There is a toxin in plain white button mushrooms called agarotene, which may be carcinogenic.

And plain white button mushrooms grow up to be cremini mushrooms, the brown mushrooms,

and cremini mushrooms grow up to be portobello mushrooms.

They're all the exact same mushroom.

It's like how green bell peppers are just unripe red bell peppers.

But you can reduce the amount of garotine in these shrooms through cooking,

frying, microwaving, boiling, or even just freezing and thawing lowers the levels.

It is therefore recommended to cook mushrooms before consumption, something I noted in a video

that's now more than a decade old.

But if you look at the various cooking methods, the carotene isn't completely destroyed.

Take dry baking, for example, 10 minutes at about 400

degrees Fahrenheit, basically how you'd make a pizza, only cuts the agarotine levels by about

a quarter, so 77% still remains. Boiling looks better, appearing to wipe out over half

of the toxin after just five minutes, but it's not actually wiped out.

Instead, it's just transferred to the cooking water.

So, yes, levels within the mushrooms drop by about half at five minutes and 90 percent after

an hour, but that's mostly because it's leaching into the broth.

So if you're making soup or something, five minutes of boiling is no better than the pizza,

and even after an hour, about half remains.

Frying for five to ten minutes wipes out a lot, but microwaving is a more healthful way to cook,

and it works even better.

Just one minute in the microwave reduces the garotine content of fresh-slice mushrooms by 65%,

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