The world of mushroom growing
medium.com
medium.com
If only this were true. Sterile culture techniques only work for the subset of species that aren't obligately mycorrhizal (forming mutualisms with plants), parasitic, or that have other complex ecological requirements. Thus there are all kinds of delicious and interesting species we can't grow so easily, or at all.
But I have a lot of respect for home cultivators like this guy, who go beyond the grow kit stage. It's straightforward to culture and fruit many mushroom species in a properly equipped microbiology lab. But when you're in your kitchen, making do with "gloveboxes"[1] instead of HEPA laminar flow hoods, stovetop pressure cookers instead of autoclaves, and fridges and terrariums instead of programmable incubator units, things can get really challenging.
[1] http://www.instructables.com/id/Glove-bag-for-Mushroom-Growi...
https://courses.biology.washington.edu/biol440-spr16/folders...
Also the mycelium has a pleasant almond smell, so that's a nice whenever you go downstairs to check on them. The hardest part is figuring out what to tell the Petco employees when they ask what kind of cat you have.
But I've seen home cultivators who manage to do things like culture single spore isolates, breed and select dikaryons, clone wild specimens, and fruit very fussy species, all indoors with basic and improvised equipment. That deserves respect.
(1): http://www.amazon.com/Back-Roots-Organic-Mushroom-Mini/dp/B0...
However, I've learned, you can buy pre inoculated trees with some mycorrhizal fungi, or infect trees with parasitic fungi like the chaga mushroom [1] that has gained popularity in the biohacking community lately due the amazing concentration of anti-oxidants.
[0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism...
Once the mycelia is established, it's quite robust, at least relatively speaking. Un-colonized substrate, however, will readily harbor trichoderma, cobweb mold, etc. that will spread and kill your mushrooms.
On a commercial farm, you're typically not looking at the colonization phase. If you see actual fruiting bodies, these are mushrooms at the very end of the crop cycle where contamination is no longer a risk. The initial colonization is often done on pasteurized substrate in a clean environment. Strict sterility is neither economical nor required, but effort must be made to give the desired species ideal conditions for growth. And then, contamination is a significant risk for the farmer. Once the mushrooms have been cased, exposure to fresh air is an important pinning trigger and contamination is not an issue.
To the casual eye, you'd think he denied growing them. If you read carefully though, he did not deny it.
Riding a bicycle by the farms when they were changing over a grow house on a humid summer morning is an olfactory experience I won't forget.
something like this:
http://www.shii-take.de/irw_lang.454e47.list.4b41543333.html
or this
I tried it a year ago and it was really awesome, you just have to keep the substrate moist and wait about two weeks.
The phrase I've heard is that they're considered the world's most delicious mushroom, that occasionally kills you.
Eating large quantities of it is really not advisable, and you are recommended to drink lots of water afterwards.
As far as I know, and please do your research first if you wish to prepare it, you should clean them thoroughly, and throw away the water. Cooking has to be done properly by boiling twice to denaturate gyromitrin, and rinsing again.
http://www.dlc.fi/~marianna/gourmet/morel.htm
> Often they seem to think that their Nordic colleagues must be totally ignorant of the false morel's toxicity.
> The truth is, however, that everyone born in the Nordic countries knows — especially in Finland — that the false morel is lethally toxic if eaten raw or incorrectly processed, and that even inhaling its fumes can cause poisoning symptoms.
And yes, most mushroom related deaths [citation needed, I think I read about central Europe with some references to Poland] are related to the false morel, but due to misclassification (people mistake it with the morel and might eat it raw).
Edit: you're right there seems not to be a consensus...
> Note that these instructions only apply to the false morel fungi growing, picked or/and sold in Finland (Gyromitra esculenta) and do not apply to any false morels (Gyromitra esculenta) growing elsewhere in the world
Also, almost every region of Earth has some types of common mushrooms that are considered “useless” and never picked in the neighborhood region, despite being equally edible.