How to pickle mushrooms: a basic recipe and safety tips

Pickled mushrooms are one of the best-loved winter preserves: firm and fragrant, they're wonderful with potatoes or onions. But it's mushroom preserves that carry a serious risk: botulism. That's why mushrooms need to be pickled not just tastily but safely. Luckily, the rules are simple if you know them and don't break them.

Let's go over a basic marinade recipe and the key rules that will keep you safe.

Which mushrooms to pickle

Firm mushrooms that hold their shape are best for pickling.

Pored mushrooms pickle best: slippery jacks, porcini, birch boletes, Xerocomus boletes, and among gilled mushrooms, small honey fungus, which look lovely in a jar. Pick young, firm specimens: old ones go mushy in the marinade.

Mushrooms that require boiling, such as honey fungus, must be boiled before pickling. More on this in our article on cleaning and cooking honey fungus.

Basic marinade recipe

The marinade is made from water, salt, sugar, vinegar and spices. Here are tried-and-true proportions per liter of water.

1. Prepare the mushrooms. Clean, rinse and boil them for 15-20 minutes in salted water, skim off the foam and drain in a colander.
2. Make the marinade. For 1 l of water: 1-1.5 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar, bay leaf, black peppercorns, cloves.
3. Add the vinegar. Toward the end of cooking, pour in 2-3 tbsp of 9% vinegar. Acid is the main preservative.
4. Simmer the mushrooms in the marinade. Add the boiled mushrooms to the marinade and simmer for another 10-15 minutes.
5. Pack into jars. Into clean, sterilized jars, then cover with marinade.

The vinegar here isn't just for flavor: it's the acidic environment that holds back dangerous bacteria.

The main danger: botulism

This is the most important part, the one your safety depends on.

The botulism bacterium thrives without air, precisely in hermetically sealed jars, and produces a deadly toxin. It loves a moist, oxygen-free, low-acid environment, in other words a typical jar of mushroom preserves. The toxin has no smell or taste, and the jar may look perfectly normal.

That's why pickled mushrooms are the riskiest kind of home canning. To stay safe, follow a few unchanging rules.

Rules for safe pickling

These rules aren't a formality but a safeguard for your life.

• Wash mushrooms thoroughly. Botulism gets in with soil particles, so mushrooms must be spotlessly clean.
• Don't seal jars airtight for long-term storage. It's safer to store mushrooms under plastic lids in the fridge rather than in hermetically sealed jars at room temperature.
• Keep them cold. Low temperature holds the bacterium back.
• Don't hesitate to throw out a suspicious jar. A bulging lid, bubbles, cloudiness or an unpleasant smell — straight into the trash, without tasting.
• Stick to the acidity. Don't reduce the amount of vinegar in the recipe: acid is your protection.

Pickled mushrooms are wonderful when made wisely. Other, safer ways of preserving are covered in our articles on how to dry mushrooms and how to freeze mushrooms.

Sources

• “Identification Guide to the Fungi of Ukraine” (Kyiv, Naukova Dumka publishing house).
• Suillus luteus in GBIF, the global biodiversity database.
• Fungi in MycoBank, the international fungal nomenclature database.
• Botulism on Wikipedia.