in this video I'm going to be showing you how to preserve your mushrooms by dehydrating them dehydrating your mushrooms is a great way to preserve an abundance of foraged mushrooms or simply to make sure that the store-bought mushrooms in your refrigerator don't spoil before you use them I will oftentimes buy mushrooms when they're on sale because I know the dehydrated mushrooms store well most mushrooms dried beautifully not only retaining but even gaining flavor in the process when you rehydrate mushrooms in hot water their texture is almost identical to fresh mushrooms dried mushrooms can be stored for at least a year you can dry mushrooms in an oven or even in front of a fan but you'll get the best results if you use it too hydrator the first thing you want to do is to clean your mushroom a lot of people say not to wash mushrooms but you can it's not gonna hurt them and it's a lot faster than taking them and brushing them with a brush one by one depending on what seems the easiest for the shape of the mushrooms you want to either slice them or go ahead and if they're very small you can dry them whole you want to slice them between a quarter and a half inch thick the thicker slices are going to take a little bit longer to dry so this is definitely going to take longer to dry than something like this so I'm going to set this to the side so that I can slice it again you want to take your mushrooms lay them out on the dehydrator tray and you want to spread them out so that they're in a thin even layer just want to make sure that none of them are overlapping because it does make drying take longer then grab another shrimp you need to spread them out have a lot of mushrooms to do I just go ahead and throw them through my food food slicer and then they're all nice and even and I don't have to worry about the size so I'm gonna go ahead and take this and place it on my dehydrator I've got my mushrooms on my dehydrator tray I'll go ahead and turn the dehydrator on and place the lid on top we're gonna turn the dehydrator up to a hundred and ten now mushrooms take anywhere from six to eight hours to dehydrate so I'm gonna go ahead and set mine at six hours it's pretty humid here so I'm sure it's gonna take a little bit longer the end of six hours we'll come back and check on them and see how they're doing mushrooms usually retain most of their color so what we're gonna be looking for is the fact that they're dry almost crispy and have a bit of a leather texture so they will still be pliable a little bit we don't want them to actually be crisp enough that they break the dehydrator has gone off so I'm gonna go ahead and lift up the lid and check and see if the mushrooms are completely dry as you can see the mushrooms are drying I might even be able to hear that I actually hear that they're dry when you take the mushroom you can bend it a little bit so it's still pliable which is what you want but there is no moisture in it I'm gonna go ahead and get them off of the trays and get them stored up