Easy Side Dish: The Best Sautéed Mushrooms Recipe (2024)

Sautéed mushrooms are such a fabulous no-brainer of a side dish that we neglected to include the recipe here for a good nine years. Not cool, Umami Girl. It's time we shared the best, most savory sautéed mushrooms recipe we know. Serve them alongside virtually anything, but especiallyEggs Florentine, Carluccio's London style.

Long-awaited sautéed mushrooms

I joked on Twitter a while back that although the Umami Girlrecipe indexhas lots of categories, it really only needs two: HAZ MUSHROOMS and DESSERTS. It’s funny ’cause it’s true, people. Still, somehow the simplest, most mushroomy dish of all — a good old sautéed mushrooms recipe, cooked to perfection with a few simple tactics — made it nine years without an appearance.

That changes now.

Last week I posted our favorite London brunch from Carluccio’s —Eggs Florentine. Every Saturday I ordered mine with a side of the best sautéed mushrooms. This is the version of that bliss that I like to make at home.

What you'll need

Here's a glance at the ingredients you'll need to make this recipe.

• A mix of mushrooms keeps things interesting, so use whatever kinds you like. We love a mix of wild mushrooms, shiitakes, and creminis, but we also love a big bowl full of sautéed white button mushrooms. The choice is yours.
• With so few ingredients, a good butter goes a long way. I like to use a cultured, salted butter like Kerrygold.

How to make them

Here's what you'll do to make this recipe. Less is more here in many ways. You can see all the steps in action in the video that accompanies this post, and get the details in the recipe card below.

1. Preheat the pan for a few minutes. Then add the butter and let it melt.
2. Add the mushrooms. Give them a quick stir, and then leave them alone for a while. The mushrooms will give off some moisture, and then it will bubble off.
3. Stir every few minutes, but not too often. Let them brown — it adds tons of flavor.
4. Be generous with the salt and pepper. That's it!

How to store mushrooms

The best advice for storing mushroom is: don’t. Or at least, don’t store them for any longer than you have to. They perish quickly. That said, of course you’ll need to store mushrooms sometimes. Here’s what to do.

If you’ve bought mushrooms in supermarket packaging, leave them in that packaging and place them in the fridge. Those containers are designed to promote the right amount of air flow to keep mushrooms fresh as long as possible.

If you have loose mushrooms, place them into a gallon-size zip-top bag, leave the bag open, and place it in the fridge. This may not be what you’ve heard before, but trust us. It works.

Don’t wash mushrooms until immediately before you use them.

And make sure to use them within a few days.

How to clean mushrooms

There’s a lot of mythology out there about how to clean mushrooms. Here’s the real deal.

If your mushrooms are whole and you plan to cook them, it’s okay to rinse them in water — just don’t leave them to soak. Brush off any large bits of soil and debris with a dry paper towel or amushroom brush. Then place whole mushrooms in a colander (or better yet, a salad spinner), give them a quick but thorough rinse. Dry with paper towels.

If your mushrooms are sliced, don’t wash them in water. The inside surfaces of mushrooms are spongelike and will absorb a ton of water, leaving them bloated. Most pre-sliced mushrooms are pretty clean, so just brush off any remaining soil and debris with a dry paper towel or mushroom brush.

If you’ll be serving mushrooms raw, don’t wash them in water even if they’re whole, because the water will darken them and make them less appealing. Just brush them off with a dry paper towel or mushroom brush.

Types of mushrooms for cooking

You can make a sautéed success out of any type or combination of mushrooms, from good old cultivated white supermarket mushrooms to a mix of fancy wild specimens. I first fell madly in love with sautéed mushrooms in the 1980s, when white button mushrooms were the only available kind. These days we tend to go a little crazier.

White button mushrooms give off the most moisture by far, but our cooking method ensures that the water cooks off quickly and lets mushrooms brown beautifully.

Cremini (baby bella) mushrooms and shiitakes are flavorful, low-moisture cultivated mushrooms. (Shiitakes are often called wild mushrooms, but these days most of them are cultivated.) We rely heavily on these two powerhouses in our typical sautée. They’re widely available and easy to work with.

If you like, it’s fun to add some true wild mushrooms to the mix. Oyster mushrooms are a great entry-level wild mushroom and make a good addition to the cremini-shiitake mix.

A few tips for the best sautéed mushrooms

The pan

Use a heavy, heat-retaining pan, ideally a 12-inch cast-iron pan if you have one. Cast iron retains heat beautifully and evenly, making it easy to brown mushrooms on the outside while keeping them nice and tender on the inside.

The heat

High heat is your friend. End of story.

The butter

Use really good butter. Kerrygold salted butter is my favorite due to its pretty much unequalled combination of quality, fair price, and availability. (Not sponsored — just fangirling.) Good butter means cultured butter made with cream from grass-fed cows. It should be a beautiful yellow color, not anemic-looking. And it should taste really, really good.

The salt

Don’t shy away from the salt. Mushrooms love it. They're also high in potassium, which helps your bod justify sodium. That's the technical analysis, okay?

That’s it! Have fun.

Expert tips and FAQs

A large cast iron skillet will help you brown the mushrooms easily, rather than risk steaming them in a smaller or less heat-retaining pan.