Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Like magic ... mushrooms
Growing shiitakes takes many hands, logs and months.
Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times
Colleen Yoder and her son, Gabriel, 2, brush beeswax on the logs to seal the holes that have been filled with shiitake spores.
Brad Constable, farm supervisor at the Best of What's Around Farm, drills holes into white oak logs. The logs can be used to produce shiitakes for up to five years.
Food writer Lindsey Nair
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SCOTTSVILLE -- Next fall, customers may walk into the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington and see shiitake mushroom risotto on the menu.
With the local food movement in full swing, they may not be surprised to learn that the fresh, nutty mushrooms were grown on a farm just outside of Charlottesville.
What they may not expect is that the same hands cooking the risotto once packed shiitake spores into oak logs, setting those mushrooms on their path to the table.
Increasingly, restaurateurs in Southwest Virginia are becoming more involved in what happens on local farms, often asking farmers to grow special crops just for their menus.
As far as I know, though, it's still pretty unusual to see restaurant staff getting their hands dirty on the farm. But that's what several Red Hen employees recently did at the Best of What's Around farm in Scottsville.
Red Hen general manager Janelle Clark is passionate about local food sourcing. She said 65 percent to 70 percent of the ingredients used at the restaurant currently came from nearby farms. In the summertime, that percentage jumps to 90.
"When you eat food that is grown locally, you know who you are getting your food from," she said. "You don't have to worry about where it is coming from, you don't have to worry about the effects on the planet, you don't have to worry about a salmonella outbreak. You have a good rapport with your farmers so they are only going to give you their best product."
But Clark hadn't found anyone growing mushrooms, so she went to Best of What's Around, where she worked last summer in exchange for fresh produce. Farmer Matthew Holt said he would grow her some shiitakes on one condition: She had to bring him some manpower.
Holt had successfully grown shiitakes before on a farm in North Carolina. It was a success, but involved a lot of work. Clark and her staff were up to the task.
One log at a time
Clark and her crew arrived at the farm on an unseasonably warm morning in January. Rust-colored roosters pecked around the barnyard.
The lower barn doors were thrown open to the sunshine. Inside, it smelled faintly of sawdust and the garlic hanging from the upstairs rafters.
Holt was there with his wife, Suzanne, and farm supervisor Brad Constable. The rest of the work crew consisted of Clark, Red Hen co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson and chef Tucker Yoder, who brought his wife, Colleen, and their 2-year-old son, Gabriel.
Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times
Colleen Yoder and her son, Gabriel, 2, brush beeswax on the logs to seal the holes that have been filled with shiitake spores.
Brad Constable, farm supervisor at the Best of What's Around Farm, drills holes into white oak logs. The logs can be used to produce shiitakes for up to five years.
Holt and Constable had already been working hard in preparation for the day, cutting about 400 lengths of white oak off the farm. White oak is considered one of the best woods for growing shiitakes because it is very hard -- one log can produce mushrooms for up to five years.
Growing shiitakes utilizes small hardwoods that would likely be outcompeted by larger trees if left alone. But the logs must be healthy and can't be any bigger than about 4 feet in length and 6 inches in diameter; any larger and they would be too big to handle.
The logs are cut in January, when the trees are dormant and storing the maximum amount of sugars in their trunks. That gives the fungus plenty to feed on as it colonizes the log.
In the cool shade of the barn, Holt and Constable started prepping the logs, laying them across sawhorses and boring 12-inch deep holes in equal distances around them.
From there, the logs went to the next station to be filled with shiitake spawn mixed in sawdust. Using special injectors, Yoder, Clark and Wilkinson packed the mixture into each hole, tamping it down so it would not pour out when moved.
Next, the logs were lifted onto a table manned by Suzanne Holt and Colleen Yoder. The women dipped paint brushes into crockpots full of melted beeswax, brushing the wax over each hole to seal in moisture and protect against contamination.
As the women worked, a few of the farm's honeybees smelled the beeswax and drifted into the barn in search of the source.
Over and over, the process was repeated. The log pile on one side of the barn shrank while a stack on the other side, pimpled with waxy holes, slowly grew. The workers shouted over the whine of the drill.
At midday, the crew broke for a sun bath and a Red Hen lunch packed by sous chef Mike Perry. Perry had sent along chicken salad, freshly baked bread, cured meats and dijon potatoes; Clark had brought homemade chocolate chip cookies.
Gabrielle napped under a pine tree while the Holts brought out Cain, a massive, fluffy white Great Pyrenees who smelled the food and drooled on the gravel.
After lunch, it was back to the cold barn to pick up where they left off.
For two days, various Red Hen staffers inoculated logs with the Holts and their assistants. At the end, all 400 logs had been prepared and were ready for their journey into the wilderness.
A waiting game
The wilderness, it turns out, is a pine grove about 50 feet away from the barn.
Holt explained that pine groves are the perfect place to set up the logs and wait for the fungus to take them over.
"The fungus that eats dead pines isn't the same that eats dead white oak," he said. So that knocks out some competing fungi.
"Squirrels are the biggest competition for shiitakes because they taste nutty," he added. But squirrels don't frequent pine groves, he said.
Holt chose to set up his logs in a "log cabin" pattern, also called the "criss-cross" method, which allows good air circulation. They will stay in that position for up to nine months.
At that time, the shiitakes can be forced to fruit by soaking the logs in ice cold water. The cold water tricks the fungus into thinking it is in danger, so it proliferates, causing a "flush," or blooming of the mushrooms on the logs.
When the mushrooms come out, the farmers will have to stay on top of them, picking them at just the right moment for maximum freshness and storage time.
"You need to pick every mushroom," Holt said. "It's just like an orchard floor. You have to keep the floor totally clean. Same with a mushroom yard."
A flush may last two days or two weeks, depending on factors such as the weather and the strain of shiitake.
With luck, the logs inoculated by the Red Hen crew will flush over and over again, producing hundreds of pounds of shiitakes before the logs are completely broken down by the fungus and have no nutrients left to offer.
In North Carolina, Suzanne Holt said, their 300 logs produced 60 to 70 pounds of shiitakes in one flush.
That's a lot of mushrooms -- more than the Red Hen restaurant will be able to use. But Matthew Holt knows the quality of what those logs can produce, and he's not worried about excess.
"I could sell every shiitake I pick," he said. "That's not a problem."
