No-Oil Sautéed Mushrooms

Forget everything you’ve heard about combining mushrooms and water

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If you’ve ever sautéed mushrooms (and I guess a few of you have), you begin with a pan, sliced shrooms, and a glug of olive (or canola) oil. Set the pan over medium heat and begin the sauté.

But, within nanoseconds, the oil is gone, and you need to add more oil. And again, and again, and again. Those little bastard mushrooms are notorious sponges and cooking them is a waistline disaster.

Or, it once was. A few weeks ago I happened upon a tutorial by America’s Test Kitchen demonstrating how to cook mushrooms without oil. The medium for cooking those fungi was (wait for it) … water!

Can you believe it?

Haven’t we always been told that mushrooms and water simply don’t mix (nicely)?

Well, I was skeptical (although I’ve relied on ATK for a ton of advice and reliable research). So I set out to do my own in-home test.

Tonight, I chose to cook a recipe I found on Serious Eats. The mad scientists (equal parts of both) at that website are known for examining every molecule of a recipe and stripping down each step to the nth degree.

The recipe I had in mind (because I had mushrooms lingering at the edge and a deep, dark desire for pasta) was this one. My dear friend Kenji suggested sautéing the requisite mushrooms in the fat remaining from cooking Italian sausage in a pan.

I thought about that and wondered if I could utilize that yummy fatty flavor on the bottom of the pan but still cook the mushrooms in water, not copious glugs of oil. Here’s what happened:

• 12-inch heavy bottom sauté pan
• 8 ounces sliced cremini mushrooms
• 1 cup water

I sautéed 4 ounces of Italian sausage in the pan, removed the cooked sausage, and set it aside. There was a lovely layer of fond in the bottom of the pan. (My co-editor Dim Nikov explains how to use this “gift” to make a delicious pan sauce here.)

I tossed the sliced mushrooms into the pan and covered them with 1 cup of room-temperature water.

Crank the heat up to high and watch the magic begin.

After 5 minutes about half of the water had evaporated and the mushrooms had begun to release their water. (Did you know that mushrooms are 90 percent water?) How did I know? The liquid in the pan was beginning to take on a brownish, mushroom-colored hue.

Water is reducing and the mushrooms are releasing their moisture

With just a few more minutes of cooking, the water in the pan was almost completely gone. The mushrooms were soft and browned, and the fond in the bottom of the pan had released and melted into a delicious glaze that coated the mushroom slices with just a quick stir.

Don’t they look amazing?!

Hope you’ll give this method a try. It’s foolproof (although I must caution you to not step away from the saute pan. Those ‘shrooms can go from done to disaster pretty quickly.)

They can be used in so many different ways — toss them in your spaghetti sauce, stir into just about any casserole or stew, add to your gravy, stir into chowder. The only limit is your imagination.

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Copyright©2024  Linda Lum (Facebook, Hub Pages, Pinterest) is a retired 
budget analyst for the Federal government, wife, mother, author, and
 lover of anything and everything to do with food history. 
Books: "Past and Present," "How Corned Beef Became Irish,” "Ask Carb Diva"