Dried Mushrooms
Here's our dry. This is just the dried area, the back storage or back stock for dried mushrooms and medicinal mushroom products. So we're actually in the process of doing like a little reset here, so everything is going to be organized depending on the product, uh, we have it packed in a case, uh, what's in the case and the weights as well as the price point.
So like, we have a different multitude of like dried products here, so like dried mushrooms that can be added into recipes for cooking, or even just like mushroom powders that are utilized for like health benefits or tincture production for those at home, uh, alchemists that want to make their own stuff.
Then, yeah, like this product, for instance, is like a gourmet mushroom medley, which is just some dried mushrooms composed of two ounces of all the strains that we grow here, dried and mixed up into a nice medley, and then add it into this nice pouch that's resealable for storage. And basically, you would just take this and add it in in addition to like a recipe, straight into like a pasta sauce or a soup for dinner, and then the dried mushrooms will rehydrate, absorbing all that water, and kind of turn back into fresh mushrooms that you can cook with.
Another great way people will use dried is just throwing them in like some lukewarm or hot water and allowing them to rehydrate for 30 minutes to an hour. After that, they take the mushrooms out, and you can kind of just start cooking with them, uh, sauteing them in addition to like some vegetable medley or whatever you're gonna do. You can, you can do some cool stuff. So yeah, we just have a bunch of medleys here. Then we do like a single single ounce of just a dried specific species, so like we'll have like nameko, um, we'll also do like some shiitake mushrooms, and, uh, this is like the Foliot and Adiposa, which is the chestnut mushroom, close cousins to the mako.
And another big thing for us is just like the medicinal things. So like dried reishi mushrooms will have a dried reishi mushroom of, uh, the species of the customer's choice out of any of the ones that we grow, and those are packed in two ounce pouches and, uh, sealed as well. And basically, yeah, the patches will come with like some simple instructions on making, uh, making a cup of reishi tea or making a pot of ricey tea to just kind of drink as like a daily health tonic or bi-weekly health tonic, whatever works for you.
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We also, um, do like the lion's mane powder. So this is just some powder that was just made, and it's waiting to be labeled and, uh, stickered, but we, uh, dry our powder out, uh, well, the lion's mane is first heated to like 140 to 160 degrees for about 16 hours. That way, it's able to break down the cell wall of the mushroom before it goes into the powdering process. From there, the mushrooms are added to a mill, so the mushrooms are actually milled into this very fine powder and creates a really wonderful product. For this four ounce pouch of powder, two and a half to three pounds of fresh lion's mane went into the production of this, so it's super concentrated and just super great for those want to get a daily regimen of light lion's mane going or any other mushroom medicinal mushroom. It makes it easy. People can make their own capsules out of this powder, make their own tinctures, or they could just use it straight from the pouch with a teaspoon, add it to like a your favorite hot or cold beverage or smoothie, stuff like that, and get great results. We get a lot of feedback from people that use this stuff, and they, uh, really love having it involved in their their routine.
So some of the other powders we'll do is just like an oyster mushroom powder. This mushroom powder is medicinal as well. Oysters contain a
Compound called Levostatin, so that will naturally reduce blood pressure and lower cholesterol. I like to utilize this mushroom, uh, powder for like cooking specifically. Um, it's great as like a breading, so like spreading up like veggies or even meats with this mushroom powder creates the nice breading that is gluten free and and just full of flavor, and it's really good.
We'll also do just, uh, any any of the mushrooms in a powder form. So like the chestnut powder, this one adds like just like a great dimension when adding to like soups or pastas. For people looking to add a little bit of that nutty, unique flavor that you'll get from a chestnut mushroom, it's great as like a seasoning. Sprinkle the top meats and veggies and stuff like that get a great depth from from really all the mushroom powders. The shiitake mushroom powder is a great one because it adds like a nice umami to the dish. Shiitake is known for having like a nice umami profile.
Drying mushrooms is a process that a lot of people ask about, and it's really easy. Simply take the fresh mushrooms, and you can, there's a couple ways that you could do it. When I was younger, I would just fan dry them in front of a fan, just on pieces of cardboard, and usually within 48 hours or so, especially since I live in Arizona and it's super dry out here, usually 10 humidity to 20 percent, within like 24 to 48 hours, you'll find the mushroom is, uh, bone dry, and you could take them, the stem, and you can break it, and it'll snap like a twig. And if you can't take the mushroom and snap it and the stem breaks like a twig, then that means there's still moisture within the mushrooms, and they're not completely dry, and they need to be completely dried, because when you do go ahead and store them in an enclosed container, if there's any bit of moisture left in them, then that can present a, you know, an environment for mold and bacteria to grow on the mushrooms.
So the way we do it now is I basically just will take the mushrooms and load them into like a dehydrator, and this is basically like a just a simple box that has like a vent and a fan, and it blows hot air into it, and the mushrooms are allowed to dry in there for about 16 hours, and usually that's done anywhere between 100 to 120 degrees. For like mushrooms like this, you, uh, you don't want to dry them on too hot of a temperature because it can cause the mushrooms to just not come out looking as pretty. Maybe you kind of get that dry, burnt to a crisp look instead of like just preserving the unique, uh, attributes of the mushroom by drying it closer to like 95 to 105 degrees.
For people at home that don't have access to like a dehydrator, you can find dehydrators for cheap at like a sporting goods store, or even simpler, you could just like open up an oven, crack it, and put the mushrooms in there on a tray, and set the oven to the lowest temperature setting, and basically let the mushroom sit in there until you can take a mushroom out and break it in half with the stem and find that it's bone dry.
So all of the mushrooms that we use to make all of our products is all grown by us. We don't outsource any kind of mushroom powders or anything that goes into the making of our mushroom products. So once the mushrooms are harvested, they go into the dehydration process, so all the moisture is taken away from the mushrooms and they are just dried out. So here we have a bag of the Foliota and Mako mushroom. This makes a wonderful dried mushroom. After the drying is done, we load them into these FDA approved just like plastic bags, and that way we can kind of store them until they're ready to be weighed out and turned
Into products such as mushroom medleys, or a specific single strained varieties of dried mushrooms. So yeah, we have the nameko right here. We have a little bit of, uh, actually this is really cool. This is the Ganoderma multiply liam, and we've been growing this out in like an antler kind of formation, and we can kind of see the mushrooms are an orangish yellow. Look, this is a reishi mushroom that hails from from Asia. So, really unique looking mushroom that we just started, or actually I just started, uh, doing it the whole growth in the bag and not moving this this strain to the grow groom, because I like the antler-like formation that this particular mushroom gives off. And this is the Ganoderma multipylium or multiphylum, which is a really good medicinal mushroom as well, when made into like a mushroom reishi tea. This mushroom is really potent. You get a really strong, bitter yet earthy flavor from brewing this one up that makes it pretty cool.
And then yeah, we'll just have like some bigger mushroom pieces in here. The best thing about drying the mushrooms, I really enjoy doing it because you really worked hard to produce these mushrooms. You put in a lot of time, labor, love, you know, you had a whole team of people working on this with you, and you get to the point where you harvest all these mushrooms. A great option for them is to dry them. Usually, with most mushrooms, you're getting about a week of. shelf life in the fridge and you know as a business when you're sitting on tons of mushrooms that can be a daunting task of selling all these mushrooms before they go bad so drying enables you to dry the product and store it for years potentially without the need for refrigeration so at that point you're saving electricity consumption then also you're passing that shelf life down to the customers people love having dried mushrooms in addition in their pantry so we'll have them available at the farmers markets and you know even online but people at the farmer's market will pick up their weekly regimen of uh fresh mushrooms and they found that or i found that people like to have like a bag of dried mushrooms to go with that that way they can have some dried mushrooms just sitting in the pantry without needing for refrigeration and as they need them they can just grab mushrooms right out the cupboard and throw it into a dish and you know usually people add them into pastas a great way to use them is straight into like a rice dish so you add your rice and water add your mushrooms and let the mushrooms actually hydrate with the dried rice it's just great and it enables us to to you know sit on the product for weeks at a time until we can move it so i love dried and i think it's important part of mushroom growing you got to try your mushrooms as needed you