Mushroom Safety

The Food Processing Center Author

03/27/2018 Added

211 Plays

Description

Mushrooms have been eaten for centuries and are a well-known part of the human diet worldwide. But just how much do you know about them? This lecture will provide an overview of mushroom identification and their potential for toxicity, with particular emphasis on species present in Nebraska.

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[00:00:05.190]I should've probably looked more closely
[00:00:08.490]at the schedule about what it says I'm supposed
[00:00:10.440]to talk about, 'cause I'm not quite talking about
[00:00:13.180]that so much.
[00:00:14.160]I'm going to touch on identification,
[00:00:16.290]and definitely toxicity as being issues of safety
[00:00:20.880]with mushrooms, but where those become critically important
[00:00:24.570]is if you're out gathering wild mushrooms.
[00:00:28.770]And in the farmer's market milieu, there's some of that,
[00:00:32.467]but there's probably more cultivation of mushrooms.
[00:00:37.750]Let's just plunge right in.
[00:00:39.100]So, there's mushrooms, there's wild mushrooms,
[00:00:44.340]and there's wild mushrooms.
[00:00:48.860]Agaricus bisporus, that's your portobello, your cremini,
[00:00:53.020]your button mushroom, they're all the same species.
[00:00:57.770]There's a brown variant and white variant.
[00:01:00.080]You let it grow longer for a portobello,
[00:01:02.450]you pick it earlier for a button mushroom,
[00:01:05.000]but that's what 9/10ths of the consuming public
[00:01:11.990]thinks of when they think of mushrooms.
[00:01:14.180]And that's why it always drives me crazy
[00:01:15.810]when someone will say, "no, I'm not interested
[00:01:19.270]"in a morele, I don't like mushrooms."
[00:01:21.000]To me, that's like saying, "no, I won't try this strawberry
[00:01:22.984]"because I don't like Brussels sprouts."
[00:01:25.580]Yeah, they're both plants: the morel and portobello
[00:01:28.890]are both mushrooms, but they're not closely related.
[00:01:33.605]Commercial sales of agaricus bisporus are 4.3 billion
[00:01:38.730]dollars worldwide annually.
[00:01:41.620]Definitely, if you're looking at the importance
[00:01:45.440]of a mushroom in commerce, that's going to be it.
[00:01:48.648]If you're looking at the farmer's market,
[00:01:50.725]probably agaricus isn't as important.
[00:01:53.650]We have one or two farms that I know of in Nebraska,
[00:01:57.420]but usually, if you're doing agaricus bisporus,
[00:02:00.630]this probably, and correct me if I'm wrong,
[00:02:03.080]probably isn't a side project.
[00:02:04.690]This is your full-time job, you're an agaricus farmer,
[00:02:07.600]that's what you're doing.
[00:02:10.310]The other mushrooms, pretty much anything on this list
[00:02:13.780]that isn't agaricus are treated by the consumers,
[00:02:19.260]by advertisers, as wild mushrooms.
[00:02:20.947]And most of them, that's kind of debatable.
[00:02:25.910]So shiitake, and these blue bars here just kind of
[00:02:29.220]reflect commercial sales.
[00:02:31.598]Agaricus is way off the scale, and then otherwise,
[00:02:34.534]you probably have more commercial sales of shiitake,
[00:02:37.550]then oyster, then Enokitake, then lion's mane,
[00:02:41.800]and some of the more specialized ones.
[00:02:45.090]So shiitake is kind of considered a wild mushroom,
[00:02:49.540]it is not wild, it is not native to the U.S.,
[00:02:53.180]I don't know of many, if any cases of it escaping
[00:02:56.330]and naturalizing.
[00:02:57.370]So shiitake is probably the most commonly farmed
[00:03:01.033]on a small to medium scale mushroom.
[00:03:04.334]And that's one that it takes some time,
[00:03:09.760]it takes some investment, but it's not that hard
[00:03:11.970]to get into.
[00:03:13.280]The main thing with shiitake, it's a fairly easy thing
[00:03:16.920]to farm, if you have a source of wood.
[00:03:20.630]So if you're managing a wood lot or something,
[00:03:23.680]and thinning out trees, and trimming trees,
[00:03:25.810]and have this wood you need to get rid of,
[00:03:28.291]then shiitake is often kind of a profitable side project
[00:03:32.850]to get into.
[00:03:34.290]The downside, you inoculate your log,
[00:03:37.430]and you've got, in most cases, a year until
[00:03:40.490]you can start harvesting, and then a few years
[00:03:42.873]that you can continue to harvest the crop.
[00:03:46.211]Next down the list, we have oyster mushrooms, and enokitake,
[00:03:50.153]I'll have pictures of all of these as we go through,
[00:03:53.300]and those are primarily cultivated,
[00:03:56.449]but they do occur wild in North America.
[00:03:59.960]You can find them in the woods.
[00:04:02.588]You can find a log that has oyster mushroom,
[00:04:07.020]and go back to that log at certain times after rains
[00:04:09.990]and count on it having oyster mushrooms for a while,
[00:04:12.814]but you don't know if you're gonna get there before
[00:04:14.980]the bugs get there.
[00:04:16.140]So most of the ones we see for sale in the markets
[00:04:20.770]or anywhere are cultivated.
[00:04:25.250]Lion's mane, hen of the woods, nameko, these are all
[00:04:28.060]wood rotting mushrooms, they're a little trickier
[00:04:30.320]to cultivate than some of the others,
[00:04:33.130]and so, I think the ones I have seen for sale in the stores,
[00:04:37.260]you'll see some of these in Whole Foods sometimes
[00:04:39.360]for instance, or in the co-ops, those are cultivated.
[00:04:43.934]But for people who just are mushroom enthusiasts,
[00:04:49.080]you're probably more likely to go out and find them
[00:04:51.310]then to cultivate them.
[00:04:55.460]But again, sales would be fairly unpredictable with those.
[00:04:59.770]Chanterelle, morel, lobster mushroom, porcini, truffle,
[00:05:03.790]those all have commercial trade,
[00:05:06.510]but they're almost exclusively wild-caught.
[00:05:10.140]And most of those, they have an obligate association
[00:05:14.660]with the roots of a living tree,
[00:05:16.300]so they're not very amenable to cultivation.
[00:05:19.920]Morel, there is some cultivation.
[00:05:22.414]There is patent in the U.S.,
[00:05:24.330]there's some efforts in China.
[00:05:27.110]I have not encountered cultivated morels in the market.
[00:05:30.870]From what I've heard from people who have,
[00:05:33.390]they don't have the same flavor as the wild ones,
[00:05:36.190]and we think that there is actually,
[00:05:38.440]probably some endosymbiotic bacterium that's contributing
[00:05:42.220]to the flavor of the wild morels.
[00:05:44.100]We know that's the case now with truffles,
[00:05:46.330]that there are other microbes that contribute
[00:05:48.926]to the flavor and the aroma.
[00:05:50.240]So those guys, if they're for sale,
[00:05:53.210]they're going to be wild-collected.
[00:05:55.910]Morel is probably the only one in Nebraska
[00:05:58.790]that we're going to see in any significant amount
[00:06:01.668]that you could even collect in quantity sufficient to sell.
[00:06:06.430]And then at the very bottom of the list,
[00:06:08.140]I'm just mentioning a few things that are edible mushrooms
[00:06:10.800]that you can find sometimes, but that I've never really
[00:06:13.640]seen any commercial sale of, but mushroom hunters like them.
[00:06:20.310]If we look at ease of production of these guys,
[00:06:22.840]that's kind of reflected by the diamond here,
[00:06:26.060]oysters, enokitake, some of the other wood decay fungi,
[00:06:30.550]are relatively easy.
[00:06:32.733]The thing is a lot of them aren't very picky.
[00:06:35.110]They break down plant matter,
[00:06:37.220]and in your best case scenario,
[00:06:39.820]like an oyster mushroom, it breaks down wood,
[00:06:44.760]it will break down paper, it can grown on sawdust,
[00:06:48.990]it can grow on straw.
[00:06:49.860]Some people grow them on coffee grounds,
[00:06:51.820]so a wide range of substances.
[00:06:54.940]They're not very finicky, and that makes them fairly easy
[00:06:57.390]to grow.
[00:06:59.731]There's a kit that I use in my classes
[00:07:01.289]with oyster mushrooms, it's the TP Oyster Kit,
[00:07:04.930]and what you do is you actually take a roll of toilet paper,
[00:07:08.190]you sterilize it by pouring boiling water over it,
[00:07:10.490]and then you just fill the center of that roll
[00:07:12.420]with the oyster mushroom spawn, and it grows through,
[00:07:14.740]and eats the toilet paper, and fruits on the outside.
[00:07:17.810]So that's very simple, straight forward.
[00:07:20.750]Shiitake pretty much wants wood or sawdust.
[00:07:25.290]It's not gonna be that happy if you give it to toilet paper.
[00:07:29.010]Some of the others have some pickier constraints.
[00:07:32.090]They take longer to fruit, maybe they'll grow on sawdust,
[00:07:35.860]but they have to have a cold cycle, or you have to cover
[00:07:39.740]them with a thick layer of sawdust to really stimulate
[00:07:44.390]the fruiting, so they can be done,
[00:07:47.054]but they're a little trickier.
[00:07:48.110]And then, again, your chanterelles, your morels,
[00:07:51.570]they're pretty much off the list.
[00:07:53.020]You're not gonna be cultivating those in most cases.
[00:07:55.866]So let's just look something some of the mushrooms.
[00:08:00.153]Here's agaricus bisporus, and again, I'm using
[00:08:03.760]the scientific name because it has about
[00:08:06.080]a dozen common names based on different shapes and sizes.
[00:08:10.270]When I first encountered mushrooms in my life,
[00:08:13.240]they were the canned things on pizza,
[00:08:15.865]and again, that's probably what 90% of Americans
[00:08:18.360]think of with mushrooms.
[00:08:20.660]These are grown in a different way than pretty much
[00:08:24.530]all of the others.
[00:08:25.590]All of the others are pretty much grown on a wood
[00:08:27.880]or cellulose-based substrate, there's a long tradition
[00:08:32.300]of growing agaricus on manure-based substrate
[00:08:35.273]with or without an add mixture of straw,
[00:08:38.334]and so this is really the only mushroom
[00:08:42.590]that's probably a big enough industry that FSMA
[00:08:47.710]comes into it, and the main place that FSMA is kind of
[00:08:49.420]focused so far is really on the safety of making sure
[00:08:53.520]that if you're using manure, that that is composted
[00:08:56.531]thoroughly enough that you're not gonna have any pathogens,
[00:08:59.580]and there's some work being done in Pennsylvania,
[00:09:02.910]which is sort of the headquarters of North American
[00:09:05.620]mushroom production, doing some validation studies
[00:09:09.210]to determine how long is safe for composting
[00:09:12.960]before you can go into these.
[00:09:15.320]A very high density of mushrooms are produced
[00:09:18.810]when they're going, and this is a domesticated species,
[00:09:22.073]so farming methods, again, there are tricks to it.
[00:09:28.750]It takes a little while to work them out,
[00:09:30.490]but they're pretty well-controlled,
[00:09:31.790]and reliable, and repeatable.
[00:09:36.290]Okay, here's shiitake, and we have it growing on the log,
[00:09:41.360]and then we also have just a bin that I photographed
[00:09:43.730]at the grocery store.
[00:09:45.647]So that's one fairly widespread commercially.
[00:09:49.430]You can get that, not all the time,
[00:09:52.810]but you can find that at Hy-Vee, you can find that
[00:09:55.209]at fairly ordinary grocery stores, as well as some
[00:09:58.870]of the more specialty places.
[00:10:02.960]After I'm done, I'm going to leave some of these catalogs
[00:10:06.190]out on the front desk if anyone wants them.
[00:10:08.530]This is from Field an Forest Products,
[00:10:10.870]and they're out of Wisconsin, they're one of the major
[00:10:14.880]mushroom spawn producers, so they have pretty much
[00:10:20.630]all of the mushrooms I'm talking about, except agaricus,
[00:10:22.880]but they have a wide variety of shiitakes.
[00:10:25.890]So they have shiitakes for cooler climates,
[00:10:28.772]warmer climates, earlier fruiting, easier cultivation.
[00:10:34.440]Just a wide range of different strains.
[00:10:38.887]And they sell the TP Oyster Kits if you want to inoculate
[00:10:41.583]toilet paper with your kids.
[00:10:42.416]Fun project.
[00:10:46.200]Here's the oyster mushrooms.
[00:10:47.690]They're kind of distinctive by the way the gills
[00:10:50.410]of the mushroom just kind of go down the stem,
[00:10:54.100]and the stem kind of curves, and is off-center.
[00:10:56.800]And here, we actually see some fruiting on that roll
[00:11:00.440]of toilet paper that is now completely covered
[00:11:02.410]with fungal fluff.
[00:11:07.070]When you're growing mushrooms, we talk about them
[00:11:09.770]coming in, they'll come one, or two, or three times
[00:11:13.620]off of a substrate, so we'll talk about
[00:11:16.067]the first and second flush.
[00:11:17.550]People get amused about that
[00:11:19.289]with the toilet paper cultivation.
[00:11:20.650]We're easily amused in the mushroom world.
[00:11:25.280]Enokitake, this is kind of a fun one.
[00:11:28.070]You may have seen this in the stores
[00:11:29.960]in its long, skinny, white form.
[00:11:32.930]If you encounter it in the wild, and you can,
[00:11:35.090]it's present in this state, you're going to see
[00:11:37.920]this very different form with a possibly slippery,
[00:11:41.408]shiny, brown cap, and a brown kind of fuzzy stem.
[00:11:44.849]And the difference between these two mushrooms,
[00:11:49.300]genetically they're the same, the difference
[00:11:50.890]is light exposure.
[00:11:52.760]So a mushroom, almost all mushrooms are very sensitive
[00:11:57.960]to light, and they're looking...
[00:11:59.890]We don't know how they look, but they are looking
[00:12:02.270]for a light signal to let them know that they are
[00:12:04.980]out of the wood, above the substrate,
[00:12:06.820]that they are somewhere that they can open up their cap,
[00:12:08.730]and their spores will be free to distribute.
[00:12:11.790]If they're in the dark, then the spores can't get out.
[00:12:15.350]So with this guy, it's being grown mostly in the dark
[00:12:20.270]with a pinprick light source at the very top.
[00:12:23.310]So that's making it grow very long, very narrow,
[00:12:26.620]do the white growth that we see in white asparagus
[00:12:30.740]is the same principle.
[00:12:33.027]Basically being grown in the dark.
[00:12:35.070]Caps will develop a little bit, because this thing
[00:12:37.408]has now been growing four or five inches,
[00:12:40.520]and it thinks, I might never get out there,
[00:12:42.070]I may as well do something,
[00:12:44.165]so there'll be a few gills, but it's not really designed
[00:12:47.410]for spore disbursal like the other one is.
[00:12:50.350]They're gonna taste pretty similar.
[00:12:53.427]This guy might have some textural differences
[00:12:56.070]because it's got the kind of fuzziness on the stalk,
[00:12:58.310]and the sliminess on the cap.
[00:13:00.371]I've never really seen wild-collected enokitake,
[00:13:05.570]but there it is.
[00:13:11.600]Other species that can be cultivated,
[00:13:13.907]the maitake, or hen of the woods, the one shown there
[00:13:17.770]that's the size of entire piece of newspaper
[00:13:19.860]was not cultivated, that was wild-collected.
[00:13:22.990]They tend to occur in the wild in the fall
[00:13:26.510]at the base of oak trees.
[00:13:29.680]Where they're not really a great thing for the oak tree,
[00:13:32.500]but they're a nice fungus, so they're a bonus prize.
[00:13:36.440]The lion's mane here, I actually had a friend
[00:13:39.410]who was cultivating oyster mushrooms
[00:13:41.080]with a toilet paper kit, and growing lion's mane
[00:13:42.851]at the same time, and the lion's mane escaped
[00:13:45.500]and invaded the oyster mushroom's property,
[00:13:47.630]so you've got these kind of fuzzy pompoms over here,
[00:13:50.850]and that's the lion's mane.
[00:13:54.560]Reishi is not an edible mushroom.
[00:13:58.820]You don't eat it.
[00:14:00.707]It's not a poisonous mushroom, it's considered
[00:14:01.920]a medicinal mushroom.
[00:14:03.750]So this one is grown, and then usually infused
[00:14:06.969]into a tea, and it's considered
[00:14:09.720]to have anti-tumor properties, antioxidant properties,
[00:14:13.566]longevity properties.
[00:14:15.790]I have had reishi tea, it's if you can imagine
[00:14:18.480]steeping corrugated cardboard in water,
[00:14:20.430]it's almost exactly that flavor
[00:14:22.590](laughs)
[00:14:24.510]but there it is.
[00:14:25.780]People also grow it just for the appearance,
[00:14:28.150]the attractiveness of it.
[00:14:29.950]And this is one also where you can control the shape
[00:14:32.430]based on the light.
[00:14:33.290]You can do a pinprick light source,
[00:14:34.780]and it'll grow kind of a more antler-shaped,
[00:14:37.662]long, narrow form.
[00:14:40.291]Nameko is becoming more popular.
[00:14:42.610]I've just started seeing that in the stores
[00:14:44.730]in the past few years, and that's another one
[00:14:46.649]that can be cultivated,
[00:14:49.170]it's a little trickier than some
[00:14:51.267]of the other wood decay fungi.
[00:14:53.130]It's not immediate, but it's doable.
[00:14:59.610]For our usually wild-collected mushrooms,
[00:15:01.667]definitely the morels, and those are probably
[00:15:08.210]in the middle of Missouri by now.
[00:15:09.850]I do keep track of where they're coming up.
[00:15:12.070]So they're not in our state yet,
[00:15:14.290]it's been a fairly cool spring.
[00:15:16.520]I would anticipate we'll start seeing them
[00:15:19.640]maybe down in the southeast around Indian Caves,
[00:15:22.707]second week of April I'd say, probably, at the earliest.
[00:15:29.959]But those are very popular, and can be very abundant
[00:15:32.320]when they come up.
[00:15:33.520]Most morel hunters, their first concern
[00:15:36.830]is to get enough morels for themselves
[00:15:38.690]and their friends and family,
[00:15:40.870]and only if it's a really bumper crop do people
[00:15:44.230]really start to think about selling them.
[00:15:46.710]Michigan has morel festivals and very abundant morels,
[00:15:51.600]so you can find people at the roadside selling their morels
[00:15:54.490]for $20 a pound, and some places will get more than that.
[00:15:59.410]Truffles.
[00:16:00.950]The Nebraska truffle industry is completely unutilized.
[00:16:05.220]I don't know if we really have...
[00:16:07.260]I'm pretty sure we don't have the black parigord truffle
[00:16:11.731]of France or Italy.
[00:16:13.010]We do have truffle-like fungi.
[00:16:15.540]In fact, my husband's working on one
[00:16:17.450]that came from, again, Indian Caves State Park
[00:16:20.360]that is fairly frequent down there,
[00:16:23.080]but the fact that is related to truffles,
[00:16:26.590]and has some truffle-like features doesn't mean
[00:16:28.920]it's necessarily delicious and delightful.
[00:16:31.290]So we're studying it more as a mega logical curiosity.
[00:16:36.190]When truffles are farmed, and you may've heard
[00:16:38.230]of truffle cultivation, that's done by inoculating
[00:16:41.330]the roots of compatible trees and hoping,
[00:16:44.790]and in some cases, it works a little bit.
[00:16:48.170]There's been some limited success in getting
[00:16:52.691]some of the European truffle species
[00:16:55.030]under cultivation in Oregon, but it's very iffy,
[00:16:59.560]and it's something that you're not gonna know
[00:17:01.660]for 10 or 20 years if its really worked.
[00:17:06.190]Boletus edulis, we have related species in Nebraska.
[00:17:10.830]I haven't seen this one.
[00:17:12.769]Goes under many different names, again, porcini, cep,
[00:17:17.480]king bolete, probably the most popular mushroom in Europe
[00:17:21.020]for consumption.
[00:17:22.810]And this one, obligate association with trees,
[00:17:26.249]there is commercial harvest.
[00:17:29.010]Where you're going to see them most commonly
[00:17:31.667]is as dried mushrooms.
[00:17:33.407]Sliced and dried specimens, and you can get them.
[00:17:34.723]I've seen them at Whole Foods,
[00:17:37.529]I've seen them at Hy-Vee, at the co-op,
[00:17:39.680]and that's actually one of the rarer mushrooms
[00:17:42.707]where drying really intensifies the flavor,
[00:17:44.910]and kind of, if anything improves it.
[00:17:48.307]So if you come upon dried bolets, don't pass them up.
[00:17:55.670]Chanterelles, enormous commercial harvest
[00:18:00.131]in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest,
[00:18:02.131]much of which is sent over to Europe.
[00:18:04.600]Some as fresh, some as canned.
[00:18:06.168]Lobster mushroom, that's one I'm just starting
[00:18:10.820]to see commercially.
[00:18:12.570]And these are all fresh.
[00:18:13.850]So we have fresh chanterelles, fresh lobsters
[00:18:16.850]that I saw in Whole Foods around Christmas time.
[00:18:20.750]The lobster mushroom is actually kind of an interesting one
[00:18:24.070]because the shape here is a mushroom
[00:18:26.602]in the genus russula, and the orange color
[00:18:34.160]is a parasite, it's a fungal parasite growing all over it,
[00:18:38.433]and that's hypomyces.
[00:18:40.100]And the parasite is smart enough, that as far as we know,
[00:18:43.140]never parasitizes poisonous mushrooms,
[00:18:46.060]so it's actually fairly easy to identify,
[00:18:48.070]but it's sheer chance if you're ever gonna come upon
[00:18:51.110]this thing.
[00:18:52.604]It's not going to be really cultivatable.
[00:18:54.134]Those are also commonly sold dried.
[00:19:02.285]So, safety.
[00:19:04.050]Identification with the wild mushrooms.
[00:19:06.710]They can be poisonous.
[00:19:09.300]And here we have chlorophyllum molybdites on the left,
[00:19:13.200]chlorophyllum brunneum, or chlorophyllum rhacodes
[00:19:16.370]on the right.
[00:19:18.786]The one on the right is edible and popular,
[00:19:19.980]the one on the left is a severe gastrointestinal irritant.
[00:19:27.040]I receive the calls for Poison Control for mushrooms,
[00:19:31.840]well over 90% of what I get when they call
[00:19:34.910]and say symptomatic child in hospital,
[00:19:37.370]it's chlorophyllum molybdites.
[00:19:40.070]The good news is, it makes you feel very bad,
[00:19:42.870]but it's not deadly.
[00:19:43.940]It will cause vomiting, it will cause diarrhea,
[00:19:47.680]it will cause severe GI cramps, but then once
[00:19:50.510]the mushroom's out of the body, it resolves.
[00:19:52.840]And we don't really know what the poison is
[00:19:54.670]that does that.
[00:19:56.700]But this mushroom here is one of the fairly few edible
[00:20:02.370]mushroom that I will almost never eat because
[00:20:06.394]they're so similar.
[00:20:08.110]The differences come down to the color of the gills
[00:20:12.140]and the spores in mature specimens.
[00:20:15.050]And these are immature specimens, so you would not know
[00:20:19.490]with these, unless you were actually looking
[00:20:21.170]at the DNA or something else.
[00:20:23.400]And to really be confident, you want to take
[00:20:25.980]a spore print, leave that cap on paper overnight,
[00:20:29.570]let it discharge its spores, and then see if they're white
[00:20:34.132]and safe, or greenish and not safe.
[00:20:36.680]So this is a group I just leave completely alone.
[00:20:42.310]Many of the things we looked at,
[00:20:44.950]there aren't all that many dangerous mushrooms
[00:20:46.950]that look like them.
[00:20:48.360]There's nothing out there that looks
[00:20:50.693]like the lobster mushroom.
[00:20:52.280]There's really nothing out there that looks like a morel,
[00:20:57.253]with few caveats.
[00:20:58.630]There's something called a false morel,
[00:21:00.900]and those, some people do eat them,
[00:21:03.434]it's not recommended.
[00:21:05.413]The best account I have is still from my introductory
[00:21:08.670]mycology textbook which said some people eat them
[00:21:12.010]and find them delicious, and other people eat them and die.
[00:21:14.234]It contains a volatile toxin that is normally mostly
[00:21:18.874]dissipated during cooking, as long as you don't inhale
[00:21:22.720]the vapors.
[00:21:24.768]There's still a carcinogen that builds up over time.
[00:21:27.434]The false morel doesn't actually look at all
[00:21:31.820]like the morel.
[00:21:32.653]You're not gonna confuse them in most cases.
[00:21:35.470]But it comes out at about the same time,
[00:21:38.330]and in some of the same places.
[00:21:41.900]Bolets, there are poisonous ones as well as edible ones.
[00:21:46.580]The color of the pores underneath the cap
[00:21:49.240]and other traits are used to figure that out.
[00:21:52.420]You're not going to learn to identify mushrooms
[00:21:54.693]in this half hour lecture,
[00:21:56.680]but if you're interested in that,
[00:21:59.190]we're starting to do a little more around the state
[00:22:01.580]with mushroom walks when mushrooms are in season,
[00:22:05.450]which is not March 23rd, and probably ramping up
[00:22:09.794]some of the mushroom identification information,
[00:22:14.100]and you can always contact me too.
[00:22:17.970]Things like hen of the woods, yeah, you're not gonna mistake
[00:22:20.270]anything else for that.
[00:22:24.180]I would say you're not gonna mistake anything else
[00:22:26.390]for a chanterelle, but people do,
[00:22:28.320]so it's anything kind of yellowish with gills
[00:22:33.350]can sometimes be confused,
[00:22:34.730]and that's caused some poisonings.
[00:22:37.653]Definitely, identification is absolutely key
[00:22:40.820]for mushroom safety, and it's the biggest key.
[00:22:44.460]Now, I'm assuming, again probably, any of you looking
[00:22:48.431]at mushrooms would be looking either
[00:22:50.780]at cultivating mushrooms, producing them,
[00:22:53.830]and then selling them.
[00:22:55.290]Or, if harvesting, it would be morels or something
[00:22:59.170]very abundant and very familiar
[00:23:01.420]that you're well-familiarized with.
[00:23:04.440]In Nebraska, our guidelines a really kind of iffy
[00:23:08.430]for mushrooms for farmer's markets.
[00:23:12.090]We're pretty wide-open.
[00:23:13.810]Wild mushrooms can be sold in farmer's markets.
[00:23:16.967]Mushrooms that you've cultivated at home
[00:23:19.720]can be sold at farmer's markets.
[00:23:21.720]It's when you go to a middle man
[00:23:24.890]and cease direct consumer sales that it gets iffy.
[00:23:29.500]So selling to restaurants, selling to grocery stores,
[00:23:33.333]that's not permissible without...
[00:23:36.940]Effectively, it's not permissible at all for wild harvested
[00:23:40.830]in Nebraska, and for cultivated, you need to follow
[00:23:44.710]the rules appertaining to a food processing plant
[00:23:48.751]or, you basically need to be following FSMA.
[00:23:53.200]Other states have different guidelines.
[00:23:55.630]A lot of our surrounding states, Missouri and Iowa,
[00:23:59.754]and Kansas for wild mushroom sales,
[00:24:04.950]like morels for instance, all require some degree
[00:24:09.150]of certification or licensing,
[00:24:11.640]and that would be something as simple as a half day class,
[00:24:15.860]and someone just signing off and verifying
[00:24:18.250]that you can tell a morel from something that isn't a morel.
[00:24:21.960]I think probably Nebraska will be heading
[00:24:24.470]that way eventually, but it's still widely disparate
[00:24:28.180]among the different states.
[00:24:29.350]South Dakota doesn't really regulate at all,
[00:24:32.688]the one thing Nebraska will regulate,
[00:24:35.194]and all of the states will, is if you're collecting
[00:24:40.191]on state parks, or federal land, sometimes you're welcome
[00:24:46.260]to do that for home use, but not for sale.
[00:24:52.668]So wild mushrooms can be poisonous.
[00:24:54.030]Most of us aren't gonna be working with wild mushrooms,
[00:24:57.580]so what about cultivated mushrooms?
[00:25:00.130]Culture conditions, good agricultural practices,
[00:25:04.210]and, again Pennsylvania has a big list
[00:25:08.350]of good mushroom agricultural practices.
[00:25:10.700]Specifically for fungi.
[00:25:13.410]Kind of like growing anything, you want to maintain
[00:25:15.720]clean, sanitary conditions.
[00:25:18.630]Cull diseased, or damaged, or old mushrooms,
[00:25:21.340]so that's an unhappy-looking batch of mushrooms
[00:25:23.960]that are kind of water-soaked, water-spotted looking,
[00:25:27.500]that's usually, that's often pseudomonas
[00:25:30.630]or some other spoilage bacteria.
[00:25:32.500]Sometimes there are viruses that get into the mushroom
[00:25:35.070]beds as well.
[00:25:36.720]And those are mainly issues with agaricus,
[00:25:40.040]where you've got the really intense cultivation
[00:25:43.030]of large numbers of mushrooms.
[00:25:45.560]Worker safety, and this would apply to shiitakes,
[00:25:49.150]and other cultivated mushrooms as well,
[00:25:51.740]you want to have good ventilation.
[00:25:54.450]Mushrooms exist to produce spores,
[00:25:58.060]that's why a mushroom makes a mushroom,
[00:25:59.730]and if you've got these mature mushrooms shooting
[00:26:02.480]off spores and you're breathing them in all the time,
[00:26:04.727]even if you're not allergic, or they're not toxic,
[00:26:07.869]inhaling large numbers of airborne particulates
[00:26:10.420]is never a good idea.
[00:26:11.510]So you want to make sure you've got good ventilation,
[00:26:13.780]you're harvesting before they're shooting off
[00:26:16.570]all the spores.
[00:26:18.610]If you're doing shiitake cultivation,
[00:26:21.140]you might be handling chainsaws, and moving around
[00:26:23.970]big, heavy logs, and stuff, so you need
[00:26:25.740]the proper precautions for that.
[00:26:29.150]One thing you're not going to have an issue with
[00:26:31.510]in cultivating mushrooms is identification.
[00:26:35.110]'Cause generally, you're often starting with a commercial
[00:26:39.470]spawn, and even if you have generated your own sawdust,
[00:26:46.820]maybe put it under a plastic sheet for a few days
[00:26:50.500]to kind of sterilize it and inoculate it,
[00:26:54.090]if your spawn takes off at all,
[00:26:55.990]that's going to colonize, and it's going to out-compete
[00:26:58.000]anything else.
[00:26:59.380]The risk of a spore of a poisonous mushroom
[00:27:03.130]drifting in from the air and germinating
[00:27:05.410]and being able to produce poisonous mushrooms
[00:27:08.829]is infinitesimal, I have not heard of it happening.
[00:27:14.320]So, if you're cultivating and you've gotten spawn
[00:27:17.950]from a reliable source, poisoning isn't a risk.
[00:27:24.370]Post-harvest.
[00:27:25.947]Fresh mushrooms are very perishable,
[00:27:27.910]they can spoil quickly.
[00:27:29.920]Sell or preserve in a timely fashion.
[00:27:31.980]Preserving can be drying, you can blanch and freeze,
[00:27:35.346]canning we'll talk about in just a moment.
[00:27:38.967]If you're selling fresh, try and allow airflow.
[00:27:43.810]A plastic bag will just allow condensation to build up
[00:27:46.840]and these things to just rot very quickly.
[00:27:50.130]Dried mushrooms can be stable over time.
[00:27:52.340]So if you can dry down sufficiently to prevent mold growth,
[00:27:54.988]then the product might be stable for months or years.
[00:28:01.950]So mushrooms are low acid, and they would be considered
[00:28:04.370]a botulism risk.
[00:28:06.520]There are documented cases of botulism
[00:28:08.600]from canned or preserved mushrooms.
[00:28:12.109]Whether canning, or soup, or preserving in oil,
[00:28:16.706]you want to be sure that you're avoiding that risk.
[00:28:20.220]This pretty picture I got on the web of mushrooms preserved
[00:28:23.820]in oil, the recipe that went along with that actually
[00:28:27.430]did include high levels of vinegar to get the acidity
[00:28:31.340]to proper levels.
[00:28:33.746]There've been a lot of instances actually
[00:28:37.590]with herbs especially lately with just putting together
[00:28:41.266]those pretty little bottles of oil and herbs and spices,
[00:28:44.450]and if it's low-acid, botulism can be an issue.
[00:28:53.220]Preparation, most mushrooms should not be eaten raw.
[00:28:56.840]The agaricus bisporus, the white button mushroom often is,
[00:29:01.940]I'll eat in raw in salads, but other than that,
[00:29:04.900]most mushrooms shouldn't.
[00:29:06.904]Morels, in fact, are especially egregious.
[00:29:09.560]There have been poisonings due to eating raw morels,
[00:29:12.049]and the reason is that the way a mushroom, or a fungus
[00:29:16.220]makes its living, is it secretes digestive enzymes
[00:29:19.549]into a substrate, breaks it down, and then absorbs
[00:29:23.730]the amino acids and simple sugars, and so on,
[00:29:29.050]and these digestive enzymes are fairly strong.
[00:29:33.030]So if you don't inactivate them by heating,
[00:29:35.980]they're still active when you eat the mushroom,
[00:29:37.930]and there's a period of time while you're trying to digest
[00:29:43.100]your mushroom, and your mushroom is trying to digest you.
[00:29:46.430]You're gonna win, because you're bigger,
[00:29:49.906]but it's not very comfortable when it's happening.
[00:29:52.086]Morels are very good at this.
[00:29:54.028]The big case in question was a gala banquet in Vancouver
[00:29:59.506]in the 1990s where the chef served raw morels
[00:30:03.410]to 400 people, and it was not a pretty site.
[00:30:06.880]And this was a charity fundraiser thing too,
[00:30:08.850]so these people had paid a lot for a poisonous salad
[00:30:13.840]that probably didn't even taste very good
[00:30:15.370]because I think cooking adds a lot to the flavor
[00:30:18.130]of the mushrooms.
[00:30:20.700]Okay, so resources, cultivation, and supplies
[00:30:24.350]including books, Field and Forest Products,
[00:30:26.560]that's the catalog I have here.
[00:30:27.980]Fungi Perfecti is the other big thing for fungal cultivation
[00:30:33.800]and they carry a lot of books.
[00:30:36.400]They have posters, they have t-shirts, they have everything.
[00:30:40.350]If you watch the new Star Treck Discover,
[00:30:43.747]Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti was the inspiration
[00:30:47.100]for the mycologist on there.
[00:30:50.690]For general information, if you're interested in identifying
[00:30:54.150]mushrooms and getting to know mushrooms for this part
[00:30:57.050]of the world, the best site out there
[00:30:58.870]is mushroomexpert.com, and it's run out of Illinois,
[00:31:03.900]but very, very good, continually expanding
[00:31:09.030]and growing site.
[00:31:11.580]Any questions?
[00:31:22.370]Yeah, we've got one there too.
[00:31:24.900]With morels being really prolific here
[00:31:27.710]in our area, what is the best way to preserve them
[00:31:30.030]so that we can do something with them later?
[00:31:32.749]Drying is fairly common for morels,
[00:31:35.843]and for that, you can get a dehydrator at Target,
[00:31:40.260]or Lowes, or what have you, and that works well.
[00:31:44.310]What I normally do, 'cause I'm not getting tons and tons
[00:31:47.690]of morels, if I do have enough to preserve
[00:31:49.986]is I will fry them and then freeze them.
[00:31:55.370]'Cause you don't want to freeze them directly
[00:31:57.680]because that'll form ice crystals that will
[00:32:00.370]kind of damage the structure and make them kind of soggy
[00:32:03.100]when you thaw them out, but if they've been blanched
[00:32:06.560]or cooked, then frozen, then they're good.
[00:32:12.960]Question back there?
[00:32:17.540]So our office received a call of someone interested
[00:32:20.850]in cultivating the morel.
[00:32:25.350]I think they might already be an established mushroom grower
[00:32:30.160]here in the state, so is there something new out there
[00:32:33.970]for cultivating morels?
[00:32:35.860]There's nothing new that I know of,
[00:32:37.730]and the best advice I can give, and they've probably already
[00:32:40.660]done this is, go on the web.
[00:32:42.350]There will be better and worse information.
[00:32:45.169]Gary Mills, who's the guy who has patented a method,
[00:32:50.509]I think that should actually be off patent by now,
[00:32:55.220]but I think that might still be somewhat proprietary.
[00:32:58.769]For a while, he had an establishment on the west coast
[00:33:04.687]of Michigan, but there's nothing really solid out there,
[00:33:12.660]so it's kind of building from what you see on the web,
[00:33:16.060]and then kind of hit and miss.
[00:33:18.350]My impression is there's still going to be a flavor issue.
[00:33:22.928]If you were branching out, I'm not sure morel
[00:33:27.260]is going to be the one I would branch into
[00:33:29.440]unless you're willing to put a lot of time and effort
[00:33:33.220]and tweaking into it, and be willing to accept
[00:33:36.650]that you might not get very good returns.
[00:33:39.800]Now, if you succeed in making a reliable, cultivatable
[00:33:45.940]morel that tastes like the wild ones,
[00:33:48.400]then you've potentially hit the jackpot,
[00:33:50.850]but it's not going to be easy.

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Mushroom Safety

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