Mushroom Grain Spawn - Growing Gourmet Mushrooms at Home - ElementalMaker

hey what's going on guys welcome back to the elemental maker today i am showing you a kind of new hobby i got into a good buddy of mine really got into mushrooms and not not those kind the type you eat now i was already kind of sparked in interest with it because of you know we we all probably watch cody's lab awesome awesome channel and he's been doing a lot of stuff with mushrooms so that combined with my buddy giving me a mushroom grow block and seeing that fruit and then cooking up my own mushrooms was kind of the catalyst that got me into this new hobby yet another one to add to the repertoire so today i kind of want to show you the initial process i use to make my grain spawn now grain spawn is basically used to inoculate fruiting blocks fruiting blocks are typically what you just end up growing the mushrooms out of and collecting them from you could of course fruit directly from the grain spawn i guess some people do that but it's a little more cost effective just to fruit from hardwood sawdust blocks uh we're gonna get it all that but today we're just gonna do the grain spawn a pretty easy process and and a super simple intro into getting into mushrooms so what we're going to do today are some king oyster mushrooms that we're actually going to be inoculating with but i already have quite a few blocks growing that are pink oyster lion's mane and blue oyster so we'll probably end up just showing one of those fruiting so i'm not filming this over the course of several months and lose the footage so here is what i use for my grain spawn this is a bag of winter rye or rye berries or rye grain depending on where you are just literally purchase from a feed store about 18 bucks for this 50 pound sack here and this for me will be a lifetime probably of grain spawn i'll never be using that much i keep it taped off just so uh just so dust and stuff doesn't get in there now other stuff if you happen to live kind of out in the country or nearby and you have a feed store near you you can always pick up some wheat bran which i have in this sack and mine even sells hardwood fuel pellets what's up brody you getting in the shot say hi to everybody tell them hello you're cute so what i have here is some of the rye grain now i've had this soaking for 24 hours just in some tap water with a tablespoon of gypsum and about half a tablespoon of instant coffee i don't know why but a lot of guys say the coffee actually helps mushrooms i don't know maybe they need to wake up but uh you can see nice and soaked the grain size that actually smells pretty freaking ripe you can see the grain size versus when it started they've uh definitely swelled probably about doubled in size so they've absorbed a good bit of moisture on top of that the reason why they recommend soaking is because it a lot of the dormant bacterial endospores and and mold and sort of stuff uh soaking it for a good while actually helps kind of wake those up they're they're very very resilient endospores so soaking them wakes them up and then we'll boil them and and steam pressurize them which will kill everything off for the rye grains it actually helps kind of absorb some gypsum too which keeps them from sticking you can see all those bubbles and kind of carbonation this is a very lively mix the rye grain must have a lot of either natural yeast or bacterial contamination smells like yeast obviously there's a co2 in there that's pretty indicative of yeast it smells almost like a a beer brewing it's kind of got that multi-malty sort of smell with a little bit more funk you know there's something wrong going on in here so there's definitely some bacteria uh that would make for a nasty nasty brew to drink all right we uh we snuck into the kitchen here i'm just kidding wife's not home so we're in the kitchen here just just heating this sucker up and uh do about a 10-minute boil that will kill off the majority of any microorganisms that are living in there and get the the grain to its final state of hydration now the important thing here is you don't want to boil it too long i'm no expert in this you know i'm pretty new at it but a lot of guys say that if the greens are boiled too long and split it'll actually increase your chances of contamination so you want to get them to a point where they're they're fully hydrated but not yet split and i guess if they contaminate it'll be like finding an old kleenex under your computer desk you know growing all sorts of new life forms we've been boiling for a few minutes now let's go dumper [Music] all right back in the sink got the uh quart size now you can see i've modified my lids they sell these things pre-made on amazon don't freaking buy them they're they're way expensive for what you get they're literally just a self-healing injection port which you can buy a hundred of for a few bucks and a little uh breathable filter sticker i think a pack of 60 or some of these is like 19 bucks so you can make the better part of 60 something for pennies basically so so don't buy the pre-made ones they're ridiculous now we're just going to fill up our spawn jars here [Music] all right so we got three jars filled about halfway some something around there i'm just gonna tighten all these down i think in normal canning you actually wouldn't tighten these down you just kind of leave them on loosely and the pressure would create the differential to pull the lid down since we have these breathable filters on there it really doesn't matter we're just going to throw some aluminum foil over them and throw them in the pressure pot so here we have my recently acquired pressure tanner now this old beauty and i mean old i think this thing's 60 or 70 years old actually found it on facebook marketplaces a horrible old uh old grandmother was selling it and she was still using it up to the day to uh to canned corn it actually still smells like corn she was terrified that some hipsters would buy it who wouldn't be using it and just use it for decoration and i told her oh hell no this thing's going to see some use believe it or not no gasket it's purely a taper fit metal to metal taper interference that actually causes the seal i have pressure tested it the emergency release does work properly this is your little steam valve here it's not like the normal type where you actually have the weight that goes over it so it is a little more dangerous you gotta you gotta keep an eye on this thing when you're operating um i believe this is an old all-american unit the lady said she got it when she was married and i think she had to be at least 80 years old and back in those days they probably married at 15. so so that would probably pin this around 65 years old private label uh hibbard's true value pressure cooker 21 barely visible 21 quart it's a sweet old unit and works like a dream you just you got to keep an eye on it obviously these things are dangerous especially the older models like this if if you don't keep an eye on it you could have a bit of an issue we're only heating to 15 psi a lot of people think this thing is a huge bomb in your kitchen obviously you have to respect that there is a lot of stored energy in here in the form of uh superheated water and steam at about 250 which equates to 15 psi assuming we're basically at sea level ish so that's about one extra atmosphere 15 psi it's about one extra atmosphere it would be enough to push the lid off and create a little havoc in your kitchen but it's it's not the bomb everyone thinks it is now if you were to totally block this thing off disable the safety popper here and crank the heat under this thing yeah you could get it up to probably a few atmospheres before it burst and in that case you're in for quite a treat all right let's go throw these babies in the pressure canner and uh hear those microbes scream i'm uh definitely gonna have to add a little bit more water to this this old type of pressure canner it literally creates essentially a seal in here so you lose a lot less water than in the modern types uh you basically control your pressure with the stove as opposed to having a weight so i can get away with running lower amounts of water but you never ever want your canner to run dry it'll warp the bottom ruin the temper the these are aluminum and uh and yeah i wouldn't trust it after that all right top air off i got the water sitting about halfway up the uh the green now that she's warming up let's affix the death plate i feel like one of those poor old bastards making bakelite if you've ever seen a bakelite reactor you kind of know what i'm talking about doesn't that thing just look like it belongs in fallout i think that's a video game right now the fun part begins get this thing up to temperature up to pressure and then we have to sit on it for 90 minutes and babysit it i got my electric stove pretty dialed into exactly where it keeps at 15 psi all right i fiddled with the knob for probably the first 20 minutes or so here kind of getting it settled in right to the sweet spot and we're just at this beautiful equilibrium where it's just the amount of energy going in from the stove is the same amount that's radiating out of course there's convection currents carrying heat away as well but it's it's just a perfectly balanced operation something about that is so cool i can't put my finger on it but something's freaking neat there fresh off the stove and still at 15ish psi we're just going to slowly release the pressure here here we are she's just about done blowing [Music] almost there i promise you can actually hear the water boiling as your you know pv equals nrt as you're changing the pressure you're allowing the water to essentially off gas change uh from liquid to vapor state phase change that's the word she's still hotter than a filipino poker in front of a pile of cash but i figure i'll help her cool off a little faster my wife's gonna kill me when she realizes why her wooden spoons are all dented all right oh there we go there they are after 90 minutes at 250 fahrenheit 15 psi spicy shouldn't be a single microbe anywhere in there all right all the jars have cooled off it's actually been a couple days you can see i also made up a liquid culture jar here because all i have is a little 10 milliliter syringe and i'm just going to multiply it i'll probably do another video on this if if you guys like uh mushroom related let me know and uh we'll we'll do a few more videos this is just uh ten to one water to bleach i would be doing this in the workshop but it's a lot more dusty in there and uh you gotta remember the air you breathe is not sterile there are little sprinkles floating all around you uh all sorts of microbial spores and airborne i'm sure you heard enough about that on the news recently basically the air is not sterile so trying to keep the workspace as clean as possible as you can see i haven't removed these yet because i don't want dust and whatnot to settle on these jars and i have my mushroom culture here this one's king oyster oyster mushrooms are aggressive as hell i'm just going to give it a little shaky shaky don't get too excited by that motion i'm sorry the lighting is kind of weird in here as well it's a what it is now this uh this comes sterile pack you can get little needles on amazon they're cheap go with 18 gauge or i can't can't ever find 16 gauge which i think this is yeah 16. i don't know where the hell they get these i can only ever find 18 and a little alcohol prep pad last thing i'm gonna do is hit my hands with some 70 isopropyl alcohol so you can see i'm gloved up i'm sure you could do this in your bare hands as well but i don't want to risk any contamination you're under your nails and can hide some really really pleasant stuff so i'm gonna do this quickly and methodically yep [Applause] alcohol pad now that needle is sterile so i'm not going to flame sterilize it just going to inject it right in there give it a little squirt of uh i'm going to leave that in there until i have the next one prepped we're just going to go down a row here usually i i can fill three jars a little higher i don't know why my grain didn't get as large as it normally does oops that one put it right back in there no worries a lot of people really freak out about contamination and keeping everything like totally sterile a lot of guys work in still air boxes or laminar flow hoods i just i've never had an issue with contaminants at least not yet i'm still pretty young to this hobby but it seems pretty uh pretty easy to not screw it up if you just practice good hygiene all right and finally the liquid culture oh and there we go and i still have three cc's left for whatever even though i technically really won't even need that since this jar will rapidly grow liquid mycelium it's pretty cool so now that we're done with the the drug den portion of things let me show you what it looks like after having some time to colonize i have a couple jars downstairs that uh that are pretty far along one last thing i'm going to do is actually mark these my handwriting has evolved at zero since kindergarten so here we go these are growing as we speak it might not be visible but the mycelium is uh getting nutrients and replicating and doing what it does so let me show you what it looks like after a couple weeks when we're ready to move on to the next step i'm not going to get into the actual fruiting blocks today but if you guys want more just say you liked it or say it sucked and uh you'll either get more mushroom videos or i'll skip them so here you can see what i currently have going this is actually in the office closet which my wife tried to decorate and i kind of took it over so we uh i'm trying a couple fruiting directly from mason jar so you can see i actually use brown rice here and this has been colonizing for quite some time and just took it out of the fridge actually to kind of cold shock it into fruiting this is uh some pink oyster also on brown rice that i tried um before i got rye green i didn't realize there was a feed company so close to me and uh i just tried some cheap brown rice from walmart works great i got some lion's mane going on brown rice that's almost fully colonized there's the king oysters we just did here is a fruiting block so usually instead of fruiting direct out of the jar you'll actually kind of shake up the jar and mix it into a hardwood uh sawdust that you either sterilize or pasteurize and after a while it'll fully colonize and you get these beautiful little shrooms these uh are only about one day since the caps actually started forming they grow quick once they start fruiting it's unbelievable and here was another little successful experiment oyster mushrooms are pretty damn stout organisms i actually just filled this thing with some aspen bedding shavings and some cuttings from a uh from a stem actually off of this block from last batch the wife and i ate and you can see where the stems were the mycelium just completely colonized around it and that is now fruiting it's pretty uh pretty impressive how resilient the oyster mushrooms actually are my buddy is an environmental scientist the one who actually got me into this and he was telling me how they're they're looking at using oyster mushrooms for environmental remediation of like oil spills and all sorts of crazy stuff so really neat well i hope you guys enjoyed and uh hopefully next video will actually make some fruiting blocks and you get to see some big old mushrooms please don't forget the thumbs up subscribe if you like the channel enough please consider keeping it afloat on patreon throw a nickel into the hat helps tremendously um patrons are are literally what keep this channel going at this point huge thank you to the patrons who make this channel work thanks for watching i'll see you next time have a great one

Channel: ElementalMaker

Views: 13,879

Rating: 4.9697924 out of 5

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Id: mlE5gx3WIYA

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020