I've always been leery of eating mushrooms incase I eat a poisonous one. Does anyone know the regulations that restaurant mushrooms have to go through to be safe? Are they grown outdoors where other species could mix? Are they just picked off of a random mountain and brought in? I'm very curious of their safety.
ckngbbbls
Favorite Answer
Restaurants buy their foods from food service companies that serve hundreds of schools, cafe's hospitals restaurants and grocery stores.
They get all their produce from big commercial farms and growers and are definitely safe.
Think about how many cafe's, restaurants, hospitals, stores are in your town and then you will see that no one "picks them off a mountain somewhere."
The restaurant I work for right now uses about 10 pounds of portabello mushrooms, about 20 pounds of your basic button mushrooms and 3-4 pounds of specialty assorted "wild' mushrooms ever single week and has for the last 12 years I have worked there. Nary a poison one in site.
Chetak.
They are never guaranteed to be safe. They have the same things that are faced with other recalls.
Most species that are readily available are grown in controlled conditions and are packed by type.
In some cases the producers will offer a mushroom mix of the types they grow.
Only a chef who knows his mushrooms is likely to find and pick them, but they are generally a very small fraction that are harvested that way, mainly in woods that have tress that favour the type of mushrooms.
I would trust most restaurants and ask what ones they had in their recipes.
More people get sick by picking and eating the ones they find that any reasonable restaurant.
Twice in the last few years I have taken mushroom I have found to a restaurant an of the three different types I have taken two were unsafe to eat and the other ws quite safe, which I took home and cooked up when I picked a few more I found.
Anonymous
Mostly they are bought from farms. I don't think anyone would go outside and pick some off of a random mountain!
And if you really are this paranoid, you can look up the differences between poisonous and safe mushrooms so you know how to tell them apart.
viv
Most of the time YES. Mushrooms for the restaurant trade are grown indoors in huge dark barns. They are processed, grown, picked and packed under supervision.
The only thing I worry about is that have they been washed before they are used in recipes.
?
Your typical white button mushroom is farmed. Some restaurants use wild harvested mushrooms like morels. I wouldn't be afraid of eating these. Restaurants try there best not to poison their good customers.