Making Mushroom Smoke

When I (Ian) was about ten years old, my parents and I lived in England for a little over a year on account of a job my dad had there. There are plenty of culinary stories to tell about that, but for right now, I want to focus on just one thing - Shake O'Cini. In Britain, there's a large supermarket chain called Sainsbury's, and there my mother discovered this product, Shake O'Cini, which is essentially a metal shaker tin full of pulverized dried mushrooms. I had completely forgotten about it until recently, when she reminded me. And then I thought - well, I can do that.

Shake O'Cini - which is still available, as it happens, though apparently not at Sainsbury's, if their website is to be the definitive word - is really kind of an MSG workaround. A delicious workaround, to be sure, and absolutely worth doing - but it's a workaround. The reason that anybody uses MSG - and you probably should, despite its reputation - is for its incredibly strong umami flavor. Umami, if you're not familiar with the word, is one of the five principle flavors, and is the sort of indescribable meaty, savory flavor that's lent by foods high in protein. Meats, nuts, beans, cheese, fish, and of course, mushrooms all primarily carry this flavor. MSG is what happened when somebody figured out that, strictly speaking, protein doesn't taste like umami, amino acids do, especially the abundant and relatively easy-to-purify glutamate. Mushrooms are incredibly rich in glutamate, and ground mushrooms are pretty much MSG plus impurities. Delicious impurities.

So Mariam and I went out to our local supermarket (we go to Fiesta usually in Houston) and bought this:

I think these are shitake mushrooms, and perhaps somebody who reads Chinese can tell me what they really are. Anyway, they cost like a dollar. On the back there are instructions for what you're supposed to do with them:

 Right. So nevermind that. I rummaged about in my kitchen and retrieved an older Braun blade grinder that I used to grind coffee with. These are really pretty awful at grinding coffee, actually (burr grinders give a superior grind), but they're great for spices and the like. If you've got one around and want to use it for something like this, however, make sure you do as I did, and clean it out thoroughly with soapy paper towels until you can't smell coffee in there anymore - it's an odor that can easily transfer because coffee beans are quite oily.

Then it's just a simple matter of breaking the dried mushrooms up into little bits with one's hands the dropping them in the grinder. Give it a few good spins, and you've got a pretty decent-looking pile of pulverized mushroom bits:

We had to repeat this several times to get through all the mushrooms, of course. After a couple of cycles, opening the grinder would release a wispy cloud of mushroom aerosol, like smoke. The smell was like a burning mushroom pizza - but in a good way. I'm sorry we don't have a picture of that - it was a very transient phenomenon, unfortunately. But be aware - if you don't like the smell of burning mushrooms, or if you have sensitive lungs (or sensitive smoke detectors) you might want to take this a bit more slowly than we did.

The mushroom powder was subsequently loaded into an old, thoroughly cleaned shaker jar, and appropriately labeled:

And now, mushrooms are a spice. This can be used to give a richer, more savory flavor to soups, sauces and gravies that might otherwise be heavy on salts and bitters. Basically, don't think of this as mushrooms - think of it as a seasoning that sort of tastes like meat (and isn't bacon bits, which is also a thing, I guess). I could also imagine adding this to marinades for vegetables, and perhaps a spice rub, though in that latter case, I would use it specifically for its mushroomy qualities, rather than its umami contribution, since meat already has plenty of that. Anyway, this was really easy, and these dried mushrooms will keep in this state essentially forever, or for as long as you care to keep your dried spices.