Mushrooms are my favorite ingredient to cook with. I love them in quiches, pasta, scrambles- the list goes on and on. If you’ve been reading my blog you have seen us grow oyster mushrooms with kits from the company Back to the Roots. As it turns out, our local mushroom seller The Mushroomery sells their own kits at the farmer’s market at People’s Co-op on Wednesdays. The Mushroomery is my favorite vendor as they carry a variety of mushrooms that are harder to find in grocery stores and they are around half the price (they supply some of the higher end shops in town) when purchased at their stand. They had a kit for shittake mushrooms consisting of a shittake mycelium-colonized block in a bag with their email for instructions. We bought it for ten dollars. The block seemed to be about half again as large as the larger kit we bought from Back to the Roots, and was a little less than half the price. My husband emailed for instructions and we got them right away. We weren’t as quick to start the growing as we ought to have been as we needed a supply run. To do it according to what it said we would need a tote with a lid and perlite on the bottom to set the block on. We were to spray the block with water in the morning and before bed and leave the lid covering the tote half way some place where there would be some ambient light. Some days passed before we got our things together but when we did we had several fully grown shittake mushrooms waiting in the bag already! (We didn’t have them on the counter for a full week before setting them up, just a few days) So we had a really nice scramble and set up our block. The mushrooms we got this next time were HUGE! Not several mushrooms like when you get a large cluster of oysters- but the size and price well makes up for that.
This was one of the mushrooms from when we opened the bag to set the block up. It was pretty large for a shittake- but it has nothing on the ones we would end up growing!
This is the block set up in our dining room on the floor by a window. Not too appetizing but until the mushrooms grow they never are!
These mushrooms are massive! I think the largest one could make a quiche on its own.
After we harvest these we will let the block dry out for about a week/ten days and then start over for another mushroom harvest.