BETHANY — One man’s damp, dreary day is Domingo Medina’s idea of mushroom nirvana.
That’s when his shiitakes take off. They plump like fleshy little beach umbrellas, just waiting for Medina and his friends to harvest them from the bark of cut logs.
They’re only too happy to oblige.
“There’s a whole world of people out there growing them,” says Medina, part of Holy Shiitake, an experiment in mushroom farming by the New Haven Bioregional Group. “What this tells you is we can grow them in Connecticut, too.”
The bioregional group believes that a convergence of climate change, economic upheaval and energy scarcity in years to come will force people to grow some of their own food where possible.
“It’s something we can incorporate in our daily lives,” says Medina, who lives in New Haven. “Even just growing food in your backyard will mean something.”
Actually, his base of shiitake operations is a backyard. Brenda Caldwell, a member of the bioregional group and operator of the Boulder Knoll Community Farm in Cheshire, has given over part of her Bethany backyard to shiitakes.
It’s a small space under a stand of trees.
In one spot, there are stacks of red oak, white oak and maple logs, each of them 40 inches long. Medina and his associates have drilled holes into the logs and inoculated them with doses of sawdust and mycelium, the vegetative part of a fungus that lives inside wood or other materials.
“After we inject them, we cover the holes with wax,” explains Bobcat Carruthers of Hamden, part of the bioregional group. “We put a metal tag on each one, recording what strain of shiitake it is, the date it was inoculated and the type of wood.” Continued...
The group began hunting for logs in December 2010. There’s a window of only three or four weeks after a tree has been cut to use them for shiitakes, Medina says, because after that the log can’t withstand the process.
once they’re injected, the logs sit for more than nine months.
Then comes a little shock treatment. The logs are submerged in cold water for a full day and pounded on rocks.
Medina and his group lean the logs upright against wooden sawhorses that sit in a cage-like structure Medina built out of white PVC pipe. The structure is covered with a black felt cloth and covered again with a plastic tarp.
Like magic, the mushrooms pop up over the next week.
“Food you have is food you don’t have to buy,” says Gaianne Jenkins of New Haven, another member of the bioregional group. “These keep well in the fridge. They last about a week. And you can dry them.”
Or sell them. The group has sold several batches of its shiitakes to the New Haven restaurant Caseus, going so far as to transport the precious cargo into the city via scooter on the Farmington Canal bike trail.
“Shiitake mushrooms have one of the highest amounts of glutamic acid, the active ingredient in all meat and seafood,” he explains. “It brings richness to the food. You can take vegetable soup and if you add shiitake mushrooms, all of a sudden, the soup becomes vibrant. Even in our tempura batter, we use the stock from shiitake mushrooms.”
Medina, meanwhile, is like a proud, shiitake papa. He and Carruthers take detailed notes on the number and size of the mushrooms on each log. Lai produces a portable stove and fries up a couple of shiitakes in a wire basket, sprinkling them with lime juice and sea salt.
“You see how meaty this is,” Medina says.
“They have a distinctive taste,” adds Carruthers. “It’s kind of a long-lasting taste. Kind of savory and nice.”
Asked if he eats a lot of shiitakes, Carruthers just laughs. A deep, rich, earthy laugh.
See Arnold Gold's shiitake slideshow.
FIND OUT MOREFor more information about Holy Shiitake, visitholyshiitakemushrooms.blogspot.com or email medinado@sbcglobal.net.
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