Pickled Mushrooms by the Pack

If you have never eaten a pickled mushroom, start with crimini. It is the mushroom everybody already knows, and ours tastes recognisably of it — mushroom first, pickle second. Nothing about it needs explaining at a table.

If you are buying for someone who cooks, shiitake is the one they will use rather than admire. It is built on tamari and oak-aged vinegar and behaves like a seasoning — the brine included.

If it is a gift, or the jar is going on a board in front of people, take king oyster. Thick stems cut into coins, finished by hand with truffle oil. It is the most expensive thing we make and it looks it.

And if you want the jar that makes a salad better without taking it over, that is white shimeji — the lightest of the five.

Only two ingredients appear in all five jars: garlic and sea salt. Everything else is chosen for the mushroom in front of it, and the vinegar is where that shows most clearly.

White shimeji and crimini are built on white wine vinegar, the mildest we use — one because a delicate mushroom is easy to bury, the other because a familiar one should still taste like itself. Black shimeji takes apple cider vinegar, rounder and a little sweeter, with coriander seed toasted before it goes in. Shiitake is the only jar built on oak-aged vinegar and tamari, which is why it reads savoury rather than sharp. King oyster gets white balsamic, with enough body to carry a mushroom that dense.

The aromatics follow the same logic. Dill in the two shimejis. Thyme only in the crimini. Bay in the three heavier jars. Truffle oil in one.

Every jar ferments for a different length of time, and the number was arrived at by tasting rather than by a rule:

White shimeji 21 days · crimini 21 days · black shimeji 24 days · shiitake 28 days · king oyster 32 days.

Two things set the clock. Density is one: a king oyster stem is close-grained and slow, and 32 days is simply what it takes for brine to reach the middle of a cut coin rather than sitting on the outside of it. Flavour is the other: shiitake is unusually high in natural glutamates, and a long, low ferment concentrates them instead of washing them out.

Fermenting is only the first stage. Every jar then rests sealed for roughly a month before it leaves us, which puts fifty to sixty days between harvest and the shelf. The ferment builds the acidity; the rest settles it into the mushroom, so the first forkful and the last taste like the same jar.

All five are grown by us in the San Fernando Valley, hand-packed in small batches, and sold in the same 480g jar — 250g drained. All five are ready to eat with no cooking, keep twelve months sealed in a cupboard, and want the fridge and about four weeks once opened.

None of them contains sugar. Only king oyster contains oil, and only shiitake contains soy, by way of the tamari. There are no artificial colours, no thickeners and no preservatives beyond salt, vinegar and time.

Jars are sold in packs of two, four or six — one variety per pack, or mixed however you like — see the FAQ for how storage and shipping work, or the recipes for what to do with a jar once it arrives.

Each of the five has a longer write-up in the journal — what it is, where the name comes from, and how it behaves in the jar.

What white shimeji is, and why it keeps its shape

What black shimeji is, and why it has so many names

What a king oyster mushroom is, and why the stem is the prize

What a crimini mushroom is, and why it is the same species as a portobello

What a shiitake mushroom is, and where its savoury depth comes from