The Mushroom Grower - Vol IV: The Harvest

So, it'll grow in really cold temperatures. It's very finicky and uh if it's too warm, the mushroom will not develop properly. So, it's going to it's kind of seasonal fruit. Just grab these mushrooms at the base. Kind of just peel them right down.

You can harvest these mushrooms in just these tight clusters. And usually you'll f find these mushrooms grown in like a bottle style culture in in uh Asia. So, they'll grow these mushrooms right off the top of a of a jar or a bottle, and you get these perfect little formations that are really easily harvested. Um, growing them in bag culture like this definitely uh makes it more of a labor intensive harvest, but you can still get really nice clusters. And then with scissors, just trim off any remaining sawdust from the mushroom to rip off the top and get a second flush out of these.

Yeah, the papino is a fast fruitruing strain for us. It's usually by day uh 21 after inoculation, it's ready to go in the grow room. It's like a I don't know. It seems like it's uh every time it it it's a it's always fruing. So if if you don't catch it, we just kind of harvest whatever is grown onto it and just put it in the grow room.

It'll keep producing mushrooms until until it's exhausted of nutrients. I got two more. A beautiful crop of mushrooms. This strain grows out very nicely. It grows these really nice canopies of these delicious velvet golden topped little mushrooms.

Uh it's definitely uh one of our favorite strains to to grow and to eat. It's a very flavorful strain. It also makes a nice uh powder which can really give a nice flavor to like soups and and other dishes. You will get the same nutritional benefits. It'll just be powdered mushrooms.

So all those nutritional values and all those nut this is a a reishi species from Palmer Woods uh near Michigan. Uh it's a beautiful species of reishi. It produces these nice antlers and conchs that are really desirable and this mushroom is mainly used for the medicinal benefits. You can take it and brew it into a tea or make tinctures out of it and utilize it for the health properties or health enhancing benefits that this mushroom offers. Uh it's been used by Eastern medicine for about 4,000 years.

So, it's definitely good for for a lot of things and it's known as the mushroom of immortality. So, we'll just cut these mushrooms off. They're really woody compared to most mushrooms. Uh, most mushrooms are 90% water and 10% tissue. This mushroom here is 70% water and 30% tissue.

So, it makes a real woody woody mushroom that needs to be uh can't be sauteed or cooked. It really needs to be boiled down into a tea to get all those goodies out of it. So I'm just the majority of the reishi is grown in the bag and uh we open up the bags just to put them in the grow room so they can develop these conchk-l like features. Uh it's due to the higher O2 levels inside of the grow room. Uh gives that reishi the signal to kind of begin producing these conchs and uh it helps really with the distribution of the spores of this mushroom and it produces a lot of spores.

Ratio is one of the most aggressive colonizers. Um, and it's fairly easy mushroom to grow. The the actual growth process of the fruing body is what takes the longest, but I'd find about 2 months, 2 to 3 months after inoculation, I can be ready for harvest. With reishi, you're going to want to use some uh pretty good shears um just because it is such a tough mushroom. It's an intensive harvest, but well worth uh well worth the reward.

These mushrooms are great brewed up into tea. Uh that's the best way to I find to prepare them cuz they're so tough. Really, if you try to eat them or powder them or add them into like any of your recipes, they're going to be pretty tough to break down. Vers color because it's known to grow out and get a bunch of different colorations throughout the the mushroom. It's a super medicinal mushroom uh highly regarded for the compound PSK which has been shown to reduce like tumors and cancers and uh there's a lot of research being done on it.

It's the most researched medicinal mushroom. So, this is not like an edible mushroom. It's one that we would use in teas, tinctures. Um, you could brew it into uh different different recipes and stuff like that to get the medicinal compounds from it. Um, but yeah, that's really cool mushroom.

Really excited to grow a lot more of it in the future and just be able to help people strictly medicinal use. Um, it's been like shown to help improve the immune function and boost like the production of necessary tea helper cells. And it contains some really like unique uh beta glucans and polysaccharides that uh have also been shown to like uh terminate tumor and cancer growth. So really good mushroom uh that has a lot of promising research. Currently, we are just making up some sixb mix flats of uh our gourmet mushrooms or exotic uh mix.

So, this would be an exotic mix that goes to a restaurant. It's usually six lbs and it consists of multiple varieties uh that we have growing currently at the farm. So, that can switch up from time to time. So, basically whatever we we are we are harvesting that week. So, that's pretty cool.

Allows us to just prepare these sixlb flats. We're just getting the getting everything situated, trying to pack the mix cases as carefully as possible. And then once it's packed, I'll just cover with a piece of this wax paper. This helps lock in the moisture and uh just keep the mushrooms as fresh as All right. Layer the bottom on my cases with some uh this wax paper as well.

Kind of just keeps the mushroom. Usually I'll just uh put the more denser mushrooms in first. So the lion's mane is going to be more of a a weight mushroom. It fills up the flats really easily. Oyster mushrooms are a little bit a little bit more loose.

So, you kind of I try to go more heavy on the denser mushrooms and kind of finish them off with a couple pounds of oysters. So, with our oyster mushrooms, we'll just put them in the boxes. And since they're so delicate compared to like a shiitake or a king trumpet or really a lot of the mushrooms, just do the 3 and 12 lb uh boxes and just put them in there so they have a nice presentation. When somebody opens up the box, they get a nice display of beautiful mushrooms. And I'll try to go for like a 3 3.6 lb box just to make up for any weight loss that might occur during uh just the next day or so while they're in the fridge.

Mushrooms uh exhale more CO2 than any other crop. Uh vegetables really don't need as much uh ventilation. So yeah, we'll just put them into these boxes. These are actually wax coated as well with an uh basically FDA approved wax. So we'll use these boxes and we're actually about to try out another box uh for packing more weight for oyster mushroom from uh from our grow rooms.

We harvest our mushrooms. Uh you know, everything's grown out on our sterilized hardwood sawdust based uh substrate blocks. Uh so we'll harvest them up. We'll put the name of the strain and the date harvested if it's just going into our cold storage. So these were just harvested yesterday.

Uh right now it's pretty busy. So usually the mushrooms uh are harvested and distributed to restaurants or to the farmers markets within about 24 hours uh after harvesting. Uh in the case of like the lion's mane today, we're harvesting it straight into the flats and it'll be picked up here in probably like 30 minutes to an hour. So fresh from harvest straight to straight to the restaurant. It really doesn't get better than that.

So here soon. So each box gets a label that ensures uh basically in the case of anything has a batch code so they can trace it back to the day it was harvested. Uh even who harvested it and just helps everybody stay organized. Process that a lot of people ask about and it's really easy. Um simply take the fresh mushrooms and you can there's a couple ways that you could do it.

Uh when I was younger, I would just fan dry them in front of a fan uh 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%. Within like 24 to 48 hours, you'll find the mushroom is uh bone dry and you could take the the stem and you could break it and it'll snap like a twig. Uh, and if you can't take the mushroom and snap it and and the stem breaks like a twig, then that means there's still moisture within the mushrooms and they're not completely dry. They need to be completely dried because when you do go ahead and store them in an enclosed container, if there is any bit of moisture left in them, then that can present, you know, an environment for mold and 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. Um, 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. Um, and the mushrooms are allowed to dry in there for about 16 hours. And usually that's done anywhere between 100 to 120° 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°. For people at home, that is first heated to like 140 to 160° for about 16 hours. Uh that way it's able to break down the cell wall of the mushroom before it goes into the powdering process. Uh from there, the mushrooms are added to a mill. So the mushrooms are actually milled into this very fine powder and uh creates a really wonderful product.

For this 4 oz pouch of powder, 2 and 12 to 3 lbs of fresh lion's mane went into the production of this. So it's super concentrated and uh just super great for those wanting to get a daily regimen of light lion's mane going um or any other mushroom medicinal mushroom. Uh it makes it easy. People can make their own capsules out of this powder, make their own tinctures, uh or they could just use it straight from the pouch with a teaspoon added to like a your favorite hot or cold beverage or a smoothie, stuff like that, and and get great results. Uh we get like a gourmet mushroom medley, which is just some dried mushrooms composed of 2 oz of all [snorts] the strains that we grow here, dried and mixed up into a nice medley, and then added into this nice pouch that's realable for storage.

And uh basically you would just take this and add it in in addition to like a recipe um straight into like a pasta sauce or a soup for dinner. Uh 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 sautéing them in addition to like some vegetable medley or whatever you're going to do.

You can you can do some cool stuff. So yeah, we just have the best thing about uh drying the mushrooms. Uh I really enjoy doing it because you really worked hard to produce these mushrooms. You put in a lot of time, labor, love. Um 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.

Uh, a great option for them is to dry them because 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 uh 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 customer. Next, I like to work with my mushrooms with scissors.

Works a lot easier. Just over a container, bust them open. Beautiful blue oyster mushrooms. And I'd always recommend investing in really good shears for that. So, I like to take those mushrooms.

If they're pretty big, I like to make them into manageable pieces to eat. So, I'll just go ahead take my knife, cut them in a little just, you know, different shapes. Doesn't have to be perfect. Mushrooms are a really great vehicle for the pork's flavor. Uh especially once it loses a lot of its moisture, it has the ability to absorb other moisture, other liquids.

And in this case the fat from the blanchali. So at this point I'll turn it up just a little bit around medium. Throw some fresh garlic in there. I just smash it by hand. And you can kind of let it sit for a little second.

Just uh let it develop a crust. You want a little bit of crisp, but you still want a little bit of that meaty texture that comes with oyster mushrooms. You can notice that it develops the crust a little when it starts to stick a little bit. No worries. It'll lift after you uh after it develops a full crust.

As you can see here, uh a big one that a lot of people make is definitely oversulting mushrooms. Um they shrink quite a bit and uh if you overcook them and they shrink uh a lot of that saltiness will go directly inside the mushroom and you've pretty much botched the whole thing. So, you know, if it's your first time cooking mushrooms, take it easy on the salt and the seasoning. And maybe just try it, you know, to little to no salt. Uh just so you can get an idea of what you're working with.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's one of the biggest things that I've seen is just using too much seasoning um with mushrooms. It really only require just like a crack or a dash of pepper, pinch of salt, and you're good to go from there. Into recipes, we do the lion's mane powder. And uh at home, we'll add it into our smoothies.

We'll even use it to like add it into like our baking mixes and stuff like lion's mane pancakes or certain breads. Uh, and uh, you know, it's even great for the little ones. I mean, they don't even know that they're eating lion's mane pancakes. Exactly. I got a three-year-old at home and uh, we've tricked her into eating what she thought were chicken strips, but it was really King Trumpet breaded with lion's mane powder.

So, it's a little two for one there. That's awesome. And now she likes my chicken strips a little bit. Heat. Heat.

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