Mushrooms as Food
Are Mushrooms Truly Magical: Part I
Stick with me over the next couple of weeks, as I share a three-part series (four if you count last week’s introduction) to the world of mushrooms and fungi, their delicious contribution to cuisine, medicine and even material science. We’ll learn together about all their applications, including industrial, construction, art and even space.
The bags of mushrooms are lined up in a row on a table in the kitchen. Two of the hunters are working meticulously sorting our bounty onto backing sheets, shaking loose moss and dirt.
A woman at the stove places a high-walled braising pan straddled over two lit burners. As the pan heats up, she drops an enormous yellow brick of butter–maybe a kilo– into the pan. It hisses and sputters as it slides across the heated surface. Another woman–one of the sorters–comes to the stove and drops handfuls of mushrooms into the pan now flooded with bubbling, melted butter. There is no fan over the stove, and as moisture evaporates from the pan, it billows into the room, heavy with scent of the delectable marriage of fungi and butter browning taking place.
Our mushroom captain, who’s name I’ve forgotten so let’s still call him Jacques, has already opened a bottle of cognac, pouring glasses for the spectators. Two stand by the only window, smoking cigarettes, and blowing thick blue clouds out into the afternoon chill. Everyone’s faces are flush from the brisk autumn foray and the ample warmth of the kitchen. The conversation is light and boisterous, in a casual French that is way too rapid and colloquial for me to comprehend. The joy, the pleasant banter, the cooking smells lull me into a stupor, and I sway back and forth like an eager child waiting for my dessert. This cave-like country kitchen is the only place I want to be in the whole world.
The first round of mushrooms has all but melted, leaving room for yet more handfuls. Bag after bag of wild chanterelles, black trumpets, and even a rogue hedgehog mushroom disappear into the pan–handful, sizzle, stir, rest; handful, sizzle, stir, rest. Time slows down as the ladies continue their work. One of the other hunters leaves the kitchen to find a deck of cards. When all the mushrooms have been sweated, browned and rendered, they look remarkably like the forest floor we found them on. Finally, the fire is turned off. The pan is covered with a sheet of parchment, and a small frying pan is placed on top for weight. The squeaky hinge of the oven door makes me stir in my seat, and the entire creation disappears into the oven.
It seems uncomfortably quiet now that the cooking is done. Jacques appears next to the range with two rather full glasses of cognac. Each cook thanks him with their eyes, and reaches for their reward.
“What did you think of your first mushroom hunt,” Jacques asks me with his black mischievous eyes, laughing and slapping me on the back, an unlit cigarette dangling precariously from the side of his mouth. “Wait until you taste the terrine de champignons.”
Mushrooms as Food
In my humble opinion, mushrooms are the closest thing to ambrosia, the food of the Gods. Revered since ancient times for their culinary allure and appeal, fungi as food has evolved over the ages from wild foraging to a sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar industry. I tend to be open minded about food, but when people tell me they don’t like mushrooms, I’m at a loss. I can’t hide my incredulity. Are you fucking crazy? Sorry…That’s rude. What’s fucking wrong with you.
Humans have probably been eating mushrooms since before they were walking upright. There are depictions of mushrooms in cave paintings and rock art. Fungal spores have been found in archaeological sites. And no wonder, as a food source, they are full of essential B and D vitamins, protein, amino acids, and antioxidants. It’s no wonder so many folks call them a superfood. Fungi is magic.
Foraging
With my Provencal mushroom hunting experience still fresh, I moved back to Los Angeles in 2006. Like many parts of the US, California has a number of mycology societies that regularly meet to forage and identify mushrooms, including the local Los Angeles Mycological Society (LAMS), which meets monthly when mushrooms are in season (Oct-May). Unfortunately, I found it hard to jump into the fungi foraging scene. I did several guided tours, but we only found inedible mushrooms. And when I inquired about edible fungi, folks were cagey about specifics.
“People will show you mushrooms, but people won’t be very forthcoming about where they got them,” says Steven Pencall of LAMS. “I have some spots I only show certain members of my own family.”
I was starting to wonder if I would ever experience the thrill of the hunt like I did in the Luberon? And then I got my biggest mycological break.
In 2020, we had a very wet winter in Southern California. A major road in town had just been re-landscaped. The fresh mulch made for a perfect substrate, and the rain had awakened long-dormant spores. The result was magical. A forest of the prized morel (Morchella esculenta) sprung up like little Easter Island sculptures pushing up between the ground cover. They were everywhere.
Farming Fungi
Foraging for fungi is fun, but it’s time consuming, and not always successful. So it’s no wonder that human beings finally figured out how to farm mushrooms. Called myciculture, mushroom cultivation is trickier than other agricultural practices, which is probably why it took longer to be adopted. There are only 33 species of easily cultivated mushrooms out of thousands found in the wild.
There are ample oral traditions that confirm native communities “tended” to edible and useful organisms well before commercial agriculture. The fantastic book Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson gives a peek into these practices. Early cultivators of mushrooms might have resembled the Miwok people of the California Sierras. They knew to leave mycelium in place. They fell or preserved downed logs for fertile substrate. They discouraged over-harvesting any one batch. They even burned the land to encourage some fungi to flourish.
But the first written evidence of mycological cultivation was the Chinese. They started growing shiitake mushrooms (Lentinus edodes) sometime after 300 BCE. Europes relied upon foraging for much longer, only unlocking cultivation in France the 1600s with the white button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus). The United States was even more delayed, waiting until the late nineteenth century to commercially produce button mushrooms in North America.
But that doesn’t seem to have hurt the mushroom market. Myciculture is nearly a $50 billion industry. Shiitake mushrooms are the most popular, making up 22% of the market, followed by Oyster, Button, Wood Ear, Enoki and Maitake.1 What about portobellos and creminis you ask? It turns out, they are simply more mature versions of the white button mushrooms. When Agaricus bisporus is an adolescent, it’s called a cremini; the adults, portobello.
Factories
Some fungi are not only delicious, but they could also be turned into food factories. This process, known as microbial fermentation, occurs when fungi are paired with other edibles to help preserve, make them more palatable, or nutritious, or just more enjoyable. Yeasts are fungi, and they “eat” one material or food (often a high energy sugar), and then “excrete” a second more desirable compound through biochemistry. It may sound off putting, but we’re all very familiar with this process when adding yeast to bread dough, (resulting in leavening) or beer (alcohol and carbonation). Fungi are also responsible for soy sauce, cheese, and kombucha.
In the 20th century, innovative minds dialed in the process even further. In 1939, the chemical company Pfizer, used fungi to produce citric acid, an important food additive and preservative. Before that, citric acid was extracted from–surprise–citrus fruits, but the process was inefficient and costly. Pfizer discovered that certain strains of Aspergillus niger could efficiently convert sugar into citric acid through fermentation. Yet again, fungi changed the way we make food.
Today, there are many commercial applications of microbial fermentation. Fungi and produce vitamins, including B2 (riboflavin) and B12. They enhance probiotics in dairy products like yogurt and kefir. They pickle things like sauerkraut and kimchi. And they make soy beans more digestible in the form of tempeh and miso. Fungi are everywhere in our grocery store isles and on our dinner tables.
Fake Meat
But what about eating the mycelium directly? If a portobello mushroom burger is the equivalent of eating a fungus apple, could we also eat the bark? It turns out, Whole Foods thinks so.
Fungi as an alternative protein is already a booming industry. With the explosion of veganism in the last decade, there are big dollars at steak–pun intended. Called mycoprotein, these protein substitutes are made from mycelium rather than mushrooms. Grown in a lab, the mycelium is manipulated to grow in ways that mimic the texture and shape of animal based proteins. The results are plentiful: mycelium bacon, carne asada, chicken cutlets, and even yogurt. And the complex nutritional value–mostly amino acids–lacking in other fake meat, are plentiful in mycoproteins. The three things going for mycelium meat are that they aren’t reliant on monoculture corn or soy, they tend to have a very short ingredient list (mycelium, salt and spices), and–according to my cursory research–aren’t very energy intensive to produce. Feel free to use the comments to challenge any of these points. Remember, I’m a writer, not a scientist. But could this be the holy grail of sustainable food?
“I think there is probably a lot of hype,” my Mycologist friend and rockstar biologist, Rachel Linzer, PhD calibrates things for me. “But the argument is that you can get the amino acids, umami, and texture [from mycoproteins].” So how do they taste?
The Taste Test
Eat Meati and Nature’s Fynd are two national mycoprotein brands available at many upscale grocery stores, including Whole Foods and Sprouts (by the way, I don’t have an affiliation or sponsorship from any of these brands). Eat Meati’s has a carne asada product that looks a little like a Playskool steak, and it has an equally rubbery texture when raw. Although the color is not unpleasant, it’s disconcertingly artificial in appearance. In a frying pan with some cooking oil, things start to look and smell more meaty as the “steak” easily browns, just four minutes on each side.
Eat Meati’s chicken cutlet looks more like the real deal, both when raw and cooked. I have to admit that if I squinted my eyes, I wouldn’t have questioned what was cooking on the stove. After both cuts are sufficiently cool, I take them to the table to taste.
Despite its own green herb sauce and my ample seasoning, the carne asada tastes bland and dry, but vaguely meaty. Cutting it with a knife proved difficult. It appeared to tear more than slice, like wet cardboard. Along with the texture, there is a distinct cardboard aftertaste. I’m reminded of when I used to eat board books as a little kid. The chicken is much less foreign in texture and flavor than the real thing. Still a bit papery, it better resembles very dry, overcooked chicken breast.
When both products were blindly offered to friends, they acknowledged it wasn’t beef or chicken, but asked “what kind of meat is this?” When I explained it’s actually mushrooms, they all agreed, “that’s not that bad.”
Nature’s Fynd Breakfast Patties were even more convincing. They resembled very lean turkey sausage in appearance and texture. Seasoning was spot on as well, and I found myself going back for seconds. This was plausible breakfast food. But the breakfast patties had a voluminous ingredient list contained soy, seed oil, methylcellulose, yeast extract, and hydrolyzed rice protein, as well as several other preservatives and seasonings.
The Eat Meati products were about $20/lb. and the breakfast patties almost $9/lb. This isn’t outrageous, but it does make them almost double the price of their grocery store real meat competitors. Not a slam dunk.
Overall, I have to say I was impressed. If mycelium-based proteins continue to improve, I could see how they might be part of a multi-pronged solution to food diversity, non-animal proteins, and sustainable calories. They may even be a solution for off-world foods in a multi planet future. But if the meatiest of the products rely on mono-cropped soy and corn, I still feel my enlightened omnivore warning flags going off.
Are Mushrooms as Food Truly Magical?
Mushrooms stand out as one of the oldest and most intriguing food sources known to humankind. From the caves of prehistory to the temples of Egypt, the opulent banquets of Greece and Rome, and the sacred meals of China, mushrooms have long been celebrated as culinary treasures. From foraging to food factories, to fake meat, their role as food continues to evolve. And as we delve deeper into the realm of mycology, we are only scratching the surface of the myriad innovative possibilities. We may yet unlock a rich tapestry of flavors, textures, and nutritional benefits that make mushrooms an even greater part of our pantries, freezers, and frying pans. Until then, I will continue to hunt, I will continue to savor, and I will continue to embrace the magic of mushrooms as food.
I sip my cognac and it warms my empty stomach. The earthy, meaty odor in the kitchen is now so potent, it’s almost erotic. Suddenly, I am craving one of Jacques’ cigarettes. I take another sip from my glass trying to remember how to ask for a smoke in French.
The almost empty cognac bottle goes back around the room. Jacques begins to fill my glass, but the woman at the stove, playfully admonishes him. Snatching the bottle, she opens the oven door and pours the remaining spirit into the baking mushroom pie.
I take a seat as the cognac really starts to kick in. Someone opens a bottle of Pastis, and I can smell the licorice. The talking gets louder. Someone has found the deck of cards and motions for me to join the game. I’m luxuriating in the mental fuzz created by the drink, and decline the invitation, choosing to sit close by and watch. Even after a few hands I don’t recognize the game.
Suddenly, a grating alarm goes off, the analog type my grandmother used to boil eggs, and I am startled out of my relaxed stupor. A small cheer goes up. The card game abruptly ends, and people start setting the table. The oven door squeaks open again, and the smell is so intensely divine that my stomach twists further into notes. I am desperately hungry.
The pan is brought to the table. A deft hand portions the giant lasagna of fungi. I expectantly wait as small squares are put onto plates. I can catch the familiar shape of a stem here, a cap there, but most of the mushrooms have transformed into a moist and shiny black cake.
I sit at a plate and look around, wanting to wait until everyone has received their portion, but the cognac has made me impatient. I scoop up the small steaming square in front of me and take a huge bite before anyone can offer me a fork. The silky, buttery, woodsy goodness melts in my mouth with flavors of nuts, moist wood, a hint of apricot, and game meat. I get a velvety, rounded mouth feel from the touch of brandy added just at the end. My eyes close, I audibly groan with satisfaction. Food of the gods indeed.
When my eyes open again, I’m staring at Jacques’ harsoot face, bright red with laughter, his beard filled with mushroom crumbs.
“Pa mal!” he roars as mushroom cake flies from his open mouth.
“Extraordinaire.” I replied.
Stick with me over the next couple of weeks, as I share a three-part series (four if you count last week’s introduction) to the world of mushrooms and fungi, their delicious contribution to cuisine, medicine and even material science. We’ll learn together about all their applications, including industrial, construction, art and even space.
https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/current-overview-of-mushroom-production-in-the-world#:~:text=China%20is%20the%20main%20producer%20of%20cultivated%2C%20edible%20mushrooms.
I’m hungry reading part 1!