BLUF: We grow high-quality mushrooms in a carefully designed 7-step process, perfected over 6 years of trial, error, education and experimentation.
Let our hard work pay dividends to you: try the ‘Best Damn Mushrooms in Texas’ and let us know how we’re doing!
- Strain Selection: The Team looks for the best growing strains for each species from around the globe. Once we identify great strains for in house commercial production viability, we verify if those strains will be viable for us. Not all are, so we run some small 40 substrate bag test batches. Once we get a trend of 3 positive results, then we determine what growing medium or substrate will be best suited for that strain.
- Substrate Production: This is kind of our secret sauce. We use a 2-yd batch mixer with a controllable water flow meter so we can use a very precise substrate recipe using a mushroom friendly amount of micro and macro nutrients. This allows us to customize substrate ingredients down to 0.01 of a pound.
Once we get the substrate bagged up in our “custom unicorn bags”, we then cook them in our very own steam box made from Mild Steel, Stainless steel, and Aluminum which is also powder-coated.
3. Inoculation: Once each batch of 200 substrate blocks has cooked, we inoculate them based on which species matches up to its desired substrate recipe.
For our pre-lab protocol, we utilize LSD:
Lint roll your clothes,
Spray down with 70% Isopropyl,
Dip your feet in the bleach bath.
When inoculating, we pour the spawn from bag to bag ensuring that we don’t touch any of it. Spawn is extremely sensitive and must be treated with the highest priority. Without spawn, no mushroom farm exists.
4. Incubation: This is where the mycelium is consuming the new mushroom food that we just introduced to it in the lab. The majority of the growth is done in this room. We keep the Incubation room at 63F to 65F in order to not go over 70F internal temperature inside each bag. Consistency is crucial in this step and often overlooked. If your Incubation room isn’t dialed-in, you will have mixed results.
5. Fruiting: After the substrate blocks have finished incubating, we introduce the blocks to fruiting conditions that are cold, wet, and turbulent air. Generally we keep our fruiting rooms between 60F and 65F. This cuts down on any other bacterial mold spores in the air (there’s Billions of them!) and colder grow rooms usually result in higher quality mushrooms.
We also harvest by trimming any unwanted substrate off the block with a razor utility knife. We want to give you mushrooms! Not un-edible, myceliated sawdust chunks. They don’t taste that great and get stuck in your teeth.
6. Cold Storage: After harvesting, the mushrooms have an internal temperature called “Field Heat” ( usually around 70F) in which we need to refrigerate the mushrooms to knock off the field heat, begin the cold chain delivery process, and get the internal temperature down to 34F to 38F.
7. Delivery: Between 2 farmer’s markets, a couple grocery stores, our restaurant clients, and anytime you pickup at the farm, a Texas Fungus team member will be the one passing these delicious mycelium morsels into your hands. We always recommend keeping them refrigerated until you get ready to cook them.
Please make sure to always cook your mushrooms thoroughly; we have recipes available if you need some mushroom inspiration!
To go deeper into the process, learn more or chat about how you can achieve similar results, click here to schedule a chat or consultation.