I love mushrooms of all kinds. However, my husband loathes them. He was traumatised by a mushroom as a child (Short version - there were mushrooms cooking the day his dad and sister nearly killed themselves in a nasty bike accident - guilt by association). He has passed his aversion down to all the children. Totally psychological - the Small Boy loved a garlic-stuffed mushroom on a barbecue before he knew what it actually was. Although there are many foodstuffs in the world that someone in our family doesn’t like, mushrooms are the only one that never darken the door.
I eat mushrooms any chance I get when out to dinner with friends.
Mushroom has a lot of umami. Not only does it taste great, it makes everything taste better.
I’m not a vegetarian but if there is a mushroom-based vegetarian option on the menu, I’d often choose that over meat. (Though good seafood will still win out.)
No they taste terrible, are slimy and any dish containing them is improved by their removal. Even the “good kind :p”, back in the day, were a struggle to ingest without horking right back up. Once I tossed part of one in my mouth intending to just gulp the bastard down, but it was so dry it stuck to the back of my throat like glue, and I was instantly in very serious gag trauma.
I love mushrooms, but when I was a kid, I hated them. It wasn’t that they were fungus, it was the taste of them.
If a restaurant dish is smothered in something, particularly something strong-flavoured like mushrooms, they have to say so so people who don’t like them can pick something else to order.
My “OMG, WHY?” ingredient is bacon. I hate the stuff and they think they are doing you a favour putting it everywhere.
You are, quite obviously, wrong in your hatred of bacon, whereas I am absolutely right in my hatred of mushrooms.
However, so far I’m being outvoted by a 4-to-1 margin, so I don’t expect I’ll stop seeing them anytime soon. I think we can all agree that restaurants should tell us what we’re ordering, so we can either avoid the dish or ask for the offending ingredient to be omitted.
They’re fine in some contexts, like pizza and cream-of soup. But overall, I’ll still say no, because in any context where the distinctively-mushroom flavor comes through, I don’t like them. And the fancy varieties like morels which have that distinctively-mushroom flavor even more strongly, I like even less.
There are some ingredients that just sit there and co-operate. You can pick bits out and the rest will still taste like whatever the rest is composed of. Strong flavours like mushrooms and bacon permeate the whole thing and, if you don’t like them, you can’t eat it (or don’t want to). I’m completely “with you” in wanting them to be disclosed. You’d think in this time where people have (or think they might have) food sensitivities or outright allergies that more places would spell out exactly what’s in a dish, but you still get “nasty” surprises.
So backing up: I grew up hate hate HATING mushrooms. Once I reached adulthood, though, I realized that what I hate are the little canned slimy mushrooms, or any variety thereof.
Sauteed wild mushrooms over pasta? Divine. Chanterelles in a frittata? Bring it on.
That said, were I confronted with what the OP described around being surprised by oodles of mushrooms arriving unexpectedly on a dish, I’d be much like the OP. My experience in restaurants that anything coming with That Many Mushrooms are the slimy low-quality mushrooms of my youth, and I’ve never developed a liking for them. I would have sent the dishes back as well.
However, I am a little :dubious: about That Many Mushrooms not being mentioned on a menu. In my experience, a menu that omits even mentioning a major part of a dish is extremely uncommon. Was it really not mentioned, or did the OP miss the fungi?
They need to be sauteed until the water has completely left them before being put on the pizza. Pizzas don’t take nearly long enough to cook to de-water mushrooms. And with cheese on top of them and sauce below, they’re really kind of sealed in there.
I was working for a little pizza place while they were in the process of working that out. If the mushrooms weren’t pre-cooked, we had to mop the top of the pizza with paper towels and slide it back in for a few more minutes. There can be related trouble with sliced tomatoes and onion. The onion only makes a small puddle, but it won’t cook all the way through if it’s not thinly sliced, broken into rings, and spread out enough.
Oh, and I like mushrooms. I like cooked ones more than uncooked ones, but uncooked ones mix in salads pretty well.
Hate them. Have since I was a kid. Like the OP said, they make everything taste like dirt, and they are everywhere.
One time I went to an event with lunch included. I am not picky and can usually find something to eat at any event. In this case there were two quiches (one with meat, one veg) and salad. Everything had mushrooms: both quiches and the salad. Well, there was some fruit that didn’t have mushrooms. So I had an apple and a banana for lunch. I spoke with the organizer and she refunded my money, but seriously, I can’t believe no one on the food committee thought that perhaps there would be someone out of the 100 or so people attending that wouldn’t like mushrooms.
