L'ACQUA DI RINVENIMENTO
PERCHE' BUTTARLA
Before answering this question, I want to make it clear that I am not a doctor, I’m not a geology expert, and I’m not a specialist in hygiene or food safety either.
I’m simply a careful and informed consumer, just like you.
I read, do my research, and have always tried to give my clients the best advice — not to complicate their lives, but to help them become conscious and informed buyers.
And now, let’s get to it. If I make any mistakes, please be kind!
Why should the soaking water from dried mushrooms be discarded?
I answer this question far more often than others, because what I say goes directly against our culinary tradition.
In fact, the soaking water from dried mushrooms used to be commonly used in the kitchen by our grandmothers. There was a widespread belief that nothing in the kitchen should go to waste — everything could be reused, especially for broths or soups.
In the case of purchased dried mushrooms (because here we need to make a distinction between purchased and self-produced) this rule does not apply.
If you were to collect the mushrooms yourself, clean them, wash them, cut them and then lay them out on a table or other surface exposed to the sun to dry them (or use a dryer), the mathematical certainty that the mushrooms are free of soil residues and washed would be confirmed and confirmable by the fact that you carried out the procedure yourself.
In the case of store-bought dried mushrooms, however, the process is much faster — but also more uncertain.
The mushrooms are typically harvested and sliced on the same day, then left to dry either in the sun or in ovens.
But no one can guarantee their meticulous cleaning — a level of cleanliness that only you can ensure when doing it yourself.
The definition of soil in fact, does not only concern what our eye perceives as DIRT, but also everything that the eye does not see.
The earth or soil in which mushrooms grow spontaneously is composed of elements often of medium-small diameter, an example are: iron, manganese, phosphorus and silicon and these components are not easy to filter through common home methods.
Even smog plays its part.
We commonly call them fine dust, the definition says that they are all those particles or dust, present in the atmosphere that can be produced by humans (for example by cars) or of vegetal origin (forest fires or volcanic eruptions). What is certain is that they are very, very dangerous for health.
Fine dust, as the name suggests, is very light and is considered the main cause of pollution in our cities.
Due to its characteristics, it is transported in the air for a long time and can easily move from the place where it is produced to the surrounding environment.
Since it is considered dangerous when breathed in and can cause the onset of even serious diseases of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems (logically these are considerations of clinical studies, not my personal ones), I feel obliged to warn my potential client, also from ingesting it.
Another factor to take into account is radioactivity.
We obviously start with a reference to the greatest environmental disaster in our history, Chernobyl, which occurred in 1986 in what is now Ukraine, and the subsequent one of Fukushima in 2011 in Japan, but I would also like to get to the presence on our territory of quarries of potentially radioactive material.
I am talking about the uranium quarries present also in our territory and decommissioned at the end of the 80s, in the municipality of Novazza (BG) for example.
They decommissioned the quarry... this is not indicative of the fact that the uranium is not still present, in fact there have been various attempts and requests for reopening, never accepted.
In fact, even those produced by volcanic rocks (tuff for example), quarry extracts or by working the land (manual or natural) are considered radioactive materials.
Given the impossibility of knowing whether certain species of mushrooms may have absorbed toxic pollutants such as heavy metals or, in the case of the Cantharellus genus, radioactive isotopes, it is a good idea to wash each collected carpophore to significantly reduce this risk and consequently always throw away the recovery and discovery water.
Recent studies have shown that the Boletus genus, therefore the porcini mushrooms, do not attract Cesium (they are not Cesium-capturing like other species) in a significant way as well as heavy metals but this certainly does not exempt them from a good cleaning and washing!!!!
