Mushrooms with Potatoes

Name: Mushrooms with Potatoes: Easy Homemade Mushroom Stew
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 45 min
Total time: 1 h
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Button mushrooms 300 g; Potatoes 500 g; Carrot 1; Garlic 1-2 cloves; Hot pepper 1; Olive oil 2-4 tbsp; Parsley, cherry tomatoes, hot pepper for garnish; Salt, black pepper, sweet paprika, hot pepper to taste

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Mushrooms with potatoes is a simple homemade dish, a classic meatless stew made by braising sautéed ingredients. It doesn’t take long to cook, which makes it a great quick dinner, especially after a hard day. All you need to do is sauté the mushrooms and simmer them with the potatoes under a lid until everything is tender and the sauce is as thick as you like.

Anyone who cooks for themselves a lot has surely noticed that braising is something between boiling and frying. For me, the beauty of braised dishes is that, depending on your mood, you can make mushrooms with potatoes close to a soup by leaving more liquid, or thick like a mushroom stew with almost no liquid at all. And changing the amount and mix of spices gives you any flavor you like, from sweet and mild to hot.

Remember the lecture by Chaplain Lacina, the character in Hašek’s novel? The spiritual father had a very sensible approach to making mushroom stew —the more mushrooms you put in, the tastier it gets. The whole story was more about spices and mushrooms than about the other ingredients or the cooking process. I think he was in fact talking about a stew like this one, with mushrooms and potatoes, because almost all the later mentions of braised dishes were about goulash with potatoes —which, by the way, is one of my favorite home dishes.

Button mushrooms are small gilled mushrooms grown in huge quantities. Interestingly, the French word champignon simply means “mushroom”. I don’t remember them from my childhood: they appeared in the shops about 30 years ago, when farmers and entrepreneurs started growing cultivated mushrooms on substrate. Today cultivated button mushrooms are the most in-demand mushrooms in the world, with hundreds of thousands of tons produced every year.

It’s ideal if the mushrooms are small, about the size of a large cherry, so they stay whole. Larger caps can be cut into several pieces, and that won’t affect the flavor. What matters is that the mushrooms and potatoes are cut fairly large and are easy to spear with a fork. If you like, you can make mushrooms with potatoes spicy by adding a fresh hot pepper.

8 ingredientsTo the recipe

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Ingredients

2 servings

Button mushrooms 300 g
Potatoes 500 g
Carrot 1
Garlic 1-2 cloves
Hot pepper 1
Olive oil 2-4 tbsp
Parsley, cherry tomatoes, hot pepper for garnish
Salt, black pepper, sweet paprika, hot pepper to taste

Step-by-step recipe

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Lately all kinds of button mushrooms have appeared in the shops, differing in color, size and shape. But I traditionally prefer ordinary young, small mushrooms that are white or cream-colored. I don’t get the light-brown, dark and large ones, although many people praise them. I also don’t like overripe mushrooms; I prefer young ones.
For this stew you need roughly equal volumes of mushrooms and other vegetables. Choose a potato that falls apart a little during cooking: a pink-skinned potato with a yellow center is perfect. And, if you like, I recommend adding a little fresh hot pepper.
Peel a not-too-large sweet carrot and cut it into large cubes. Heat the olive oil in a saucepan or a large frying pan with a lid. If you like, first fry a crushed garlic clove in the oil to flavor it. Then discard the garlic and fry the carrot in the oil until soft.
If the mushrooms are large, cut them in half. Smaller mushrooms can be used whole. Add the mushrooms to the saucepan with the fried carrot. Without covering the pan, fry the carrot and mushrooms over medium heat, stirring constantly.
Mushrooms fry very quickly, in just a few minutes. They say raw button mushrooms are perfectly edible and even tasty, and are used for salads and sauces. Button mushrooms brown nicely, and then at some point they begin to release moisture. As soon as liquid appears in the pan, add the potatoes.
Peel the potatoes and cut them into large cubes, roughly the same size as the mushrooms. In a mushroom stew the pieces should be large and easy to spear with a fork. Add the potatoes to the fried mushrooms and fry everything together for 4-5 minutes.
Add the spices to the stew. Be sure to add salt and pepper, plus 0.5 tsp sweet red paprika or dried sweet pepper, which is often sold as flakes. Chop one or two garlic cloves with a knife and add them to the stew. I recommend adding fresh hot pepper. Carefully remove the seeds and white inner membranes from one small pod, or half a pod, and chop it with a knife. By the way, a deseeded pepper isn’t the hottest, since most of the capsaicin is in the seeds and white membranes.
Stir the mushrooms with the potatoes and spices. Immediately add 1.5 cups of liquid (300 ml). Plain hot water will do, but if you can, vegetable or mushroom broth is better. Stir, bring the liquid to a boil and simmer the mushrooms with potatoes under a lid for about 30 minutes. The liquid should barely bubble; a vigorous boil is not allowed.
That’s plenty of time for the potatoes to cook through and start to fall apart slightly. Take the lid off, raise the heat to medium and let the excess liquid evaporate. This can take up to 10 minutes.
In the end the mushroom stew should have just a little liquid left, which together with the broken-down part of the potatoes forms a thick, tasty sauce. Put the potatoes and mushrooms into small deep bowls and pour the sauce over them. Garnish the stew with sprigs of greens.
To lift your mood, I recommend adding a few cherry tomatoes cut in half, or a regular tomato cut into thin slices. Also cut fresh hot pepper into thin rings; it will wake up your imagination.
Serve the mushroom and potato stew right away, while it’s hot. It’s a hearty, tasty main dish with no meat. If you leave more liquid in the stew, it will resemble a thick soup, similar to bograch with mushrooms. I recommend serving the mushrooms and potatoes with fresh white bread.