Open Source Food
What is Open Source Food? – To answer this I need to first summarize what Open Source means to me.
Open source is the essence of sharing in the software world, you take the source code someone else has worked to make and adapt it for your own needs and possibly make a new peace of software out of it. I have taken this philosophy and adapted it to the Food world, you take an recipe that someone puts up and allows you to use, alter it and adapt it to serve a new purpose and create a new item from someone else initial work. This to me is very similar to Open Source, so I coined it Open Source Food!
In the spirit of Open Source I took a recipe i found on a friends site and changed it slightly making it work for my needs.
Open in the sense your free to change it and Source referring to the raw ingredients
Fried Mushrooms
Recently I got a huge craving for Fried Mushrooms so I began to look for recipes online, not finding any that really interested me, Robbie Ferguson suggested trying the batter for his Parmesan Chicken and using it for the mushrooms, I agreed and tonight I did just that.
Mushrooms before being Fried
I started with some cheap White Top mushrooms shown above which I mistakenly bought way to many of. I then took the following recipie
- 1 Cup Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
- 1/2 Cup Grated Parmesan Cheese (I just use the freeze-dried stuff here)
- Sea Salt (about 1 tsp)
- Fresh Crack Pepper (about 2 1/2 tsp)
- 2 Large Eggs (Whites Only)
- 1/2 Cup Room-Temperature Water
This generated a nice batter which proved to not be enough for the large amount of Mushrooms I bought, so I had to make a second batch while dubbling the above incrediants.
Mushroom Batter
When I placed the mushrooms in the batter they were easily coated as you can see which helped to create a great tasting mushroom. When i got them evenly coated I began to heat up some cooking oil in a Deep Fryer, setting the Fryer to 375 and giving it about 5 minutes to heat up. I then dropped them in one at a time and let them cook until they resembled the color below
Freshly fried mushrooms
After that you want to make sure you have a plate with a few paper towels on it to absorb the excess oil, then place the Fried Mushrooms down on it and repeat till all the Mushrooms are done. You can tell if you did it correctly when they look similar to the image below
First Batch of Mushrooms
That is all that is left of the first batch as they were so good my Wife and Daughter seemed to woof them down as evidant by the small amount that is in the picture above. Keep in mind this was merely the first batch, finaly I repeated the steps over and over until the last batch was done, You can tell by the picture below just how many Mushrooms were made.
The pile of Shrooms
As you can see I made a huge amount here and that was not even all the Mushrooms I still have about 12-15 left that never got fried due to running out of Batter once again. You can see in the image below just how many mushrooms were left which is not alot
Left over Mushroom stems
Bottom Line – These things are delicious and very easy to make but be careful how many mushrooms you buy because they seem to multiply once you clean and cut them up. I had some rather large mushrooms so alot of them had to be Quartered and all of them needed to be de-stemed.
That leaves the left over stems and other Mushroom scraps seen below. You could easily include these in some kind of soup or other Mushroom dish.
Mushroom Stems
Let me know what you think post your comments below.
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