The humble button mushroom packs as many or more antioxidants than more expensive varieties. And with a few simple ingredients, it packs amazing flavor too. A pair of recipes below.

After weeks of meat and fish, it’s time for vegetables to take center stage with another in the series of A Little Something on the Side.

We all remember the rotary phone, right? Before the advent of the touchtone phone, though, the retroactively dubbed rotary phone was just “the phone.”

And not so long ago in most American supermarkets and kitchens, humble button mushrooms were just mushrooms. Unless you were one of those people who trekked out into the woods collecting wild mushrooms [and in doing so, inspiring countless articles about the deadly dangers of toadstools], button mushrooms were pretty much the only game in town.

Now, between fresh and dried varieties, we have an embarrassment of mushroom riches at our fingertips. The portobello, once exotic and hard to find, is now almost boringly available in most stores. Shiitake, crimini, oyster, porcini, chanterelle, morel and a dazzling array of other fungi are increasingly finding their way onto store shelves and into our culinary hearts. Just this past weekend, I found enoki mushrooms, those slender, almost alien-being looking Japanese beauties, shrink-wrapped and sharing shelf space with portobello caps and pre-sliced “baby bellas” [they’re just crimini mushrooms, people—don’t get all wound up] in my neighborhood grocery store.

With competition like this, it’s easy for dependable old button mushrooms to get kicked to the curb, to be seen as somehow less wonderful than their more exotic, more expensive brethren.

Not so fast. Turns out button mushrooms have plenty going on, especially in the health department. According to a recent article in ScienceDaily [sent to me by fellow Internet magpie Carolyn—the magpie motto: “Ooooh, here’s another shiny link!”], “The humble white button mushroom [Agaricus bisporus] has as much, and in some cases, more anti-oxidant properties than more expensive varieties.” Who knew? For that matter, who knew that mushrooms even contained antioxidants, let alone that button mushrooms were particularly rich in them?

Which reminds me of a commentary I heard on American Public Media’s Marketplace last week. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, says that despite the growing cacophony of health claims from processed, packaged foods, the healthiest foods are still to be found in the produce section. “In fact,” Pollan states, “The more processed the food, the less nutritious it typically is. Yet it’s the processed food makers who have the marketing budgets to do the research to support the health claims and then shout them from the rooftops.” So we sometimes forget that “the hands-down healthiest foods in the supermarket are the unprocessed vegetables and fruits and whole grains. These foods sit silently in the produce section or the bulk-food bins. They don’t utter a word about their antioxidants or heart-healthiness, while just a few aisles over the sugary cereals scream about their heart-healthy ‘whole grain goodness.'”

So button mushrooms are healthy. What about taste? Now see, here’s the great thing about mushrooms—they are flavor sponges. In fact, you have to store them carefully so they don’t soak up flavors from your fridge [see Kitchen Notes for storage tips]. So while the more esoteric mushrooms offer delicious variations on the unmistakable earthy theme that make them absolutely worth exploring, button mushrooms, when combined with the right ingredients, can do some pretty amazing things too.

In the quick, simple recipes below, butter and salt combine first with garlic and parsley, then with port, to make the humble button heavenly. Continue reading “Mushrooms: In praise of the basic button” →