Morels have to be washed. They are full of grit, and without giving them a good cleaning you may as well eat sand. But here is the good news: typically get mushrooms wet and they go bad faster, about morels is they can stand a little water. That said, they need to be dried before cooking; otherwise, they exude tons of water, steam, shrink up to nothing, and go limp. What you ultimately want from a morel is a crispy brown mushroom that has soaked up butter and the flavor of any aromatics you might have added to the sauté pan. I always store mushrooms in a salad spinner set in the fridge. In the case of morels, I always leave the top off and use the automatic defrost that all modern fridges have to dry them out overnight; it is worth the wait. I really like a carbon steel French style sauté pan for this recipe because it gets blazing hot very quickly. Turn on you hood vent.

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