Anyone mess with growing mushrooms? Looking at adding it to the ever growing list of random things I've tried lol. Is it easier to start indoors with the fancy grow tents and stuff or is it pretty easy to just try outs side with some long and the little spoor plug things ?

Also for y'all who eat mushrooms a lot ( I don't but never really had anything past the ones you get in the can or come with a steak) what's a good one that acts pretty close to meat ? I've seen people talking about using certain ones and cooking then like steak and and apparently some are a pretty decent substitute and good if your trying to do weight loss.

Many chef's use Portabella's as a meat sub.

Last July, I inoculated around 35 or 40 truckloads of wood chips from tree trimmers (arborist chips) with winecap mycelium. In early May they were incredibly productive for just a few weeks. They put out literal hundreds of pounds of mushrooms.








I should get a great flush in the Fall. I wish the flushes were more spread out. Hundreds of pounds of mushrooms is too much at once. As the mycelium spreads, I suspect I may get thousands of pounds in a flush. They do break the wood chips into soil, which I need for my nursery. My partner had chips dumped in a more shady area at her house. We will inoculate that pile with mycelium from here. Being in the shade, I think the pile will flush longer.

Winecaps smell and taste like asparagus.

Keith

Keith I didnt know i could do my chip piles. But they are in full sun.

Edit apparently i forgot about the oyster mushrooms my wife started in straw last year.


Wolfdog there is no such thing as a meat substitute.

Matt, my piles are in sunlight. I have piles in front of the front barn on the left, by the road and on the hillside by the first barn on the right, behind the bee hive, if you remember where that is?

If you want a start, if you stop by again, I'll give you a 5 gallon bucket of mycelium. I should have enough by now to inoculate hundreds of piles of chips.

Winecaps will even grow on garden paths covered with wood chips.

Keith

Winecaps can get huge, well over a foot across. I think they are better when they first pop up, but the older ones taste okay. Pretty close to every spot I stuck parts of the spawn blocks, had mushrooms in May. I initially put out 20 pounds of spawn, in around 40 places. Most of the flushes were 3 to 4 foot wide, from just a handful, probably weighing less than 1/2 a pound, of spawn.

Keith

I was on a road trip with a friend. We stopped at a diner, I ordered a portabella burger. My buddy say "that sounds good, I'll have one too". When our lunch was served. First words out of his mouth after the first bite, " where's the beef"? We just chuckled ... Burger?? was still good.

Mushrooms aren't a substitute for meat, but they sure are good with meat!

A lifelike depiction of how big winecap mushrooms are compared to Wolfie.



Keith

There’s no substitute for meat. Mushrooms are filler.

Portabella mushrooms are pretty common and pretty easy to turn into something steak like.
I recommend grilling it (or baking it off), adding pico (or bruschetta), heat it all up, drain moisture, and drizzle with balsamic glaze, salt.

Also you should be trying oyster mushrooms in your gumbo if you haven't.

This. Pretty useless nutritionally, too, heavy on the liver, tend to hyperaccumulate heavy metals meaning you have to be sure that the spots where you collect them are safe, and some "edible" species are allergenic or can cause rare but weird and nasty adverse reactions.

We can't even digest the main structural protein of mushrooms (it's the same as cockroach wings). It comes out pretty much unchanged. Technically, maggots are the most edible and digestible part of mushrooms, for humans. So unless you really like the taste and texture, mushrooms are not worth bothering with as food. Sauteed morels, honey mushroom buttons pickled in spicy marinade and chanterelles in sour cream are pretty good, so are grilled portobello mushrooms and vareniki with potatoes and porcini, but pretending it's actual food is an "axe porrige" type of fallacy.

That is the opposite of everything I've ever read about consuming mushrooms.

Mushrooms have a lot of B vitamins, selenium, potassium, copper, zinc, riboflavin, niacin, and pantothenic acid. They can even have D vitamins if exposed to sunlight or ultraviolet light when they're growing. They are one of the best dietary sources of antioxidants such as ergothioneine and glutathione. And they contain good amounts of protein and fiber.

Yes, there's plenty of such information but a lot of it is doctored to suit the vegetarian and food supplement market agenda.

riboflavin, niacin and pantothenic acid are B vitamins.
As for selenium and other microelements, mushrooms do contain some of them (so do other foods), but there's the catch that I mentioned. Fungi have weird proteins/enzymatic systems that often require various relatively heavy atoms as their functional core, so they have this property of superaccumulation of certain elements, which I mentioned. If you collect mushrooms where there's lead contamination (former roadside, or a rotted down doorframe shedding lead paint flecks buried under the leaf litter), the plants there will have a level of contamination comparable to the soil, while many mushrooms will have 100+ x times the substrate contamination level. It's true for lead, caesium 137 and some other elements you generall do NOT want in your system. Fungi do accumulate copper, this is actually why most fungicides are copper-based, because fungi can't help accumulating it and overdose on it.
As for them containing "protein", the bulk of fungal protein is chitin. We can't digest it, we don't produce the enzymes for that nor does our normal symbiotic gut microbiota (some other mammals do), so it goes undigested, and if you overindulge, the wrong kind of bacteria in the gut get to it and begin rotting it down, causing intoxication. So in reasonable amounts, it acts as fiber substitute, sort of, but reality is you still need good plant fiber.
Some fungi do have antioxidant properties (but it's hard to assess the value of these substances as components of food, not as extracts in vitro on cell cultures), and certain species (wood-decaying mostly) also produce substances that seem to have certain antiinflammatory and antiviral properties, but the effect is probably marginal unless we're talking about extracts. And like I said, there's also the allergenic/autoimmune flareup/other adverse reactions part, especially when it comes to wild mushrooms, although some cultivated mushrooms pose a risk, too. I'm attaching a picture of my friend/colleague, a mycologist, who had a bowl of shiitake soup at a restaurant and ended up in a hospital with a case of flagellate dermatitis that shiitake causes randomly in some people. Ironically she's the head of a research lab that currently focuses on mushroom cultivation.

So, like I said, the nutritional value is pretty much limited to certain microelements and a little bit of vitamins. That doesn't mean I'm saying you shouldn't eat mushrooms, but they are definitely not a substitute for vegetables, meats, fish and dairy, not even close, and a lot of their health benefits are exaggerated.

Nothing replaces Prime Rib.

Grandpap retired from the largest button cap (?)
producer in the world. We ate them A LOT.
Maybe that's why I'm so toxic.

To what Guru said.
I found bulk chantarelles. Several of us ate lots.
One friend was hospitalized.
Toxin tests were negative (shrooms ok).
No one at the hospital could explain.

I think I will just have a usda approved hot dog.

This exactly. Love mushrooms but they'll never be mistaken for meat.

I'd listen to Tatiana....

Never was fond of mushrooms, granted usually just had the supermarket buttons and portobellos, but I find neither actually compliment anything...yeah I eat them cause Miss Daisy seems to think they're a food group, but if I never have another one that would be just fine, lol

I love mushrooms! I've been eating many different varieties all my life; chanterelles, morels, portobellos, chagas, lion's mane, reishi, oysters and others. I have mushrooms almost every day in an omelet and/or a salad. i've never had an adverse reaction.

I've read studies published by medical personnel that back up everything I've said in my post above.

I ain't about to stop eating them! LOL

I agree that mushrooms are not a replacement for meat or veggies but, IMO, they are a very healthy addition to any diet.