Not every mushroom picker is able to engage in "silent hunting" at any time of the year. Although it is known that mushrooms can be harvested in the winter. But more often wild plants are harvested in the warm season, and so that they are suitable for use after the end of the season, they use various ways to preserve this tasty and healthy food product for a long time. They are canned, salted, dried or harvested frozen mushrooms. In the latter method, due to a strong decrease in temperature, the activity of microbes that can cause spoilage of the product is weakened, and the action of enzymes (for example, oxidizing ones) that darken light-colored fungi stops or decreases. At the same time, the rates of chemical reactions slow down, both inside the fruiting bodies and with the environment (air or packaging material).
The biggest advantage of freezing foods is the preservation of their quality. If it is possible to avoid heat treatment, then in the mushrooms all useful substances remain unchanged: unstable vitamins (especially vitamin C), carbohydrates, proteins. They have excellent color, appearance, taste, texture and aroma. How to freeze mushrooms so as not to spoil them? Only a quick freeze method provides almost complete preservation of natural nutritional benefits. Another advantage of this method is the speed of cooking mushrooms. They are already clean and ready to use, just thaw enough fruits. More often they are boiled in boiling water or immediately fried in hot oil.
When freezing, water transitions from liquid to solid. As a result, ice crystals with sharp edges penetrate the entire thickness of the product. In the solid state, H2O takes up 9% more than the same amount of liquid water. For this reason, irreversible undesirable processes occur in the cell tissue of fungi, leading to rupture of the cell walls, that is, the main structure of the product is destroyed. After thawing, the cell walls cannot hold the juice, and it liberates abundantly. Mushrooms become mild, flabby and tasteless. To avoid deterioration in the quality of the product, you need to know how to freeze mushrooms and observe the freezing and thawing regimes.
If a single large crystalline ice is formed in a cell, then it will destroy it more than several small ones. The smaller their linear dimensions, the better the frozen mushrooms will be. You can achieve this result by quick freezing. Therefore, it is necessary to create the maximum possible temperature difference between the mushrooms and the refrigerant. The industry uses special freezing machines capable of maintaining a temperature of no higher than minus 30-35 ° C and even much lower. A further task is to prevent recrystallization of water during storage, which is accompanied by the enlargement of crystals with increasing temperature, which is also undesirable because of the possible increase in the vital activity of harmful bacteria. Therefore, the storage temperature of freshly frozen mushrooms should not exceed minus 18 ° C.
How to freeze mushrooms at home? Of course, it is better to expose already boiled or fried mushrooms to this storage method. They are well stored in a home freezer. In this case, the structure of the product is less disturbed, and harmful microorganisms are largely neutralized during the heat treatment. All edible mushrooms are suitable for freezing . But only young, solid and intact fruit bodies are chosen by worms and their larvae. To do this, they are sorted and cleaned. Boil in salted water or fry in a pan until cooked (undercooked or undercooked mushrooms after defrosting will take longer to cook). Allow the mushrooms to cool (the water is drained before), and then lay out in plastic containers or bags.
How to freeze tubular mushrooms (white mushrooms, boletus, butterflies, boletus) or lamellar (champignons, traps, large russula, mushrooms, honey mushrooms, chanterelles)? First, all prey from forest wild plants is sorted out, damaged or weak mushrooms are removed, then they are washed or cleaned. All these mushrooms are perfectly stored in a home freezer for 6 months. Porcini mushrooms are boiled separately, and the liquid remaining from them is not discarded, as after plate mushrooms, but they are cooled and frozen, then they are used to make soups and sauces. Hard chanterelles collected at the end of the season are unsuitable for freezing, caviar is made from them. In honey mushrooms , only hats are used for freezing, and the legs are also suitable for making mushroom caviar.