A quick pickle is a day’s work and most of it is waiting. You simmer the mushrooms, pour hot brine over them and leave the jar in the fridge overnight. By the next afternoon they are sharp, firm and ready, and they will keep for about two weeks.
This is not the same thing as the jars we sell. Ours ferment for three to five weeks and taste different for it. That difference is at the end of this page, because it matters and most recipes never mention it.
Which mushrooms to use, and which to skip
The mushroom decides more than the brine does.
- Cremini and button — the default, and the easiest. Firm caps, they hold their shape, and they take brine without going soft.
- Shiitake — good, but take the stems off. They stay woody however long you cook them.
- King oyster — cut across the stem into coins. The stem is the part worth eating; the cap goes soft and slightly slippery.
- Shimeji and enoki — leave these alone. They are too fine for a hot quick pickle and collapse into threads. They are worth fermenting instead, slowly and cold.
- Portobello — don’t. The gills bleed and the brine turns muddy brown within a day.
What you need
Enough for one 500 ml jar.
- 480 g cremini or button mushrooms
- 250 ml white wine vinegar
- 250 ml water
- 1 tbsp fine sea salt
- 2 tsp caster sugar
- 3 garlic cloves, sliced thin
- 1 tsp black peppercorns
- 2 bay leaves
- 4 sprigs thyme
Method
- Clean them dry if you can. Brush or wipe the caps. A quick rinse is fine as long as you dry them properly afterwards — mushrooms that go into the pan wet steam instead of firming up.
- Trim and cut to an even size. Halve the small ones, quarter the large. Uneven pieces pickle unevenly and you get one bite that is sharp and the next that tastes of nothing.
- Simmer for four minutes in salted water. This is the step most recipes list without explaining, and it is the one that decides whether the jar works. A raw mushroom is mostly water and behaves like a sponge. Simmering drives that water out and leaves room for brine to move in. Skip it and the mushrooms release water into the jar over the next three days, thinning the brine until it tastes of very little.
- Drain properly. Tip them into a colander and leave them five minutes to steam off. Then pat them dry.
- Bring the vinegar, water, salt and sugar to a boil. Stir until the salt has gone. Take it off the heat, then add the garlic, peppercorns, bay and thyme — aromatics boiled hard turn bitter.
- Pack the jar and pour. Mushrooms in first, brine over them until they are covered. Press them down with a spoon; anything above the surface will darken.
- Cool, lid, fridge. Let the jar come to room temperature on the counter before you close it, or the lid traps steam.
- Wait a day. Twenty-four hours is the minimum and forty-eight is better. At six hours they taste of raw vinegar.
How long they keep — and where
Two to three weeks in the fridge. Not longer, and not in a cupboard.
A quick pickle is not shelf-stable. There is no canning step here and no fermentation, so nothing in this process has made the jar safe at room temperature. If you want a jar that lives in a cupboard, that is a different method with different equipment and it is worth reading properly before you try it.
Quick pickling is not fermenting
A quick pickle gets its sourness from vinegar you poured in. A ferment makes its own, slowly, out of nothing but mushrooms and salt.
Ours take between 21 and 32 days depending on the variety — white shimeji is the quickest, king oyster the slowest. The sourness arrives gradually rather than all at once, and the texture firms as it goes. The result tastes less like vinegar than any quick pickle does, which is the thing people do not expect.
Neither one is better. A quick pickle is bright, immediate and yours by tomorrow. A ferment is a longer, rounder thing and there is no way to hurry it. We make the second kind because it is what we want on a board.
If you would rather not wait a month, our jars are already three to five weeks in — five varieties, fermented separately, packed by hand in the San Fernando Valley.