Quick Homemade Pickled Mushrooms

Cooking method

1. Step 1:

   

   Gather all the ingredients for making pickled mushrooms at home. Choose your mushrooms carefully — size matters most. It's best to buy uniform, even, medium-sized mushrooms: too-small ones shrink considerably when cooked, while too-large ones have to be cut up, since they may not fit into pretty jars, and big mushrooms are less convenient to eat.

2. Step 2:

   

   The first step is to make the marinade. Pour water and 9% table vinegar into a pot, add the salt and sugar, drop in the peppercorns, cloves, and bay leaves, add the garlic (slice the cloves into thin slivers first), and pour in the vegetable oil.

3. Step 3:

   

   Next, prepare the mushrooms themselves. Quickly rinse them under running water to remove sand and other debris; if you like, remove the so-called "veil" for a nicer look. If the mushrooms are very large, cut them into pieces at this stage.

4. Step 4:

   

   Put the prepared mushrooms into the pot with the marinade. As you can see in the photo, only the bottom layer of mushrooms touches the marinade — but don't worry: as they cook, the mushrooms release their moisture and shrink, so all of them cook through nicely in the fragrant marinade.

5. Step 5:

   

   Put the pot of mushrooms on the stove and bring the marinade to a boil. Once it's boiling, cook the mushrooms for 7 minutes, stirring now and then. As you can see, all the mushrooms have settled into a single layer on the bottom of the pot and cooked well in the marinade. When the time is up, take the pot off the heat, skim the foam from the surface of the marinade, and let the mushrooms and marinade cool completely.

6. Step 6:

   

   Transfer the cooled mushrooms to a sterilized glass jar, pour in the fragrant marinade with its garlic and spices, close the jar with a lid, and refrigerate overnight. Mushrooms made by this recipe will keep in the fridge for another 2–3 weeks.