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Mushrooms maintaining the freshness of the mushrooms after harvest

Janssen

Admin
The shelf life of mushrooms is about 5 days if you pack well and store in a cool/dry place.

To extend the shelf life you may consider vacuum sealing the mushroom to let air/moisture in or you can dry them. More information below:

There are various methods of preserving mushroom to extend the shelf-life beyond the five days it lasts after picking.

Preserved mushrooms can be kept for up to five years without going bad.

After mushrooms have been picked from the farm, they should be transported to the processing factories as quickly as possible. They are then immediately placed in a vacuum where they suck up a lot of water.
Mushrooms contain quite a bit of air, thus, by placing them in a vacuum, it gets replaced with water making sure they won’t float to the surface in the blanching kettle.

Blanching mushrooms include dipping them in almost boiling water) and is the first step in prolonging their shelf-life. By heating them, the mushrooms are less susceptible to deterioration.

DRYING MUSHROOMS
They are then sliced, cooled with ice water and dried. It takes just half an hour to process 10kg of fresh mushrooms into a bag. When cooled, they can be kept for six weeks.

However, as a final step, the mushrooms are pasteurized or sterilized so that they stay even longer. Pasteurization means they are heated to 95 degrees Celsius for a while, extending the shelf-life to about six months as long as they are refrigerated.

In the case of sterilisation, mushrooms are heated to 125 degrees Celsius. Cans of sterilised mushrooms can be kept for a maximum of five years.

Another preservation method is drying done using a food dehydrator. You can either slice them into half-inch pieces or depending on the shape, you can cut them right down the middle.

Arrange the mushrooms on the drying racks and assemble your dehydrator. As you arrange the pieces, don’t pack them so tightly that they’re sitting on top of each other.

Dry continuously on a lower setting, not higher than 150 degrees. An average of 135 degrees is a perfect temperature. Check on them every few hours and remove when they’re cracker dry.

High heat can destroy some of the beneficial compounds in some mushrooms, so for drying mushrooms use lower settings rather than just roasting them.

When they are cracker dry, they snap easily and break apart. If they still seem moist or bend rather than snap, you better keep drying.
 
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