Foraging, Growing, and Cooking

Foraging, Growing, & Cooking Mushrooms

by Megan Lowder

Mushrooms are an excellent source of vitamin D, have wonderful health benefits, a decent shelf life and can be prepared in many ways. Mushrooms can be purchased from a local mushroom grower, grown with a kit or foraged in natural areas near you. Read on for tips about, foraging, growing and cooking mushrooms.

San Antonio’s natural areas offer a variety of edible mushrooms that can be foraged seasonally. It is important to note that when foraging for mushrooms, a proper identification must be made by an expert and, even then, should still be approached with caution. Facebook groups such as Texas Mushroom Identification are an excellent resource for learning to identify mushrooms. The admins of the group, such as Jared McRae, have years of experience in identifying mushrooms. Mushroom identification requires an abundance of knowledge that cannot be accomplished through research alone. It requires field experience as well. Through the mushroom walks held by Central Texas Mycology, participants can gain the knowledge and field experience it takes to learn about sustainable foraging and conservation of natural spaces that grow fungi. Andrew Denny and Jared McRae lead mushroom walks in San Antonio to teach the community how to identify wild mushrooms. Sam the Fungi and Angel Schatz lead mushroom walks in the San Marcos and Austin area as well. To find out about a mushroom walk near you, follow Central Texas Mycology and South Texas Seasonals on Facebook and Instagram.

To identify mushrooms, you need field notes and a set of good pictures. Proper ID requires information on where the mushroom is growing, what it is growing on, and detailed pictures of the mushroom. In order to get a proper identification of a mushroom you must learn to take a good picture of the mushroom. You will need pictures of the top, the side and most importantly the bottom of the mushroom. The Central Texas Mycology website offers more tips on how to capture the perfect picture to best help with identifying a mushroom.

Foraging instills a curiosity about plant and animal life that can only be tamed with research. Foragers become citizen scientists that become close observers of the ecosystem. There’s something about eating a plant or a fungus that you didn’t have to tend to that gets you looking at your ecosystem differently. From a forager’s perspective, a patch of weeds turns into an abundance of medicine that, without stewardship, will be suffocated by invasive species. Our natural areas promise a plethora of potential that is being paved over. At the rate of development San Antonio is experiencing, we may never know what native medicinal species

Mixed mushroom box with gold, pink, snow and gold oysters with special foraged chicken of the woods

were exterminated by strip malls and apartment buildings. Central Texas Mycology aims to bring awareness to these natural spaces by encouraging sustainable foraging of fungi and tackling mycophobia through education.

Foraging is an educational way to get outside and learn about your native ecosystem and the importance of conservation. Though, the safest way to ensure that you have a mushroom that is absolutely safe for consumption is to grow your own. Growing mushrooms at home requires you to purchase a kit or mix box. San Antonio’s local source for fresh mushrooms and mushroom kits is South Texas Seasonals in Elmendorf, just thirty minutes south of downtown San Antonio. They offer contactless home delivery and orders can be made through their social media. South Texas Seasonals offers a variety of kits including reishi and lion’s mane as well as gold, pink and Italian oysters. Kits are easy and fun to grow at home. Each kit comes with a specific set of instructions on how to properly fruit your mushroom kit. However, it is good to know what type of kit you should purchase based on the requirements the kits need to grow.

Some kits require less maintenance than others. Reishi kits grow in the bag so they require little maintenance. They just need ambient light and to remain at room temperature. Like all mushroom grow kits, reishi kits should not be exposed to any heat. Reishi kits are slow growers, while oysters and lion’s mane kits fruit fast. You can watch them grow bigger every day. The process you witness is fun, simple and educational. For the oyster or lion’s mane kits, simply cut an “x” shaped slip in the side of the bag, release the air and fold the top under the block. Place the kit slit side up into a clean plastic tote and mist two to three times daily. Make sure the indoor temperature is consistently at room temperature and you are regularly misting. In a week or two, you’ll be able to harvest and cook mushrooms in your own home. After harvesting, store in a paper bag in the refrigerator for one or two weeks. For best results, plan to prepare a dish after harvesting.

Second fruit can occur after the first harvest if you continue misting the slit regularly. After one or two fruits you can use the block as a spawn or toss it. To dispose of the block, simply crush the contents and bury the chunks in your garden. Keep an eye on the area where you disposed of the block. The substrate can continuously fruit in the garden, especially if it is buried in mulch or straw. Burying the crushed blocks also adds beneficial mycelium to your garden. The mycelium creates a network in the soil that allows plants to communicate and flourish. Prepping and cooking

mushrooms can take place in many ways. Joshua Schwencke from Gastronomy Live Events takes pride in preparing artistic dishes with ingredients that were harvested sustainably

From left to right Megan Lowder, Andrew Denny, Jared McRae, Angel Schatz, Sam the Fungi at the Chicken of the Woods walk

Andrew Denny from South Texas Seasonals taking pictures

Mushrooms add their own beautiful flavor to cooking while being an amazing vessel to hold onto fats, salts, and sweetness from other ingredients. Cooking mushrooms with a compound butter made from salted, good quality butter mixed with fresh herbs gives any culinary mushroom what it needs to carry that flavor through the rest of the dish. The trick is to not add bold, extremely strong flavors when cooking mushrooms as to not take away from their delicate, sweet and sometimes nutty flavor profile. The versatility of mushrooms serves many purposes when added to a dish. It can be marinated to substitute a meat dish or added to any dish to complement flavors. In fact, mushrooms make fantastic meat substitutes because of their dense, meaty texture and their ability to soak up flavor quickly. Many of the meat substitutes available are soy based products that contain a surplus of ingredients. Soy is farmed using unsustainable agriculture methods; it is a monoculture that requires the excessive use of herbicides and pesticides to be produced. Using mushrooms as a meat substitute is a more sustainable option because it uses waste products as substrate and can be produced locally and organically without the use of chemicals to facilitate growth.

Lion’s Mane mushroom kit from South Texas SeasonMushrooms can be prepared in many different ways. Often they are sauted or added to a soup, but they can also be candied, dehydrated, and powdered. Their versatility adds to their growing popularity in meat substitution culture. Angel Schatz, an active member of Central Texas Mycology, loves to forage and use mushrooms in her cooking. Preparing mushrooms and practicing sustainable cooking is about experimenting with local ingredients that are seasonally available. Angel suggests the best way to prepare mushrooms is to first blanch them by adding water to the hot pan. Mushrooms are porous and will absorb whatever you add first to the pan. Blanching mushrooms before cooking is helpful for all types of mushrooms because it breaks down the sugars. After blanching, the mushroom can be seasoned and marinated for a more intense flavor. After marinating, the mushroom can be sauted, baked, fried or dehydrated just as meat would. A recipe Angel has experimented with is oyster jerky. The oyster mushroom is blanched, seasoned and dehydrated to create a texture and taste similar to that of beef jerky. This makes for a wonderful trail snack while foraging.

Mushrooms have the ability to change our culture through the culture of our food. Foraging fuels an interest in mushroom identification that promotes a passion for protection of natural areas in our community. When awareness is brought to the potential of natural areas, it provokes questions about the sourcing of our food. Central Texas Mycology, South Texas Seasonals, and Gastronomy Live Events work together to educate the community and end mycophobia. Like the mycelium in our soil, mushrooms create a network of people that have found a purpose in advocating for a sustainable future through food. Making mushrooms into a meal that tastes amazing is what fuels the passion behind the purpose. Growing your own food and seeing weeds as medicine and fungus as food is what contributes to a cultural shift in our food system. What’s good for the planet, is good for the people.