The Garden Thyme Podcast
A monthly podcast where we help you get down and dirty in your garden, with timely gardening tips, information about native plants, and more! The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. https://extension.umd.edu/. This institution is an equal opportunity provider.
The Garden Thyme Podcast
509 Mushrooms interview Jose Prieto-Figueroa
Hello Listener,
This month, we discuss mushrooms with our friend Jose Prieto-Figueroa of The Bay Mushroom. Jose and his wonderful wife, Bianca, have grown specialty mushrooms for over 10 years. Jose answers some of our mushroom questions, such as: what a fungus is, why we see them in the fall, how he grows them on his farm, and some tips for how to cook them.
We skipped our Native plant, bug, and tip of the month this month, but they will be back next month.
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The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Hosts are Mikaela Boley- Principal Agent Associate (Talbot County) for Horticulture; Rachel Rhodes- Senior Agent Associate for Horticulture (Queen Anne's County); and Emily Zobel- Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture (Dorchester County).
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Garden Thyme Podcast Transcript: S5:E09 - Mushrooms
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: Up Beat Music:
Emily
Hello, listener. Welcome to the University of Maryland extension presents the Garden Time podcast, where we talk about getting down and dirty in your garden. We're your hosts. I'm Emily.
Mikaela
I'm Mikaela.
Rachel
I'm Rachel.
Emily
And in this month's episode, we're joined by Jose Pedro Figuerello from the Bay Mushroom farm in Cambridge, Maryland, who's here to tell us all about mushrooms and how to grow them.
Mikaela
We're excited because we get a lot of questions about mushrooms, and I'm pretty sure none of us really know enough to be confident about it. So I'm very excited to learn more. You've already talked to us for, like, ten minutes this morning, and I'm learning more than I thought I would. So we're really glad to have you on.
Emily
We are going to do a quick disclaimer before we jump into this episode. We are not encouraging anyone to go out and forage and eat wild mushrooms. The process of identifying mushrooms is super complicated, and Jose is going to talk a little bit about that, hopefully for us. But you shouldn't consume mushrooms that you find in your yard or out in the woods unless you've properly identified them, because we do have several very toxic, poisonous species found in the mid Atlantic. Welcome to the podcast, Jose.
Jose
Thank you, Emily. I'm excited to be here.
Emily
We are so excited to have you on. So I think we're going to start you off with a really easy question, which is, what is a mushroom like? It's not a plant. It's not an animal. Like, what is it?
Jose
Glad you started. Easy, right? So, yeah, people. So in the culinary world, mushrooms is still under, like a vegetable, right? People use them to cook with other vegetables or as a meat substitute. But in reality is that mushrooms are, they have their own kingdom. They're not plants, they're not animals, but they have different features that from one side or for the other. But mushrooms belong. They're basically what we see and what we consume. The mushrooms is the fruiting body of a fungi. And fungi belongs to the fungi kingdom. And there's over 144,000 species of fungi. And then in the fungi kingdom, you see other things like molds, rust, yeast, and then there's two big divisions. One of them is called basidio micotae, and then ascomycota. And those are, they're considered a higher fungi. And those, especially basidiomycota, includes all the gill mushrooms. So all the chitakes portobello cremini type of mushrooms, that they're really valuable in the farming industry. And then on the ascomicotta, there's things that are really, really important, like something you call morels. You probably heard about it, and truffles. Yeah. There's two kind of species, and some of them, like. Like you mentioned before, are really toxic to animals, including humans.
Jose
There's a few species that are here in this region that could kill an adult in just one bite or if you consume one cup. So you have to be really, really careful.
Emily
Why do you find mushrooms in the fall?
Jose
Yeah, good question. So a lot of the species in this area here, for example, shiitakes lion's maid. So the mycelium will grow, but it will not fruit until the right conditions. And that temperatures from between fifties and sixties, they're ideal for motion to food. If it's too hot or too dry or if it's too wet, the micellar will still be there, fungi will be alive, but it would not, it's not the right conditions to food. When I grow in my growing room, I need to keep the temperatures right there between 55, 65. Some species, you can actually go a little higher, and they will be fine. But I've seen it myself, like, when you have blocks of, for example, king oysters. King oysters will colonize the bags, no problem, at 70 degrees. But I never seen fruit on this. I dropped the temperature to sixties or lower than that. They will stay there and not do absolutely anything until temperatures go down. So I think that's what the reason that temperature range that we see quite often in the fall is, like, ideal for. For fruiting.
Emily
Now, Jose, you've said mycelium a few times. Can you define that for our listeners who may not know anything about fungus?
Jose
So the mycelium is the body of the fungi, right? So think about it like, the spores will be the equivalent of like, a seed, right? So when a seed germinates, it creates a plant. So the mycelium is the structure that is touching the fungi, and it spreads, consuming the substrate. If you find a piece of wood that is rotting away and you cut it open, you see that cotton structure like that is the fungi that grow. When you see the fruit, the mushrooms is actually the fruiting body of that. If you get a piece of the mushroom, if you put it on a agar plate, for example, you can actually grow the mycelium from the mushroom, which is kind of neat. So I go back and forward.
Emily
And.
Mikaela
Now you and your wife own the bay mushroom. What sort of mushrooms are you farming?
Jose
So I started in 2001 when I was back in college. There's doctor, Julia Minnucci. She was a professor of plant pathology at the University of Puerto Rico, and she had a project where she was trying to find uses for the sugarcane residue. So in Puerto Rico, there was a big industry. And by the way, I went to University of Puerto Rico to study agriculture, and we used to have a huge industry of sugarcane. So the sugarcane, once it's cut and it's pressed, there's all this residue left over that, you know, nobody knew what to do with it. It was just basically just like, you know, like corn stalks, like, just piling away. And people were trying to do composting, burning it. But there was this idea of, what can we do that farmers could do? Use it to make some extra income. So she had this project to grow oyster bushyron on this residue, and it was on sugarcane residue and also coffee beans residue. So we also have a good big size coffee industry. And once the holes are taken away from the coffee beans, nobody knew what to do with that. So it was just piles and piles of this stuff.
Jose
So she did a research using these byproducts to grow oyster mushroom, and it was very successful. When I talked to her, I was just in love with this thing. So it's just like, you get something that is basically garbage, that it's just running away, just taking room, and then you can turn into food. Not only food, but, like, really, really good food. Because I love mushrooms all the time, and this was the best mushroom I could ever. That I ever had. The other thing is that it was kind of cool. It was a really low budget project. So the whole idea was to develop a technology that would be very accessible to farmers, that it would not cost that much to get into, but then you can make an extra income design. So I started doing that with her, and then I just kept going, you know, with my life, just working on other things. But I always had that thing on my back, and I did it a few times as a hobby, and people liked it. And then I did it a few more times, and I was working with a private company, a seed company, and I brought some mushrooms to share with my friends, and they were like, oh, my God, can you give me more next week?
Jose
And I was like, okay. I said, these are really good. Can you sell me some? It's like, okay, right, whatever. So I did a few batches, and I thought, okay, you know, maybe I'll sell a few. But I was selling out all the time, and I thought, well, maybe there's something in it. So in 2010, actually, it was 2012, because it was before my son was born. I started doing it and selling at the farmers market. We sold out, like, in 3 hours, and then next week, the same thing and more and more and more. So I started adding a few other pieces. So we started with oyster mushroom, then we switched. We added shiitake mushrooms. Now we are up to five different species. So we have shiitake oyster, maitake, king oysters, and lion's mane.
Mikaela
Lion's mane is highly sought after.
Rachel
It is. It's a prized commodity in mushroom foraging world.
Jose
Yes. And funny story, when I, the first time I grew a lion's mane, I took them to the farmer's market. Nobody wanted it. They were like, what is that thing that looks so scary now? It's the first thing to sell out.
Mikaela
I think if people figure out what it is, they go really quickly.
Jose
Yeah. There have been a lot of information out there about their beneficial properties. I think John Hopkins is doing a research right now on Lion's mate to treat different problems with brain injuries or brain diseases. And so the word is out, and people are, you know, they're trying it, they like it. Lion's way is one of the cool mushroom because it looks kind of weird beginning, but once you try, it's completely different what people think, and they're delicious. If you cook it properly, that's excellent.
Mikaela
And now you're mentioning you guys are growing it using a substrate and you're actually farming it. But how do mushrooms grow in nature? How are you finding them in nature? And what kind of substrate would they be growing on?
Jose
So mushrooms, they could be at least three different ways that you can find it. So the majority of the mushrooms, at least the ones that I grow, they feed on decaying wood or organic matter. So they're basically the ones who clean the forest. So once the tree die and they start decaying, the fungi, which is what produced the fruit, which is the mushroom it colonized, this wood or trees are dead, and they start decomposing it. And at some point, when the conditions are proper, it will start fruiting, so they can release the spores and the cycle continues. So that's one way that mushrooms grow in the wild, just by decaying organic matter and wood trees. Another way is some mushrooms are parasitic. So, for example, linos may actually grow parasites of some trees. So the tree will be alive, but you see the moisture growing from there. Chaga is another moisture that is considered to be a parasite of trees. But the fruit, you can harvest it, and it's not harmful for anybody. As a matter of fact, it's very beneficial, but it grows on living trees, not dead trees. And then the other way is as a mycorrhizal.
Jose
So it's where the fungi live in a beneficial relationship with other plants or trees. In this case, you got the truffles or one morels, a few others that are very, very important as a food. I forgot to mention something. Another parasitic mushroom that is pretty cool is called cordyceps. And you've probably seen it. It's one of the, what do they call it? Ant zombie mushroom.
Emily
Yeah. I think we've talked about them before on the podcast, but tell us more about them because they are very cool.
Jose
Yeah. Cordyceps, it had developed for many, many thousands of years, and some species of strains of cortisol will parasite ants, and it will actually grow inside and control the ants, and it will actually make the antennae go to places where they have moisture that survived the better conditions. It's very specific to ants and other insects, but then they're used in medicine right now. There's a lot of research of the different medicinal properties so humans can consume and they're not going to get, you know, soapy like, like in the movies. Right. That's not the same thing.
Emily
Or what is the zombie show on HBO is based on that idea.
Mikaela
Is it this?
Jose
Yeah, this is us. Yes.
Rachel
Yeah, I don't watch zombie shows.
Emily
No, no.
Mikaela
Boy.
Jose
Now this is one of the coolest zombies because it's apparently in the story is that Cordyceps kind of change and start doing the same thing it does to the insect, to humans. So it's very, very likely that something like that will happen. But it's kind of cool, too.
Emily
Yeah, no, Rachel doesn't do it. Rachel's here for like, the cute little happy mushrooms, but not the scary mushrooms.
Rachel
Oh, yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's me. Like the fairy of the woodland creatures.
Emily
Yeah, yeah.
Jose
Right.
Rachel
Yes. Like, if Beatrice Potter could draw a mushroom with a little toad on it, that's what I would be here for.
Emily
Nice.
Rachel
Yeah.
Emily
So you talked a little bit about mushrooms and gills and stuff like that. What sort of characteristics would you look at a mushroom if you were trying to identify it? And again, we're not necessarily promoting identifying for consumption until you know what you are doing. But if people, for instance, found a mushroom out in the woods and they had a guide or just wanted to try to figure out, like, oh, what type of mushroom is this? What, what are some key characteristics they should look at?
Jose
Right. So going out and identifying mushrooms is a really. It's a long process, so some people say. I've been told. A few people tell me, oh, well, if it grows on the bark of the tree, it's fine to eat, and if not, it's not. Well, unfortunately, there's nothing like that that you can be okay if it does this, safe. If it doesn't, it's not. There's, like hundreds of thousands of species of different fungi. And unfortunately, there's a lot of mushrooms that look alike, that some of them are fine, they're. They're edible, and some of the other ones are that they look very much alike, they're not. So what I tell people is that it's good to go and practice and learn as much as you can and start practicing, because what typically people do to identify motion, you need to look at the different characteristics. Like, you know, does it have gills? Does it not have gills? And gills are the structures that are underneath the cap where the spores go. So if you look at mushrooms underneath, right? You see this, all these gills. It's like a little accordion, right? So the spores are in between those gills.
Jose
And some mushrooms have gills, some are not. And depending on the size of the way they're shaped, that's one thing to look for. Any characteristics on the caps. If you have a cap, right? If it has ornaments, if it's the texture, the stem, does it have a veil or not? Sometimes when you cut them, some motion will stain in the different colors than others. But the first thing I will tell people is that you buy or just find an identification guide and just go out and start practicing. And then you can also check first what's available, what is typically in your area, especially what dangerous motions are in your area. So those are the first ones that you need to learn how to identify, because, like, there's a joke saying that all mushrooms are edible. Just some of them are edible once and not twice. So you have to be sure that if you, before you try eating something, it's recommended that you practice and you are able to identify, properly identify a mushroom at least three times. There are some mushrooms in the wild. They're pretty easy, or there's nothing dangerous that look like it.
Jose
Lion's mane would be one. It's very. There's nothing that looks like it, that it would cause you harm, and it's pretty easy to. To find and differentiate from other mushrooms. Morels is another mushroom that is pretty, very. Have very characteristic features that are a little bit easier to identify. Although there's a. There's another motion called fake morel that look a little bit like it. So a fake morel looks like a morel that is being stunned on, like. Like it deflated. I don't know. It has a similar color, a similar shape, but you can tell the difference. The only thing is that, and this is the reason why I say people had to practice before attempting eating any of the wild mushrooms. Depending on the stage of the fungi or the mushroom, depending on the time of the year, a mushroom could look different than others. So if you have a really young mushroom, it could look completely different when it's a lot older. And just to give you an idea, there's a couple of mushrooms that when they're older, they look like some of them that are dangerous. So maybe you're missing out. If you wait too long or if you get it too early, then you can get confused.
Jose
So, ideally, what you do is you go out, you look the spore prints. That's a different feature. You can look at what type of media is growing. Some of the motion will grow right there on trees. Some of them will grow more, liKe, on the GRound. One mushroom that is pretty easy to identify is chanterelles, but there's another mushroom called Jack O'Lantern mushroom. If you look at them, they have similar color, they have a similar appearance, the shape. But the Jack o lantern will grow more, like, in a cluster. And the Chantrells are a little bit more individual, so that's something to look up for. But it takes practice to identify these kind of features.
Mikaela
What's fascinating is the, like, hundreds of years, humans have done this trial and error to figure out what mushrooms not only, like, taste good, but what won't kill them or make them really sick.
Jose
Absolutely. We have to be very grateful of the first, right? Very first, humans will be like, hey, let me try. Let's see what happens. Right?
Mikaela
Like, how did someone come across something they found in the woods? I guess if you're desperate, you start eating something, and if you don't die, you just keep telling people about it.
Emily
Well, that always makes me think of, like, truffles, because aren't truffles fully underground? So I'm like, how did we even figure out that we could eat truffles? Yeah, they're not even above ground, so, like, someone was digging and was, hey, here's an edible rock.
Rachel
Or maybe it's somebody who just liked to eat rocks and figured out it.
Mikaela
Was, like, kind of soft. So they were like, well, maybe.
Rachel
Maybe I can eat this rock today.
Jose
Yeah, there's a lot of resources to find that you can study first before you go, even go out. What I tell people is if you find something, you know, just do the whole exercise. Just take a note. And at the beginning, it's just a practice just to learn how to do it, just to see the terminology, you know, if the caps have a different texture, you know, make notes about it. And as you practice, you will learn what features will identify better. So if you go outside and you just practice and practice, and don't ever eat anything that you're not 100% sure, it's not worth it.
Mikaela
I think what's helpful is to go out with somebody who might be experienced. Like, sometimes they will do mycology walks with people, or. What's nice about the Facebook universe is that there's groups that post pictures, and people can help crowdsource and identify. But I think there's probably no substitute for actually being in person and understanding what they look like, where they're growing, that whole thing.
Jose
Yeah, absolutely.
Rachel
I agree.
Jose
And there are apps that could give you a start. For some of you, if you get a good picture, you can just Google. It will give you an idea of where to start. But you should never trust 100% of the app. Oh, the app says it's this. Let's go for it. You always have to double check. Okay, so if it looks like a morale. Let me cut it open. Is it hollow in the center? Because the fake morel, when you cut it open, is different, you can start practicing doing spore crates because spores could be different colors from one species to the other. You know, if you see something that looks like a morale, but it's in the middle of the summer in a really hot place, that usually doesn't happen. So you have to know what you're looking for at what time of the year. They're more abundant than others, but it's cool. It's a nice hobby to have. It's to learn. There's a lot of resources online for free. There's mycology groups that sometimes they do. They go in the forest, and you got experts who talks, you know, just learn before you take that venture.
Emily
I'm going to be double safe, and I'm going to only eat mushrooms that I buy from my local mushroom grower at my farmer's market.
Rachel
Yes, 100%.
Emily
Markets are great places to look for local farmers like Jose who are growing specialty mushrooms as well.
Mikaela
And they're good at it, so that.
Emily
They'Re good at it, that makes it better.
Rachel
There's no guessing game, no absolutely.
Jose
That's. That's the good thing about growing, that you. You see everything from the very beginning, you know, when they're just the mycelium. Right. So, you know, if something's off, you can stop the process at some point if it's contaminated or something. But, you know. Okay. I started, basically, I started from the seeds, and I saw the fruit. So when I say I saw a shiitake, it is a shiitake. This is not gonna be strange. Yeah.
Emily
So, on that note, Jose, can you tell us a little bit more about how you grow mushrooms? I know that we kind of joke all the time that people think you have a cave in your backyard to grow them in, which I'm pretty sure we know that you don't because you're not as much as you want to be.
Jose
I would love to, but no.
Emily
Can you tell us a little bit more about how you go through this whole process of growing some of the mushrooms that you sell?
Jose
Yeah, absolutely. So we use a technique that we basically recreating the conditions of what the fungi will find in the forest. So we do everything indoors, and we use sawdust as a substrate. The fungi will colonize the sawdust a lot faster than if you did it on logs, and it's very consistent. So the process that starts preparing the substrate, and we use a mix of sawdust and different types of amendments, depending on the species. You can use wheat bran, you can use soybean holes, puffa. So depending on the species that you're growing and your conditions, you can create your own mixture of substrate. Then that substrate has to be sterilized or pasteurized. So, basically, what you're doing is you're preparing the mixture, and then you're killing every single. As much as you can of any other microorganism that could be in that. So you're preparing, like, a perfect seed bed for your fungi. So then you take the substrate, and what we've used is some plastic bags that holds, in my case, the one that I used, they hold, like, five pounds of substrate, and they have a filter to let air exchange. So we fill these bags, and we make 300 of these bags a week.
Jose
We fill them up with a lot of bags. That's why you probably don't see me that often. I'm always working. 24. Sorry. Almost. So we filled out these bags with the substrate, and then we sterilized them using steam, basically, which is put them in a chamber that is connected to a steamer, and we just inject steam to the chamber until the center of the bags are 200 degrees, and then we keep them there for a couple of hours. That will basically kill almost everything that is in there. And then we move those bags to the lab, where we inoculate the bags with grains, and we use millets, and so these grains come at least we do it our own spawn, but a lot of times we just buy from a lab that have a much bigger capacity. So there's a couple labs that they. That's what they do. They take pure cultures, and they take a little piece, put it in the bag with the grains, and the mycelium will colonize all these grains, and then that's what you use to inoculate the sawdust bags. Right? So in front of a laminar flow hood, we open the bags with soft drink, and then we add the grains with the fungi, and then the fungi will start spreading into the substrate.
Jose
And depending on the species, it could take a month, it could take three months. For example, oysters, it will be fully colonized in about 2025 days. And then once the bags are fully colonized, you can move them to the growing room. The growing room will have a different set of conditions that will promote the fructification of the fungi. So our growing room will have relative humidity of, like, 90%, and depending on the species, will be at a specific temperature. So when we put the bags in the growing room, we make cuts. So we cut them the bags, we make little holes, or depending on the species, there's different ways to open the bags. And when the fungi sense that the oxygen is available, it will start producing the fruits from there. So if you make cuts on the bags and the mushroom, the pinning, which is the first stage of the fruit, will start coming out of the bags, and then days later, they're ready for harvest. That's a very simplified version of what we do.
Emily
That's really cool, though. And it's neat because it's one of those things that you can grow because you've got the setup kind of year round versus. Yes, the seasonality of ones. That would be, like outside growing.
Jose
Yes. So if you have the waste, we grow them indoors. So we cool it down in the summertime, we heat it up in the winter time, so we keep the temperature steady year round, and that will give us the capability to grow them no matter what the conditions are outside.
Rachel
That's a very interesting process.
Mikaela
Like, it's a different kind of farming, you know?
Jose
It is. Yeah, it is.
Rachel
I've been to the big facility near Elkton. I think it is the big mushroom grower, and it's a completely different process. Well, not completely different, but it. It's a much larger scale than what you're describing. And I think I like your scale a little bit better.
Jose
And it all depends on the species that you're growing, like the white bottom mushrooms or the portobello. So it's completely different than what you do in shiitakes or oysters. The white bottom mushrooms, they use and mix, the substrate is basically a mix of. It's like compost. Right? So, and they have huge beds, and. And they move everything conveyors. So it's a much more mechanized. And also they grow thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds of mushrooms a year. The specialty mushrooms, which is what I grow, is more hands on, like, more manual labor. So it's really different depending on the species that you grow. Now, growing mushrooms as a small scale, you can basically do everything by hand. So one person, a couple people, could grow from a few 1020 pounds a week to probably hundreds of pounds a week. And the equipment that you need, if you're creative, it doesn't have to be anything that's expensive. So that's the cool thing about it. There's another thing that is very important on your growing room. You need to. So when you put a lot of bags or mushroom, the CO2 will accumulate very, very high.
Jose
And if you have high levels of CO2 in the growing room, some of your species will grow kind of weird, kind of lanky. So you need to have access to fresh air coming in and then an exhaust to get all that CO2 out. So your room has to keep the right temperature, the right humidity, and had to have air exchange. So fresh air coming in and CO2 coming out. So it's a little bit of a, depending on how big you want to make it, right. When I started here, I have a rack, like a shelf rack in my garage, and I had covered it with plastic, and I have a humidifier inside and a fan on the other side. So it was like pushing fresh air one side. And when the humidifier was in a timer, so every half an hour will turn on or something, and it will produce, like, a mist to keep the moisture high. A lot of people start in their basement, but those are the three things that are important to have fresh air coming in, high humidity and temperature control.
Rachel
So, Jose, this really sounds like your own personal mad scientist lab, like, where you get to experiment and figure out what works and figure out what grows the something else, or it's like a science nerds dream.
Emily
It really is.
Jose
And here's the thing. Doesn't matter how many years you've been doing this, you will never get bored or you will never say, I know everything. Because almost every cycle, every time you feel the growing room, you need to keep track of temperature, humidity, but every time you add a new species, you have to start basically all over again. Because if you grow, I have somebody growing shiitakes in May, for example, they will have, depending on their equipment and growing room, they might have to do things a little bit different than me that I'm here, and I have a different setup. So every time you have to learn and learn for every species and for every season that you have, I have sensors on my growing room, and I keep looking at them almost all the time. And you have to know your humidifier start running and your humidity went down or your CO2 levels went to the sky, it can ruin your whole crop. So it's not that it's difficult, but it's really, you need to have a lot of attention to details, and that makes it not boring at all. Like, it's just kind of cool.
Rachel
Well, I mean, like, that's the science. And fun in it is finding out what environment can do what when you're growing. And I think we all love that.
Jose
Yeah, it's not for everybody, but if you like to learn, oh, what if I do this? What if I do that? You know, it keeps you. It keeps your brain, like, working, which is one of the things that I like the most.
Emily
I guess our next question would be, you kind of talked about this on, like, a large scale, and then on the medium scale that you're doing, Jose. But what if I wanted to grow mushrooms at my house? Is there a reasonable way that US or listeners could grow just a handful of mushrooms to cook, run with our own dinners?
Jose
Yeah, absolutely. That's the good thing about it. But one of the easiest one to grow, and that's how it started, is oyster mushrooms, because oysters are of amazing to eat. Right. You can grow them in so many different types of substrates. I see people growing oyster mushrooms, paper, coffee grounds, straw, sawdust. So there's so many different ways that you can grow them cheap and easy. Of course, if you're doing something at your home and you have no experience, the easiest way to do it is some companies sell ready to fruit growing kits. So basically, it's what I do, and you can actually buy the bag at some point when it's already colonized. So you take it home, and the only thing you have to do is basically open the bag, following the instruction and providing the conditions for them to fruit, and then you can harvest your own mushroom. But something else that you can do, if you can buy, if you find the spawn, which is the bag with the grain already inoculated. Some species, like oysters, you can actually grow them outdoors. So you can make a litTle. If you find an area in your garden and you want to make a mix of straw and some other ingredients, you can actually make them outside.
Jose
And the only thing you have to find is a way to keep it from drying out. And it works. First time I grew mushroom, we did a huge pile of straw, and I think it was hay. And we inoculated with, with oyster mushroom, and we just had to go every couple days and get all wet. It's almost like I'm making a compost because that's basically what you're doing. And then about a month later, there were mushrooms everywhere. Just, it's kind of neat, but the easiest way to do it is just find a ready to fruit, you know, bag or kit, and, you know, you can make a fruit there. Once you harvest all the mushroom, you can use that bag to inoculate something in your backyard.
Mikaela
Is there places you should avoid, like buying the spores or the inoculant from or are, as long as they're, like a reputable source.
Jose
Yeah, so there's. There's many places I would not get it from, like, you know, somebody who's just doing it in the backyard. I got this. You know, I will get it for somebody who's, you know, there's some people in maine that that's what they do. That's their business. They're certified organic. They're, you know, they have all their infections done, and they grow either growing kids or they grow the spawn and they sell it. And the reason why you want to go with a company that has more experience is because they have all the tools to prevent contamination. They have the right equipment to sterilize the grains. Because the problem is when, let's say you plant a garden and there's so weeds in there, but you can actually weed the garden, bring it back. That's fine if you have bags with the inoculated, but they're contaminated with some mold, well, unfortunately, there's not much you can do about it. So if you buy grains from somebody who doesn't know what they're doing, the grains could come contaminated already. And if you spread it into the garden or something, you're not going to get what you want.
Jose
So having access to is ideal.
Mikaela
Awesome.
Rachel
All right, Jose, do you have a favorite way to cook mushrooms? You know, what's your favorite recipe?
Jose
So as you can imagine, in this house, we eat mushrooms, like, pretty much every day. One of my favorite, especially recently, one of my favorite mushrooms is maitake or Hannah the woods. And I tell you, if you never had a pizza with maitaki, it's just the best thing ever. And it's so simple. That's the thing that I love the most. Basically, you can take any pizza. If you make it yourself, that's even better. But you can have any pizza that you want and just take the maitake, and you just break it on top. You just spread it on top of the pizza, and then you put it in the oven. By the time it's done, it's gonna be the best. Also, my takis are really good on quiche. They're excellent on risotto. If you never had a risotto, like, a mushroom risotto with maitagi, it's gonna, it's gonna blow your mind. You gotta try that. It's amazing. Laiosmae is a nice mushroom to go with seafood with. My favorite way to cook it is with scallops. So you cut the lion's mane into slices about, what, like, a little bit less than half an inch, and then you fry them at the same time with the scallops.
Jose
And so the scallops will release some of that juices, and the lion's plan will pick it up, and it's just insane how good it is.
Rachel
And I can go, we're going to go to lunch.
Jose
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Mikaela
You guys are making me really hungry.
Rachel
Yeah.
Mikaela
Which is unusual, really, for me, the thing with mushrooms.
Jose
So I have a lot of people who comes to the farmers market that they're either they don't eat meat or they're trying to cut meat. So they use a lot of mushrooms to substitute meat. Or, you know, they're vegetarians, and they just would like to add something because the mushrooms not only add flavor, but they also add texture. So the king oyster is a mushroom that is really dense, and you can cut it really thin, or you can actually, like, shred it, put your seasoning, and you can make it taste or feel like pulled pork sandwich. You can make pulled pork sandwich with King oyster, and it's just insane how good it is. And I'm not kidding. It's like, I thought, oh, there's no way. Yes, it works really good. And, you know, if some people, they just don't want to eat meat, or some people don't. They can't eat meat. So mushrooms will do a good meat substitute if you want to.
Mikaela
In that same vein, I actually put in the chat box because I just found this recipe on outside magazine, which is crab cakes made of lion's mane with, like, a ramp tartar sauce, which ramp is a, is a wild onion. So it sounds really good. But I was, I said it's going to make Marylanders mad because it's not really a crab cake.
Jose
Exactly.
Rachel
I'm sorry, Michele, you're going too far.
Jose
It's a bold. Yeah, it's very bold to say you can make crab cakes in Maryland with lion's mane. But I tell you, you know, I love crab cakes. I love them. But I tell you, I had, we tried this once. I said a matter of fact, a couple of times, and they're really good. I'm not saying it's a substitute for Maryland crabs. Absolutely not.
Mikaela
But they should call them, like, mushroom cakes. They can't call them crab cakes. You can't call them crab cakes. Old bay mushroom cakes.
Emily
There we go. I like that, telling people not to eat crab cakes in Maryland. We'd like to continue living in the state, please. Angry mobs don't come for us.
Rachel
Yes, 100%. So do you, Michaela and Emily, do you have any favorite mushroom recipes?
Emily
I love a good, like, mushroom cream soup with stuff not necessarily, like, the canned versions. I'm spoiled because I live in the same town as Jose, so I've been enjoying Jose's mushrooms for years and years and years, and his freshly made mushroom soup is one of my favorite things in the fall when I can get it, because he sells out of it quick, because normally the stuff in the can is, like, super salty, but his stuff isn't. And then I can, like, add it with, like, chicken and rice with, like, some broccoli, and it's just very, like, homey and fall, like, well, not to.
Mikaela
I'm gonna get ostracized here.
Rachel
I know what you're gonna say.
Mikaela
I'm not big on mushrooms. Okay. But I'm actually feeling really inspired, inspired by this talk. I think I'm going to go out and try some different kinds, because I think the ones I normally run into are, you know, like, the button mushrooms you find in the grocery store, and they throw those on any pizza that you buy anywhere. And, like, I'm not big on that, but I do like a good portobello mushroom, especially when it's grilled as in, like, a sandwich. I actually really enjoy that. The local deli here makes a portobello mushroom sandwich that I really like because they put, like, a sweet onion jam on it, too. It's really good.
Rachel
Let's go there for our next meeting.
Mikaela
I think we should.
Emily
That sounds delicious.
Jose
So it's interesting that you mentioned about the texture. So. And I get that a lot from some people say, oh, you know, I tried mushrooms back in the day, and I didn't like the texture. The good thing is that there's so many different species commercially available that if you don't, let's say you try something and it was too chewy, for example. So you didn't like that there's so many other types of mushrooms that it could be cooked differently or they have a different texture type. So maybe you didn't like something. Don't let that stop you from trying other things. It's just a matter of switching from one species to the other one. Some people don't like cream of mushroom soup, but I tell you, if you make cream of mushroom soup with shiitake mushrooms, it goes from a five to a 15. You know, it's just amazing how the difference. Everything else the same, right. The same process to make it just change the mushroom, because shiitake has a nice texture, but it also has way more flavor. It just makes everything much better.
Emily
Are there any common mistakes or misunderstandings about mushrooms that you want to clear up?
Jose
Yes. So everybody think that I, like you, said that I grow mushrooms in a cave in the dark. You know, this whole dark or the mushroom grow on poop all the time. So. No, I mean, some do, but not all of them. Like, none of my mushrooms grow on any type of manure. There are some that do, but in funny thing, I keep my grow room with a lot of lights because we grow maitake and maitake. They love bright lights. Yeah. Everybody tell me, oh, you keep everything dark and humid? No, it's actually pretty bright there all the time. And no, I don't have a cave. I wish. But that's the other thing.
Emily
Hit me with some weird mushroom facts, Jose.
Rachel
We love weird facts.
Emily
We love some weird facts, so.
Jose
Me too. I'm gonna tell you. Weird. That's my alley right there. So in 2010, there was a paper written about they found fungi that would produce fruit underwater. Yes. Believe it or not.
Emily
Now, mushrooms related.
Jose
They need oxygen. How does. I was like, what? So the name is, and you can look it up, it's called the aquatic gill mushroom. And the name. And I'm sorry if I mispronounced this, but it's satirella aquatica, and it was found fruiting at the bottom of the river in Oregon. And apparently this. There's enough oxygen in this river or the water, like, saturated oxygen, I think it is, that there's enough for the mushroom to grow. And it's a tiny little thing mushroom. It's so cute like that. But it's fruits. Like, they have a stem and a cap and most likely produces pores, and it grows underwater. It's the only one. It was first published in 2010. I don't think they haven't seen it in any other part. Well, this is not documented. I have been seeing.
Rachel
Yeah, that's so cool.
Jose
It's pretty. And there's pictures of them, just so I think that's cool.
Emily
No, that's really neat.
Mikaela
I mean, I think it's been described to me there's more types of fungi that we would ever have names for or would ever be able to identify a name in our lifetime. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it's really cool.
Jose
And, you know, this told me that this is, you know, 2010, not that long ago. So, you know, what else is out there? What are the things we don't know about? You know, lion's mate is being researched to help with diseases, brain injuries and brain diseases. Maitake this. Who knows what else is out there? So I think mycology is one of the signs that it could go on and on. Who knows? I'm really excited, too. I'm really proud that when we started in 2012, there was a lot of people who said, oh, I never seen anything like that, or I never had it before. And they're like our customers every Saturday, after ten years, people who never try something, and now if I bring a new something new, they'll try it, too. And now their grandsons are trying it, granddaughters are trying it. So I think that's something. I'm very proud that somehow I brought something to the market, that people are trying it and they're liking it. It's cool.
Mikaela
Well, we're proud of you, too, Jose, because for listeners who don't know, you used to be part of the University of Maryland extension family, so to speak. And I just. I'm so glad you've gone and done so well with, with your own farming. And I have a renewed sense of wanting to try mushrooms now. So I appreciate that you brought that.
Emily
Okay, so if our listeners wanted to learn more about the bay mushroom or figure out where you're growing your mushrooms. Is there a good place online for them to learn more about your company?
Jose
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a website, so it's called thebaymushroom.com. you can find us on Facebook, the bay mushrooms on Instagram, a lot of pictures. You can find us at Anne Arundel County Farmers market Saturdays and Sundays. We do Cambridge market on Thursdays and we do Berlin farmers market on Sundays. But we did St. Michael farmers market and we did eastern, that's where we started in eastern farmers market many years ago. And we did St. Michael Farmers Market for many years. But what I tell you what's happening is the biggest market is, for me at least, the Annoraldo county farmers market and also some of the restaurants in Easton and their basically buy everything.
Mikaela
So that's great.
Jose
You know, we were, we were just running short on the market and we were a little bit short on staff, too. So we had to make decisions as I well, okay, we're planning to go eventually come back, you know, since we got more staff and we can grow, maybe have another growing room. I'd be always telling Emily that I got, I want to take her to work with me because we, you know, it's good that there's a lot more demand. And especially young people, they're cooking more. They're, you know, they're getting tired of the same old can of stuff and they want to, you try something new. You like that. You tell your friends and then, you know, you're coming with your friend. Now your friend comes with your mom. So suddenly we're selling out Lion's mane that nobody wanted to buy at the beginning.
Mikaela
Oh, that's so funny.
Jose
So that's cool.
Emily
I think that's all the questions we had. And we really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Jose
It's been great. I love it. Absolutely. This is a lot of fun.
Emily
If you'd like to learn more about growing mushrooms, check out the Cornell Small Farm specialty mushroom program on Cornell's website and we'll have a link to that in the show notes.
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Rachel
Well, thats all we have for this episode listener. We hope you enjoy it and will tune in next month for more gardening tips. If you have any garden related questions, please email us@umegardenpodcastmail.com or look us up on Facebook at Garden Time podcast that's Garden T H y M E. For more information about the University of Maryland extension and these topics, please check out the University of Maryland Extension Home and Garden Information center website at go umd.edu HGIc thanks for listening and have fun getting down and dirty in your garden.
The Garden Time podcast is a monthly podcast brought to you by the University of Maryland extension, Mikaela Boyle, Senior Agent Associate for Talbot County, Rachel Rhoads, Senior Agent Associate for Queens County, and Emily Zobel, Senior Agent Associate for Dorchester County
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