Adventures in Mushrooming

My journey into mycophilia. (No, it’s not a fetish.)

by Daniela Zenari

During our annual family vacations, my dad would abruptly pull off the highway anytime he saw a cluster of mushrooms growing on a stump in the forest along the road. In Italy, where he grew up, there is a culture around foraging.

My interest in mushrooms (and foraging) ignited when I travelled to Italy as an adult. The feeling of searching the woods, slowly weaving through the trees, gaze lowered to the ground, earth’s treasures sprouting up the more my eyes attuned to the undergrowth. The satisfaction in finding, harvesting, cleaning, cooking, eating and sharing the bounty. It was the first time I stopped to think about where our food comes from and how much nature offers.

After a few successful mushroom-hunting trips, I wondered what I could find—or grow—in Alberta. A soggy summer helped me along in my first fall forays, and I found some boletes and honey mushrooms right here in the Edmonton river valley. I even found some morels when hiking in the mountains near Jasper. But when a few taste tests led to stomach aches, my exploration of local fungi became cautious.

“You’re really smart to do that because many poisonings are due to people being too confident,” says mushroom expert Candice Cullum.

Illustrations Jan Thalheimer

“Some mushrooms here, like the King Bolete (boletus edulus) or porcini, are almost identical to European mushrooms. But others, like the honey mushroom (armillaria mellea), can look very different.”

Candice’s interest in mushrooms came from an epiphany in the blueberry patch. Her son found mushrooms growing there, and as he threw them at her head, she thought, “How can I learn more about these?” She joined the Alberta Mycological Society (AMS), where she is still a long-time volunteer. (The AMS has many mushroom resources available such as foraging videos, articles, books and mushroom identification keys.)

Still hesitant to eat my foraged mushrooms, I decided to grow my own at home, but the information overload paralyzed me.

You know the feeling when you search for how-to information online? You’re swimming in a sea of subculture dos and don’ts that see even the best-intended fail miserably.

Luckily, I met Jason Cameron from Block Farmer, a small mushroom producer, at a local farmers’ market. Blue Oyster mushrooms grew from a block, a thick plastic bag densely packed with growing medium (wood, grain or hay infused with mycelium). It displayed the mushrooms that were for sale, but the block caught my attention. Whether it was because he saw my keen interest or just to get rid of me, he offered to sell me the block.

I was hooked when the first signs of more new tiny mushroom caps appeared. But, once the block was spent, I couldn’t find Jason’s contact information. I looked online, and, just like those little caps that appear from nothing, I realized that Edmonton has a budding fungi community.

I found Planet Mushroom, which makes grow-at-home kits, gourmet soup and risotto mixes and medicinal tinctures. I ordered a Blue Oyster grow kit and picked it up from their stall at the Bountiful Market. The kit was a single block, about the size of a Nalgene bottle. Inside the usual thick plastic bag, I could see the white tendrils of the mycelium already spreading through the growing medium.

After a couple of weeks, with the first signs of growth, I felt a surge of satisfaction at my impending harvest. Within days it was exponential. Blue Oyster mushrooms were bursting from the side of the plastic bag, the crisp white gills running along the stems of the mushrooms. The edge of the caps darkened ever so slightly with a greyish-blue hue (I later learned that introducing UV light can bring out more colour).

As my mycophile journey continued, I found satisfaction quickly turned into frustration with temperature and humidity changes, mould, bacteria and fungus gnats. I faced every challenge as it came with the occasional small win, but the gnats were too much. I did my best to seal my block using packing tape, hoping to hold off the gnats while I regrouped.

I was discouraged and slightly defeated, but my interest wasn’t, so I pitched this story for a shot of external motivation and shifted to researching mushroom producers.

I talked to Janine Aube from Red Fox Fungi in Calgary. She noticed it isn’t just pests that eat mycelium. “I went outside, and the whole garden was moving.” She saw that the bees from nearby hives liked the spent logs in their compost heap. “The bees are producing really well, and they’ve been super healthy.”

The bees supported something that had already grabbed my attention as I fell down the mushroom rabbit hole; the medicinal benefits of mushrooms. They have anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and even anti-cancer properties, and there is ongoing research to determine how much mushrooms can help us.

Jack Martin, owner of Woodland Mushrooms outside of Sherwood Park, knows this from personal experience after a motorcycle accident left him hospitalized for a month with a head injury. Jack researched mushrooms’ medicinal benefits and found Lion’s Mane to help improve brain function.

The more local mycologists I talked to, the more I realized that the community in Alberta isn’t huge, but it’s tight-knit and supports each other. Every conversation with one person led me to another, fuelling my fascination. After talking to Meghan Vesey from Fungi Akuafo (where they sell spawn—think mushroom seeds—and grow-at-home education workshops), she put me in touch with some of the innovative local producers she works with.

That’s how I met Alex Villeneuve. While in the Brewmaster program at Olds College, he had an idea for a fun side project to grow mushrooms from brewing byproducts and Ceres Solutions was born. Over several years Alex developed unique processing equipment to combine the major steps of gourmet mushroom farming into a mostly automated process. Learning about it blew me away.

Between the blur of life, work, and talking to fellow mycophiles in my spare time, I noticed something on my abandoned mushroom block. Five small mushroom heads had pushed through the tape and dried up from neglect.

Now that I am armed with all the resources, workshops, and community support, I will try again.

Whether they’ve been foraged, grown, or bought, the best part about mushrooms is eating them, and Jack gave me a hot cooking tip.

“A dry sauté. Chop up your mushrooms and throw them in a saucepan covered, on medium heat, with no oil, no other vegetables. Let them sink into the pan. They’ll steam themselves. They’ll release a lot of moisture. Then you let that water evaporate. Then treat them like normal mushrooms and pop them on your pizza or in your stir-fry with everything else.”

I tried it, and within minutes my house was filled with the aroma of mushrooms. A peek under the lid showed the mushrooms in a mini-jacuzzi of their bubbling juices, getting steam-infused in their mushroom goodness. The results were tender, meatier, and tastier.

Daniela Zenari grew up in her family restaurant Zenari’s. She writes about food, foraging and family. Her other philias include anthophilia, apiphilia, botanophilia, cibophilia, graphophilia, hylophilia, and sinistrophilia.