Inside Our Exotic Mushroom Grow Room | Lion’s Mane, Chestnut, Pioppino & More
Here, we, uh, just pulled out some mushrooms or some fruiting blocks from our growing rooms, and we're just looking at some of the variety or diversity and mushrooms that we have out here on the table. And we could start with the pink oyster, or also this species is known as Pleuros Deja Mor, and it produces these wonderful clusters of these pink mushrooms that have these wonderful showy, bright pink gills. And the mushroom is oyster species, so it's one of the many oyster species that we can grow, and it has a wonderful flavor. It's a little tougher than some of the oyster mushrooms, but a lot of people like it for that pink color it gives, and yeah, it's really nice. We also have a golden oyster right here.
This is a Pleurotus Citronaut Pledis, and it produces these wonderful clusters of mini mushrooms that have a yellow to goldish color. This mushroom has a wonderful flavor. Some kind of compare it to cashews. The pink and golden oyster are oyster mushrooms that originate in Asia, and these actual cultures came from a Japanese commercial culture. The stem on the golden oyster mushroom is also edible and pretty tasty.
It goes great in like stir fries, rice dishes, soups. It really goes good in like Asian style cuisine. Also, we have our lion's mane mushroom right here, and this is the wonderful teeth fungus. It produces these little tight pom-poms with all these little teeth or icicle-like elongations, instead of having gills like you would see in most mushrooms, where the spores are produced underneath the cap. This mushroom actually produces spores through each of the teeth, and the teeth also give it a wonderful texture.
Written protocol
Lion's Mane Commercial Cultivation SOP
175 pages on this species specifically, from culture to harvest.
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Some will kind of compare it to that of a crab or lobster when sauteed in like a bar garlic butter, but I've even found it to kind of take on like a chicken-like texture when cooked right, or sauteed simply with a little bit of white wine and maybe a tablespoon of tamari added in. It brings out a wonderful flavor, and it blends well to like stir fries, rice dishes, or even used as a as honestly like a meat substitute and like a mushroom taco. And yeah, simply just saute it up and add it into your favorite recipe. Next, we have, uh, the Foliota Nameko mushroom. So this is a Foliota species, and it's actually, uh, relative to the chestnut mushroom that we grow.
Uh, the Foliota produces a kind of like a gelatinous like substance over neath the caps and underneath the gills, and that'll actually prevent it from drying out in nature. It's highly cultivated in like Japan and Asian countries, so you can add it into like a miso soup or fried rice dish, stir fries, or even just sauteed and simply garnished over your favorite meats and veggies. Here, we have a really nice robust blue oyster mushroom that we grow, and this is still in the younger stages. This would actually be a really good time to harvest these things, just for the presentation point of them. They still have that really nice blue color, and towards the bottom we can even see a light greenish color coming out.
So this is like the blue green oyster mushroom, and it's very dense, very meaty. It has a really good shelf life compared to some of the other oyster mushrooms. I'll find this one lasting about 10 days in the fridge, compared to like five to sev, five to six days with the pinks or golds. So this mushroom is very versatile. It can really go into anything that calls for mushrooms.
It has a very savory flavor, almost poultry like, and it's very easy to grow in my opinion, and I love that it just produces all these wonderful blue robust mushrooms. And next, we just have some reishi mushrooms. This is the Ganoderma Cecile, and this mushroom is a medicinal mushroom of course. So you would basically harvest these antlers or conchs and brew them into a tea, or make a tincture out of them, and really just use the Mushroom for its immune, immunomodulating benefits. It's able to basically enhance your overall immune function.
It's been shown to help with the treatment of cancers and tumors and also aid in, like, chemotherapy treatment because a lot of people will suffer from fatigue and stuff like that, so this will help with fatigue. It's been used throughout eastern medicine for over 4,000 years, so there's a lot of research on the mushroom and documentation of the mushroom being used throughout many centuries. And here we have the pioppino mushroom, also known, also known as a Agrocyte algerita, and it's a wonderful, wonderful mushroom that has this really nice edible stem and nice velvet amber kind of cap. These are still in their young stage, so we'll let them grow out a couple more days, and we'll get a nice height off of them, and the caps will kind of go from this dark color to a nice light orange color. The mushroom has a an actual kind of somewhat of a mild pork like flavor when sauteed, and it's really good in, like, pastas and and kind of like mediterranean style, really anything that calls for mushrooms as well.
So this is one of my favorites to grow, and I like that it produces tons of these mushrooms, and they grow very quick. From the time that I inoculate to going in the grow room, it's usually about three weeks, so very quick grower. It's a hardwood loving mushroom, and it has some medicinal benefits as well. It's a, you know, immuno-enhancing, it's anti-cancer, anti-tumor, and it's also been used, or it's been shown to help with, like, fever reduction and stuff like that. So it's also just a good mushroom to have in your diet.
That covers it for these gourmet and exotic mushrooms. To go over the names again, we had the pink oyster, Pleurotus de jamore, the golden oyster or yellow oyster, Pleurotus citronopletes, the lion's mane, Hericium erenasius. We have the nameko mushroom, the full yoda nameko, the piapino mushroom, the aggressive badgerida, and then we have the blue oyster, the Pleurodus austriatus, the reishi mushroom. This species is actually a Ganoderma cecile. That's about it for for what we have out today, and it's basically only a fraction of really what we grow with our gourmet mushrooms, so that just shows that you can grow so much variety on, you know, on some of the same hardwood substrates and, you know, really get some diversity with