Mushrooms Are Easy to Grow, Delicious, and Very Healthy
By: Christian Behler
Tags: Vegetarian, Mushrooms, Health, Vegan, Food

Mushrooms Are Easy to Grow, Delicious, and Very Healthy

Fully-grown Lemon Oyster Mushrooms, image by author.

They were the most delicious mushrooms I ever had.

They were the most beautiful mushrooms I ever prepared.

But most importantly, they were the first mushrooms I had grown and harvested myself.

Besides giving you access to delicious and beautiful mushroom variants you cannot easily purchase in a store, growing your own mushrooms is very fun and rewarding. Using household leftovers like coffee grounds, they are inexpensive to cultivate and will provide you with a healthy source of proteins, vitamins, and minerals, which makes them especially valuable in vegan diets.

Mushroom Growing

A while ago, the all-mighty YouTube algorithm recommended a few videos about mushroom growing to me and it guessed correctly once again because I clicked. It looked interesting and I talked about it with a few people but forgot about it afterward. So when I got a mushroom growing kit for my birthday it was a really nice surprise.

A mushroom growing kit contains a package of grains or another substrate that is infused with mycelium. Mycelium is the underground vegetative part of a fungus, a dense web of thread-like strands, a little bit like the roots of a plant. Mycelium is the far bigger and more important part of a fungus, what we commonly refer to as mushrooms are only its fruiting bodies. It can grow to enormous dimensions, the biggest living organism is a fungus that stretches 3.8 km in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, but it is just as happy growing in a little pot.

Getting started

For the fungus to fruit, it needs access to nutrients. Therefore we need to mix the mycelium-infused grains with a growing substrate. Common substrates are grains, sawdust, straw, or used coffee grounds. Coffee grounds have a nice advantage compared to other substrates. Because they have been brewed with steaming hot water, all bacteria and foreign mushroom spores have already been killed. When you use another substrate you often have to cook it first to kill the contaminants. Used coffee grounds are also a common leftover in most households, so instead of throwing them away, we might as well use them as a growing medium.

Preparing the mushroom is very easy. We need to stack alternating layers of the mycelium grain and coffee ground on top of each other. Because coffee grounds are acidic we also need to add a little bit of agricultural lime. There will be some water left in the cooled off coffee grounds, so we do not need any extra water at this point. The container is then loosely covered with a lid to contain the moisture.

The mycelium is spreading through the substrate, image by author.

Fruiting

The mycelium will spread through the substrate and consume its nutrients. After a few days, you can see the first mycelium strands and after about a week, most of the substrate will be colonized.

At that point, the fungus will start to fruit. The lid is removed to give the mushrooms more air, unlike plants they breathe oxygen. Because this will evaporate a lot of water, they now need to be watered regularly. Always water from above so no water can get into the fine gills on the underside of the mushrooms.

When the mushrooms are fully grown, they can be harvested. They are cut with a sharp knife at the bottom of their stem. All other smaller mushrooms are harvested as well because the fungus won’t grow them any further. However, after a few days of rest, a new fruiting phase will begin. Depending on the amount of nutrients the fungus can have 2–5 fruiting waves.

Another benefit of mushrooms is that you can basically regrow them forever. When their substrate is spent and they don’t produce any more mushrooms, you can mix the old, mycelium-saturated substrate with fresh substrate again and the cycle will repeat.

Recipes

The variant I got were Lemon Oyster Mushrooms (Pleurotus Citrinopileatus), also called Golden Oyster Mushrooms, and they are a member of the Oyster Mushroom family. They are commonly cultivated for commercial use, particularly in China, but I have never seen any in local supermarkets. Which is a shame, because they are very pretty with their yellow color and also taste a lot better than the white button mushrooms that make up over 95% of all mushroom sales in Germany.

I fried my first harvest in some olive oil and added only salt and pepper to get a pure-ish taste of them. They had a lot more flavor than button mushrooms and their texture was softer as well, button mushrooms often get a rubbery consistency after cooking.

Since then, I have tried them on toast and in a pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic, parsley, and basil. Even though they were a lot less than the tomatoes by volume, their flavor still came through in the sauce.

This doesn’t look great, but they are extremely delicious, image by author.

Health Benefits

Oyster mushrooms — and mushrooms in general — are a very healthy food source, especially in a vegetarian or vegan diet. They are rich in proteins, vitamins, minerals, and fibers and also low in fat and calories [1] [2]. They contain antioxidants like selenium and zinc, which protect cells from damage, help to strengthen the immune system, and have anti-tumor properties [3].

Studies have also found antihyperglycemic qualities that decreased blood sugar levels in diabetic rats [4] and some oyster mushroom species contain the cholesterol-lowering drug Lovastatin [5].

As you can see, mushrooms have several health benefits and should be a regular component in every diet.