Indoor Fungus Farming

I may have mentioned before that despite being surrounded by agriculture and cattle ranches, we lived in a food desert.

The city outside of which we live is only 2000 people. The entire county is only 3000.

This puts our grocery store at the bottom of the list for food deliveries. The quality of the food isn't great to begin with, and the variety of food is just horrible.

We could drive a 2 hour round trip to a bigger city to find higher quality groceries, but we don't really have the time, energy, or gas money to do so.

The crops grown around here are alfalfa, cotton, and peanuts. One family grows melons, pumpkins, and squash. The rest of the community either has their own garden, drives the 2 his round trip, or suffers the slim pickings of our local grocery store.

I've been trying to eat fewer meat dishes and trying to get my husband to agree to eat fewer meat dishes. The hardest part of this is finding delicious substitutes.

The vegan community raves about mushrooms as a meat substitute. They are nutritious and delicious. I, for one, have loved mushrooms all of my adult life.

According to Healthline.com, oyster mushrooms pack a huge nutritional punch.

Unfortunately, the only mushrooms available to us from the grocery store are those white button mushrooms. They pretty much taste like slimy dirt. Even I don't like those, thigh I will eat them if that's all that's available.

I quickly realized if I wanted gourmet mushrooms, I would have to grow them myself.

So, I bought some mushroom kits and have started growing them.

I bought: pink oyster, blue oyster, yellow oyster, lion's mane, shiitake, chestnut mushrooms, and reishi mushroom mycelium.

The way mushrooms propagate themselves is to release a fine dust called spores. These spores find a friendly growing medium, substrate, and begin to colonize it.

A brick of colonized substrate turns white. The white is called mycelium.

Once the mycelium is Marie, tiny pins form. These are the fruit.

The conditions must be ideal for mushrooms to grow. Everything from temperature to humidity should be monitored. We live in a very dry area, so my husband and I made a humidity tent.

Inside the tent are the spray and grow kits we bought to see if we even liked growing mushrooms and liked their taste.

We bought Yellow, Pink, and Blue oyster mushrooms as well as Lion's mane mushroom growing kits. I bought two others, Reishi and Shiitake, in mycelium bricks.

As I mentioned already, we weren't sure we would even like the taste of these mushrooms. I hoped we did because they were growing like crazy. When they grow, they drop spores. The spores are how the mushrooms reproduce.

Ours have dropped a LOT of spores.

Apparently, most mushroom spores are black. The oyster mushroom spores may be the only mushroom to drop white spores.

We had put a trash bag over our table to protect it from moisture. When the mushrooms dropped their spores, that black trash bag turned nearly white.

So the mushrooms grew and matured. It was time to taste them.

The first mushrooms we tried were the pink oyster mushrooms.

I really didn't know what I was doing, so I decided to cook the mushrooms the same way I cook all my mushrooms. Sautee them in butter and garlic.

I diced the whole mushroom and cooked them.

Again, I didn't really know what I was doing. I sauteed them the way I would a Portobello mushroom or any kind of button mushroom. I don't like my mushrooms slimy, so I just let them brown a bit.

You can see in the photo that there are some thicker chunks. Those were from the stems. They were impossible to chew and I won't be cooking the stems again.

The mushrooms had a good flavor and I added them to some white sauce and served them over pasta. It was good but for the chunky stems.

The next mushrooms to mature were the yellow oysters. This time I searched on YouTube to see if I could find a good way to cook them. All of the recipes were basically the same as I had already used. The only difference was I needed to cook them a bit longer so they would be crispy.

According to the YouTube videos and articles I read, all of the yellow oyster mushroom, including the stem, is edible.

I harvested and cooked the yellows. This time, I sauteed them in butter alone and just added a dash of salt. I cooked them until they were crisp.

Gues what they tasted like. No, really. Guess. I'll wait.

I can't wait any longer!!

They tasted like BACON!!!!!

I couldn't stop eating them. My husband couldn't stop eating them. We stood there, in the kitchen, tasting the mushrooms over and over until they were gone. And then we were sad until the next harvest.

The pink oysters had a second fruiting just in time for the blue oysters to mature. I harvested both. This time I was careful to pull only the fleshy part of the pink oysters. No stem! The blue oysters were huge so I tore them into bite-sized pieces. Again, I sauteed them until they were crisp.

We kind of suspected they wouldn't taste like bacon. I have a cast-iron skillet in which I do most of my cooking. I just rinse it with hot water and give it a wipe with a towel to clean it. The last thing I had cooked in the skillet had been breakfast sausage. We thought probably the sausage had contributed to the bacon flavor.

This time, I gave the skillet a more thorough cleaning, using a soapy sponge to ensure no residual flavors. I don't like to use soap on the cast iron because I am convinced it takes away the non-stick aspect. It may all be in my head, though.

Once the mushrooms were crisp we tasted them.

THEY STILL TASTED LIKE BACON!!!!!!

Oh. My. God. We had a healthy substitute for bacon. This batch of mushrooms disappeared as quickly as the other batch.

Next to mature was the Lion's Mane mushroom. Lion's mane has been touted as the next superfood.

According to Healthoine.com "Research has found that lion’s mane may protect against dementia, reduce mild symptoms of anxiety and depression and help repair nerve damage.

It also has strong anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and immune-boosting abilities and been shown to lower the risk of heart disease, cancer, ulcers and diabetes in animals."

Follow the link above to see 9 benefits of Lion's Mane.

Lion's Mane is said to taste sweet, like crab. I decided to try a crab cake recipe using the mushroom instead of crab meat.

The mushroom shredded a lot like crab meat. I was very curious to find out how this would compare to an actual crab cake. I love seafood. Especially shellfish. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to anything that turns pink when cooked. This means, shrimp, lobster, crab, and crawdads (also called crayfish). If I could find a substitute that tastes similar I would be in hog heaven. Or crab heaven.

They tasted so much like a crab cake. My husband loved them. I even took some to a friend. She couldn't tell it was mushrooms.

I believe we have found some good substitutes for meat. If only they didn't take so long to grow! (The spray and grow kits only take about a week until the mushrooms reach full maturity)

I could happily eat mushrooms every day. Especially the ones that taste like bacon.