Yes, these are both culinary crimes - but at least you'll be able to make a clean getaway.

#1 got sidebarred on the mothership a couple of weeks ago. The short version: not shit, sterile compost; washing doesn't change the flavour at all.

#2 I mostly rub mine with coarse salt to clean it. Seems to get rid of other flavours. I've also be doing the occasional wash for years also without any apparent harm.

Mushroom prep.

As for the skillet thing... yeah, you really shouldn't wash it. If you absolutely must, be sure to dry it thoroughly afterwards or it will rust. Put it on a hot burner until all residual water boils off.

To avoid FISHPANCAKES, you can either have a dedicated fish skillet or, better still, get a griddle.

1. The reason my mom told me not to wash them is that they absorb the water. She went on to say if you cook them immediately after washing, no problem.

2. I have a wonderfully seasoned cast iron pan. I never wash it with soap, but will occasionally soak (briefly) in hot water and scrub gently.

I wash my skillet in soap and water after fish for precisely that reason IF I was too lazy/hurried to heat up oil in the pan, wipe it clean, and then do it again. After a couple of heated oilings, the fish flavor goes away.

It is better to have a designated fish pan, though I don't. I did see a really cute antique (I think) cast iron pan in the shape of a fish, supposedly for exactly this reason. I don't know where you'd find one.

I've lived in a house where the cast iron was rubbed with salt after every use and a a house where it was washed every night.

The salt-rub produces a far superior cooking surface, but the washed pans still work. If you don't feel comfortable with FISHPANCAKES, wash the pan after you fry the fish and just rub otherwise.

I don't know for sure if this is true, or just wishful thinking on the part of raw foodists who don't eat animal products, but *supposedly* soil has b-12 in it, and raw foodists brush off the excess and eat mushrooms without washing to get b-12. I've been raw on and off, and I don't wash mushrooms either, I just knock off dirt and eat them.

I too have a dedicated fish skillet, and use a cast iron skillet for lots of non-fish things.

I have no mushroom opinions. I just wipe them off with a towel and eat them, but I have what's probably unjustifiably enormous faith in my immune system.

My cast iron improved noticably when I stopped even light soap usage, and just scrub with a bit of kosher salt when needed.

I figure we eat more dirt on, say, salad greens and fresh berries than we get from a smooth surface like a mushroom. Washing spinach is much more fraught than cleaning the odd button. Fraught, I say.

Most shittake mushrooms are commercially grown on wood, or sawdust mediums. All licensed U.S. commercial mushroom growers of common "white" or portabello mushrooms use sterilized growth medium. This maybe topsoil, which may be enriched with manure and other organic matter, baked to a temperature high enough to kill all bacteria and fungus, for a long enough time to ensure that result. But a lot of commercial mushrooms are also grown on agar media.

Commercial growers go to great lengths to avoid introduction of unsterilized materials into their growing areas, because of the risk of contamination of their facilities with molds or other fungi which could taint the taste of their product, or take over other beds. If the worst thing you ever put in your mouth is the brown stuff on commercial button mushrooms, count yourself very, very lucky.

As for the cast iron skillet issue, I have a 50 year old 10" Grissom skillet, that I bake a cornbread in, then turn around and fry fish (in cormeal), and make johnny cakes in the next morning, pretty often, in winter. Salt rub, and a dab of lard between uses. Nobody's ever complained about taste contamination, and if your pan is well seasoned, there's a reason for that: "seasoning" on cast iron pan is not a porous coating. If it were, it would flake off regularly, when exposed to any water in cooking. It doesn't, because it's impervious. Likewise, it can't really absorb either fat soluble or water soluble tastes. If you skillet is clean down to the seasoning, and you grease it lightly, as needed, after use, it'll bring no flavor to what you cook.

We have a cadre of cast iron skillets here, and they all regularly get a mild soap-and-water scrubbing after use -- not a soak, not a full-on Palmolive attack, just a little bit of suds to help unstick the crusty bits, a rinse and then onto the stove to burn off the water. Once it's dry, we poar in a little olive oil and wipe it around the surface with a paper towel.

Been doing it like that for a decade with no deleterious effects.

Wow, totally missed that mushroom AskMe.
Reassuring to know it's not poo.

And thanks for the salt idea, I'll give that a try.
I'd been washing with soap after the truly messy stuff, and I'd done the boiling water on the stove thing too.
Recently I've been using the regular teflon-deal for fish, thus avoiding the FISHPANCAKES problem.
Thanks for the tips.

To clean my cats iron pans I boil them for 5 to 10 minutes, then clean with a non-soapy stiff brush. I wipe with kitchen towel, heat for a bit, and apply a thin layer of oil. Never notice any flavor carry-over.

I learned this method from my brother, the chef. He also taught me that if you get a used cast iron skillet (or one that isn't seasoned, or one that has become so mucked up you need to use soap), to half-fill it with coarse salt, and heat it up real good. This sucks out all the dirt in the pan. After this you half-fill it with oil and heat to the smoke point. This step can be repeated. Then you have a re-reasoned cast iron pan.

Alton Brown did a show on mushrooms where he measured the weight of those that hadn't been washed, mushrooms that had been briefly dunked in water, and mushrooms that had been soaked in water for some time. There was no appreciable weight difference among the three, which led him to conclude that mushrooms washed in water do not soak up the water.

However.

The texture definitely changes. (The outside gets slimy.) And I think the flavor does too. I think mushrooms washed in water get a sort of skunky ammonia funk, and I do not like it.

Also, yes, they're grown in compost, not shit. The process of making compost involves bacteria that eat the icky stuff. I'm not squeamish at all about compost -- and therefore I brush my mushrooms off with paper towels -- but some people are unable to distinguish it from plain ol' dirt. Those are the people who eat skunky mushrooms.

My cast iron improved noticably when I stopped even light soap usage, and just scrub with a bit of kosher salt when needed.

Good advice upthread, but felt the need to chip in. Cast iron pans are cured with oil. Soap breaks up oil. This is why soap on cast iron can wreck the curing. It's not irredeemable, but it's unnecessary and creates more problems than it's worth. As mentioned above, coarse salt as a scouring agent will get rid of most nasty bits, including the fishy taste. The drying over heat and rubbing with some (high flash temp--veg or peanut or lard, never extra virgin olive) oil will keep your pan in the style to which it should be accustomed. I use mine for everything from steak to pancakes to fish to brownies and it does fine. I wish I could say the same for my cutting board (any hints, bunnies?)

AwkwardPause, thanks for the tip. That I didn't know, and will use in future.

I always wash my mushrooms, dammit. I can't be arsed wiping every last one with a clean cloth.

HEATED OILINGS.

hee.

I wash my cast iron stuff in mild dish soap and dry them on the stove. They seem to work fine. Of course the dog cleans them out first, which is one reason for the dish soap.

mmmmmmmmmm... fishpancakes. Sounds good to me.

(I never wash mushies. Just knock off the obvious lumps of non-mushie stuff and then fry the bejeezus out of them....)

I rinse mushrooms well in the sink, and if I'm feeling ambitious, blot them with paper towels.

Elizard, I have the best cutting board! It's made of bamboo strips, and it's great. I only use for vegetables (and cutting loaves of bread), and never wash it with soap, just rinse it afterwards. If I feel the need for some scrubbing I use lemon, or salt, or vinegar and baking soda (I just don't like the idea of any remaining or absorbed soap on the board - I don't think this is some "rule"). If I had known how nice is was going to be I would have bought several, because it was really cheap, too - but now the place where I got it doesn't have any more, and I haven't seen any just like it, though they are certainly available. It's just that they cost about four times what I paid for that one.

Apparently bamboo is harder than other woods, and absorbs less water.

I saw a mushroom farm on Dirty Jobs once. The soil was basically shit, but they didn't use it until it had cooked/fermented itself to a safe temperature - to kill all the bad bacteria. Knowing this makes me feel safer eating mushrooms without scrubbing the hell out of them.

I always rinse mushrooms, I didn't even realize I wasn't supposed to.
However, I always put veggies away "dirty" and just wash them RIGHT before I chop them up to cook.

I don't have any cast iron *yet*, but I do have some stoneware, which is much the same deal. I wash in hot water with a scrub brush, no soap. Occasionally, if I've cooked something pungent I'll scrub with some baking soda.

IIRC, the soap thing is because cast iron is actually pretty far from nonstick when you clean it like that. It needs the "seasoning" from oils to make it so nice to cook on.

I don't think I've ever washed or brushed a mushroom in my life, and from looking at them before I chop them I've never needed to. No gritty bits of dirt in my food, food poisoning, or funky flavours either. How dirty are your mushrooms?

chococat, my favourite kitchen toy is a salad spinner. It uses centripedal force to dry your lettuce.

How dirty are your mushrooms?

The ones I get often have great big chunks of wet dirt on them.
It depends, though. If I'm buying loose mushrooms from the produce section they're good. It's only when I grab the cheap prepackaged kind that I get scummy nastiness.

I fling my cast iron pan through the windshield of that car parked outside that has THE FUCKING HAIRTRIGGER KLAXON ALARM THAT NEVER SHUTS OFF FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK after every use, works great.

There are a bunch of cast-iron-care AskMes in which the general consensus is similar to what you see here, and what I have done all my life, learned at my mama's and grandmama's knee: salt scrub to clean it (it's an excellent abrasive; it gets everything), immediate drying, and then a quick wipe with corn oil to refresh the seasoning. I season the pans again when they start to need it - as in, when something's sticking a little - and for that, I just scrub it out with steel wool and follow the seasoning instructions you can find all over AskMe or on the web - basically, a couple heatings with a generous coating of oil.

The mister and I tend to use plastic cutting boards, one for meat and another for veggies and non-meat stuff. However, I read recently that maple cutting boards are better for keeping the wee nasties at bay.

And my crush for the Divine Mr. Wino deepens.