greenstorm | (Reply)

From:

After our previous conversation I tried making crispy shiitake mushrooms according to a recipe I found. It called for corn starch, which I didn't have, so I used tapioca starch; one website said to double the amount when doing that substitution. It was probably referring to its use as a *thickener*, though, because what actually happened is that the tapioca starch immediately glommed all the slices together into a big gluey ball. I pan-fried the heck out of it and it eventually looked and tasted cooked, but had turned into a single, large mushroom gummy. Cooled in the fridge and thinly sliced, the flavor was intensely bacon-mushroom umami and it was really pretty great in sandwiches.

I might try for crispy at some point, but this was actually pretty nice too, if extremely weird to work with.