Well, not home home — she’s fallen in love with independent living — but, come January, she’ll be in the vicinity. Minutes away is a lot better than hours.
During that time, she’s gone from being a working student to also being an assistant trainer, working 10-hour days, six days a week. She’s been thrown and she’s fallen (I get a kick out of the security camera footage bloopers that she sends me), and she’s been stepped on and kicked. She’s ridden dozens of horses and taken countless lessons from trainers, and just the other week, she taught her first lesson.
She’s sad to leave, she says, and she’s excited, too. She’s ready for a change.
I learned about it from Kate and then I made a big batch, adapting her recipe to suit our tastes and we plowed our way through the stuff. So I made it again yesterday. This time, a triple batch.
I don’t usually spring for seasoning blends because I’m wary they’ll make all our food taste the same, but mushroom salt, it turns out, simply elevates the food, heightening the flavors and making everything taste that much better. You don’t know it’s there — and yet you do. It’s magic.
(I guess it’s no different than regular salt, now that I think about it. We salt all our food and yet it still manages to taste like what it is: eggs, beans, corn, chocolate. So mushroom salt is like that — just, for meat.)
Not up for foraging and drying your own mushrooms? Do like me and buy the dried.
A Costco-sized tub of dried gourmet mushrooms will set you back about 8 dollars (or was it 12?) and will make enough seasoning salt to last a couple years.
And if you don’t like mushrooms, don’t worry. Certain people in my family hate mushrooms and they’re totally fine with this seasoning. It’s all the goodness of mushrooms without any of the negativity.
I use the salt on almost all our beef: mixed into ground beef for burgers, on steaks, on roasts, etc. I hear it’s good on chicken, or tossed into soups, or sprinkled on potatoes, but I haven’t done that yet — I’m not opposed; I just haven’t gotten around to it.
Kate says 2 cups of dried mushrooms should equal about ⅓ cup powder. I halved the red pepper and swapped out some of the thyme for oregano (the ingredient list reflects these changes). And this time around I didn’t have onion powder so I threw a bunch of dried onion flakes into the blender when I was grinding the mushrooms.
2 cups dried mushrooms, ground to a powder ⅔ cup salt 3 tablespoons onion powder 2 tablespoons dried thyme 2 tablespoons red pepper flakes 1 tablespoon dried oregano 1 tablespoon black pepper 1 tablespoon garlic powder
Pulverize the dried mushrooms in a food processor or blender. It’ll take a good minute or two, and even then it won’t be a fine powder, but that’s okay. Also, be aware that quite a bit of mushroom dust will be created during the grinding process. It will stink and everyone will pitch a fit, but persevere. The dust will settle (literally and figuratively).
Toss the mushroom powder with the remaining ingredients. Pour the mushroom salt into jars, keeping one on the counter for daily use and freezing the others.
