How To Cook Lion’s Mane Mushrooms PERFECTLY

Lion's mane is a beautiful intricate mushroom known for its stark white puffy appearance and long hair like spines. Although it's been used as a medicine and gourmet ingredient for centuries, it's recently seen an increase in popularity as modern science learns more about its potential health benefits. Regardless, it's a great source of meatless protein and fiber and absolutely delicious. Today we're going to show you how to prepare lion's mane, some tips and tricks to get most out of your mushroom, and a mouth-watering recipe for you to hone your craft. Hey, I'm Lou and I'm here with Turnip Vegan. His real name is Todd Anderson and he is a vegan chef, a content creator, and happens to be an expert in growing lion's mane mushrooms. Lion's mane is one of the best mushrooms when it comes to being able to create your own flavor profile. I would say I eat lion's mane two to three times a week. It is my favorite mushroom by far, mainly because the texture, how you can really control the flavor. So yeah, I love lion's mane. This is one way to get your lion's mane out of one of these beautiful spray and grow kits from North Spore, but where can people get this weird mushroom? Really good question. I would say that has been one of the number one questions I received since I've been doing recipes with lion's mane mushrooms. I would start at your farmer's markets, your specialty stores. Typically where I get my lion's mane is just growing it at home. I live in Joshua Tree, the desert. You know, not many restaurants or stores around, so my best way of getting lion's mane is growing it at home. I always try to harvest my lion's mane before it turns yellow, or if I'm shopping at the farmer's market, I try to look for lion's mane that has a very firm, dense texture to it. You don't want it to be too airy because if it's too airy, then when it comes to cooking it, you really don't have a lot of substance. If it's begun to produce these spines or teeth, you know it's ready to harvest. It's going to get this shaggy look, and that's perfect. If you get it a little before then, or maybe it hasn't produced spines, you just want that mushroom to be nice and dense. So a little earlier is better than later. So you have a beautiful mushroom. How do you go about harvesting this mushroom so you can cook it? Really good question. So you don't want to pull. You don't want to push. You can just take your and try to get a clean pull away. We got a nice size chunk right here. Now on the lion's mane, we have some substrate that's still here. This is something that we could just cut off. If you still have substrate on the lion's mane, I recommend just taking a little brush and just kind of brush off any particles that you see on the lion's mane. I do not recommend putting the lion's mane into water because as we know, it's a sponge and it would absorb all that water and it changes how the lion's mane cook. It changes the texture. Now sometimes I've gotten lion's mane from the grocery store and it was really, really dirty. In those cases, I took the brush and I just tapped it a little bit into some water just to kind of get off the dirt, but you do not want to put the lion's mane into water. All right, let me show you how I love to whip up lion's mane. It's very important to me to have the right texture and the flavor and anyone that's being introduced to mushrooms, why not make it something that they're very used to flavor-wise and texture. So lion's mane contains so much water and that water has some of the mushroom flavor and so I like to cook that out completely and dehydrate the mushroom and then I'll add my marinade and rehydrate it with whatever flavor that I need for whatever I'm cooking. If it could be tacos, it could be burritos, it could be steak. So I basically just add it to a cast iron pan. I turn the heat up to medium high and I don't add anything to the pan, maybe a little salt just to help remove some of that water. No worries at all. You don't have to worry about the mushroom burning. There's going to be so much liquid that comes out in this process right now. That's a pretty perfect pan for pushing it down, but what else might you use? Good point, good point. And so what you could use to press is a pan or a press. They sell cast iron press and you can just sit it on top and slowly it'll start to press down and as the water starts to remove, you just want to take a spatula and just flip it. My goal in this process is to get all the water out and infuse it with my flavor so I can, you know, make something magical from there. All right, Lou. So as you can see, there's not much more mushroom liquid here. And so this is a indicator that we're ready to move to the next step. Normally I'll take a spatula and see if I can press any more liquid out. And this is looking like some type of fillet, right? Looks fantastic already, seriously. We went from a cauliflower looking mushroom to a beautiful fillet that you can marinate and do other beautiful things with. So from this point, I normally will infuse flavor back to it. So we removed all the mushroom water and the mushroom flavor, and now we're going to go ahead and add our own flavor to it. So I'm going to add it to the refrigerator and then we'll come back and sear it up in a pan. All right, Lou, we got our marinated lion's mane and it's ready to go into our cast iron pan. You can smell that beautiful marinade. Beautiful sound. I like to add a little bit of the marinade around it so it doesn't dry out. And so you really could cook it just like a steak at this point, depending on if you like it to have a nice sear, if you want it medium done, it's really up to you. I prefer for my lion's mane to be cooked really well done. And so I'll cook it on each side for maybe two to three minutes and just keep flipping until ready. If the pan starts to dry out a little bit, you can also continue to just add more liquid. But as you can see, you can see how the marinade has infused the lion's mane and we've got nothing but flavor going on here. I mean, it's hard to believe, Lou, like three years ago, I hated mushrooms. The visuals were sometimes difficult to come over. And so this is why I take those extra steps to improve the texture and add the right flavors to it. All right, this is looking perfect, Lou. Let's go ahead and remove it from the pan and check out that beautiful texture. Let's see. Oh, incredibly tender. You can get that lime. The marinade just took over the lion's mane. So good. Perfect. Todd, where can people learn more about the work that you do and watch the content that you put out? Thank you. It's really easy to find me. Turn up like thevegetablevegan.com. You will find tons of recipes. I have two cookbooks. I have tons of recipes on North's board page as well that really show you different techniques of how to whip up your lion's mane, how to whip up mushrooms and, you know, become more mushroom lover like us. If you like this, please like and subscribe. Tell us what you think. If you want to see more cooking content, let us know. Let us know what kind of content you want to see. We can bring turnip back for more of that. Thanks again.