Pickled Crimini Mushrooms 2-Pack

Cold and slow for twenty-one days, which is the same clock as our white shimeji but doing a different job. A crimini is firm to begin with, so the time is not about softening it — it is about keeping each cap intact while the brine gets in. A warmer ferment would be quicker and would cost us the texture.

We pickle them whole, picked while they are still about the size of an olive. A whole small cap is one clean bite; a halved large one is two ragged ones and lets brine into the gills, where it turns the inside of the mushroom to mush. Picking small is the whole trick. After the ferment the sealed jar rests roughly a month before it ships.

Filtered water, white wine vinegar, garlic, thyme, mustard seed, black peppercorns and sea salt.

The same mild white wine vinegar as our white shimeji, for a different reason: there it protects a delicate mushroom, here it keeps a familiar one tasting like itself. A crimini has real mushroom flavour of its own and the brine's job is to frame it, not to replace it. Thyme is the one herb in the range that appears only here, and it is the obvious partner — it is what most people already cook criminis with. Mustard seed and black pepper do the rest. No sugar, no oil.

This is the jar for someone who is not sure about pickled mushrooms. A crimini is a mushroom everybody has eaten, and this tastes recognisably of it — mushroom first, pickle second.

The two shimejis, white and black, are more delicate and more unusual, sold in clusters rather than single caps. Shiitake and king oyster are both considerably bigger flavours and take a week and a half longer to make. If you are building a pack for people you have not fed before, start here.

The most versatile jar we make, mostly because a pickled crimini does not need explaining to anyone.

Halve them into a green salad and they behave like an olive would. Whole on a board they are the easy thing that gets eaten first. They are good chopped into a potato or egg salad, where the acid replaces the pickle or caper you would otherwise reach for. And they are the jar most at home next to a steak or a burger — the classic use for a pickled mushroom, and it is classic for a reason.

Every jar is 480g net, 250g drained, and keeps sealed in a cupboard for twelve months. Once it is open it lives in the fridge and is best inside four weeks — though the brine keeps working the whole time, so the last forkful is a little sharper than the first. That is fermentation doing what it does, not the jar going over.