more ads you scroll by trying to squeeze out some actual information.
ReplyDeleteAs for storing them, my instinct would be to go with sealing them up tight in a second bag and freezing them. I might pound them into submission first.
I can't imagine doing all my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I do like the variety of fresh vegetables not available elsewhere. I used to buy ground bison there for chili, but WalMart now carries it. For weekly grocery shopping, the selection is horrible. I couldn't even find the cheeses I wanted - ie, the only Havarti they had was flavored and I wanted plain. That was 5 years ago and I never went back.
Regarding umami flavor in gravy: 3 or 4 years ago, I started adding a little soy sauce to most of my meat gravies (mushroom, too). In 2-3 cups of gravy, I might add between 1-2 tablespoons of soy sauce. As long as I remember to keep a lid on the saltiness of the other ingredients, the gravy turns out way better with a little soy.
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