How to Dry Mushrooms at Home

How to Dry Mushrooms at Home

Mushrooms might be our favourite food, but they have a limited shelf life. Fresh mushrooms only stay good for around a week, making it hard to limit your food waste if you’re not cooking mushrooms daily. Learning how to dry mushrooms is one of the best ways to extend the life of your home-grown mushrooms and reduce food waste.


Drying mushrooms is an alternative to freezing them, helping to preserve their quality with a longer shelf life. A dried mushroom maintains its intense flavour and can be easily incorporated into most mushroom recipes.


We’re sharing our tips and tricks on the best ways to dry mushrooms and how to use them in your favourite recipes. Don’t have time to dehydrate mushrooms? Buy dried mushrooms instead and keep them in your pantry.


Easy Steps to Dry Mushrooms at Home

There are different ways to dry mushrooms, including using an oven or dehydrator. Air-drying is the cheapest and easiest way to dry mushrooms at home – however, it’s a more time-consuming process.


Drying mushrooms helps maintain their flavour, reduce food waste, and maximize the value of your home-grown mushrooms. Learning how to dry mushrooms is a great way to preserve the last of your mushrooms that might otherwise go bad.


Once you rehydrate your mushrooms, they’ll have a dense and meaty texture. It’s a great option if you’re looking for a plant-based substitute for meat. Using rehydrated mushrooms is the best option for certain recipes, such as a wild mushroom risotto, where the texture may be lost with fresh mushrooms.

How to Dry Mushrooms at Home, various methods.


The easiest way to dry mushrooms is to place them in an oven or dehydrator low and slow. Firstly you should clean your mushrooms, removing any debris from the stem, sometimes there is substrate left on the stems so this should be discarded. All mushrooms can be dried for later use, the only difference with this process will be the length of time it takes to dry, it is very important for this reason to keep checking the mushrooms to see when they are done. Popular mushrooms to dry at home include Chestnut, White and Shiitake Mushrooms, Our Shiitake Mushroom Growing Kits tend to crop 1kg of mushrooms on the first flush so often people dry them as they may not need them all in one go!.

How to Dry Mushrooms With An Oven

To use an oven to dehydrate your mushrooms, you should set your oven low, around 50-60'c and spread your mushrooms onto a baking sheet in a single layer so air can get all around the caps / slices of mushrooms, slicing will reduce the time to dry but for mushrooms such as shiitake and making ramen, you may prefer larger, whole caps.

You should leave the door ajar so that moisture can escape, or every now and then open the door so it can escape. It is best to check the mushrooms every half hour and typically you can expect your mushrooms to be perfectly dried after 2-3 hours.

How to Dry Mushrooms With A Dehydrator

To Arguably the best way to dehydrate mushrooms would be with the use of a purpose build dehydrator, these have many layers so you can process more mushrooms at a time and do tend to be quicker than ovens.

The process is very similar to using an oven, the temperature should be 55-60'c and the dehydrator should be run until the mushrooms feel leathery, time will depend alot on the size of the mushrooms used and quantity, but should also take you no longer than 2-3 hours.
Shiitake Mushrooms In Dehydrator

How to Rehydrate Mushrooms at Home

Most recipes required dried mushrooms to be rehydrated. The easiest way to rehydrate dried mushrooms is to place them in hot water for several hours. If you’re planning on cooking that evening, it’s best to do this process in the morning and allow them to rehydrate for the rest of the day.


Dried mushrooms usually rehydrate after an hour, but you’ll get the best results by allowing them to soak for longer. Save the liquid your mushrooms were soaking in as it will be packed with flavour. You can incorporate it directly into sauces and mushroom recipes.


Shiitake mushrooms are one of the best for dehydrating and are an Asian cooking staple. You can make the umami flavour of shiitake mushrooms more intense by drying them before using them in soups and stir-fries.


Grow Your Own Mushrooms with Our At-Home Growing Kit

Our ready-growing mushroom kits make it easy to grow and dry mushrooms at home. We’ve already started the growing process, ensuring a healthy crop, and giving you your first cookable mushrooms in just days. Got a question about mushrooms? Contact our team, follow us on Instagram, and explore our blog for more mushroom growing tips and tricks.

Authored by: Merryhill Mushrooms