The Presence of Portobellos is Mushrooming

Portobellos are simply overgrown cremini mushrooms. Regular-size cremini mushrooms are often sold as "baby portobellos." (SHNS photo courtesy Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune)

American menus and grocery stores are full of ingredients and dishes that pop up suddenly out of ethnic cuisines. Almost overnight these once-ethnic specialties get to be so common that even folks who couldn't care less about such things — folks who don't care whether there's any arugula in their salads — come to think of them as everyday foods.

Occasionally, though, the food that shows up everywhere comes out of nowhere. Surely the best example of this is the pancake-size mushroom known as the portabella (or portobello or portobella or portabello).

Let's dispose of the spelling thing right off the bat: It's a made-up name without a clearly identified source, and it has appeared every which way — including even portobollo, which one source claims is the original name, later modified to make it sound more Italian.

By far the most common spelling in mushroom offerings on the internet, for what it's worth, is portobello, so lacking any argument in any direction at all, let's stick with that one.

The presence of portobellos is (excuse me) mushrooming, in part because the 4- or 5-inch-wide cap has enough firmness and mildly earthy flavor to transform it from a flavorful fungus to a stand-in for meat that nonvegetarians actually like.

It can be grilled or roasted whole and slapped on a bun or stuffed with almost anything, or sauteed in chunks and tossed into stews and hot dishes. Or it can be used raw in salads instead of shrimp or chunks of chicken.

(Although raw portobellos are perfectly palatable, some folks might find raw slices or chunks rather dry. Even the briefest saute brings out enough moisture to eliminate that problem.)

The other reason portobellos are everywhere is their musky flavor, which is considerably more pronounced than that of the supermarket white button mushroom.

Unfortunately, it isn't so intense that it's really noticeable in a lot of the dishes in which portobellos seem to be winding up. If you toss diced portobellos into something as strongly flavored as a tomato-based pasta sauce, they won't contribute much more than texture. And for that, you might not think it's worthwhile to spend $2.99 (at a discount supermarket) for 6 ounces of portobello caps.

If the portobellos are going to be chopped into pieces small enough that they will contribute only flavor, not texture, you'll be better off buying cremini (also called brown button) mushrooms. These are the size of regular white supermarket button mushrooms. They are often sold as "portabellini" or other cute names, and they cost more like $2 for 8 ounces. Their earthy flavor isn't quite as concentrated as it is in the full-grown portobello, but you can use more of the cremini and still be ahead financially.

Yes, careful reader, you detected a buried bit of hard information back there: Portobellos are, in fact, nothing more than overgrown cremini (or brown button) mushrooms. Cremini are a strain of Agaricus bisporus, the regular supermarket white mushroom. (In fact, one source advises that the more flavorful and firmer brown strain was the common one here until the white one was isolated in the 1920s.)

The story of portobellos (and it's so vague that that's the best thing to call it) is that some mushroom farmer in the 1980s noticed a patch of behemoth cremini that had escaped harvesting a week earlier, when they were "normal" size. As they became huge and the gills were exposed, some of the mushrooms' moisture had evaporated, concentrating their flavor and making them firmer.

Instead of throwing them out as unsalable, which had been the practice (who would buy overgrown, pungently earthy, too-firm cremini mushrooms?), the farmer and his distributor decided to see whether they could be marketed as something else.

Could they ever!

Lisa Hemker, a regional sales manager for Money's Foods of Fennville, Mich., one of several suppliers of portobellos to Twin Cities supermarkets, said sales of portobellos have grown in double digits every year for the seven years she's been in the business. These days they might represent as much as 15 percent of the mushrooms sold at some supermarkets, she said, with a spike in sales in the summer because of grilling.

Based on what she hears from customers when she provides samples in stores, Hemker said, she thinks portobello sales would be even higher if the people who like them in restaurants knew "how easy it is to use them at home."

To that end, the most useful suggestion — the morel of the story — is that in mildly flavored dishes and sauces where you might now use sauteed white button mushrooms, the simple substitution of portobellos or cremini can provide a wonderful boost in flavor and add a nice firm texture.