Savory Sausage-Stuffed Mushrooms

Want a Thanksgiving savory snack or New 12 months’s Eve handed hors d’oeuvres? Open up a bottle of wine or pour some martinis and go round a tray of those simple sausage stuffed mushrooms. Your pals will speak.

Nice stuffed mushrooms pack lots of taste right into a small package deal, hitting earthy, salty, and umami notes all of sudden. They’re the perfect occasion meals, so it is no shock that they’ve remained standard at the same time as different festive meals have come and gone. At their greatest, they mix textures—a delicate filling, crispy topping, and a young however barely chewy and completely browned mushroom exterior—and are sufficiently small to eat in a single chew.

However at their worst, these lovely umami bites will be soggy, bland, and rubbery, and doubtless the very last thing you need to eat on the occasion buffet. Fortunately for us, our Birmingham, Alabama-based take a look at kitchen colleague Renu Dhar stuffed mushroom cap after cap, testing and tweaking, till she perfected this simple, party-worthy sausage stuffed mushroom recipe. (Additionally they developed an equally satisfying vegetarian model, filled with a sun-dried tomato and cream cheese combination.) They’re the perfect simple, crowd-pleasing occasion hors d’oeuvres, however with simply quarter-hour of prep time and one other quarter-hour within the oven, you actually don’t want a celebration to take pleasure in these little beauties. 

To make sure a flavorful filling, Renu begins with sizzling Italian sausage for the stuffing base. She fortunately found in her testing that the sausage would not should be cooked earlier than going into the mushrooms, which saves you time and cuts down on soiled pans. A splash of excellent dry pink wine, plus some garlic, thyme, oregano, and pink pepper flakes season the savory filling whereas Parmigiano-Reggiano provides richness and ensures a serious punch of umami in each chew.

Generously sprinkling panko breadcrumbs over the stuffed caps earlier than baking gives a contrasting crunch, and a intelligent cooking methodology prevents the mushrooms from turning soggy. As an alternative of baking the mushrooms on a sheet pan or in a baking dish, Renu discovered that utilizing a forged iron skillet to roast the stuffed mushrooms captures and concentrates the mushrooms’ juices, leading to deeper taste because the mushrooms reabsorb this potent liquid. The forged iron skillet retains warmth effectively and successfully browns the underside of the mushrooms, guaranteeing they received’t flip soggy.

The end result? Scrumptious, savory sausage stuffed mushrooms that come collectively in below a half hour. Now that’s one thing to have fun.

October 2024