Pink Oyster Mushrooms: GROW and COOK (Tastes Like Bacon!!)

hey guys tony from freshcat mushrooms here and today we're going to start growing some pink oyster mushrooms so i have a bunch of these blocks of pink oysters they're already fully colonized in fact they're already starting to pin all over the block since they're already fully colonized it wouldn't be too long maybe a week or so before we're going to start to see some beautiful pink oyster mushrooms and there's a million different ways that you can grow any type of oysters pink oysters specifically but we're going to be growing these outside in kind of a mini greenhouse so if you've seen the reishi mushroom mini greenhouse grow video that we did this is going to be very similar to that but instead of actually planting these in the ground we're just simply going to put them inside of this greenhouse and grow them right from the grow bag that they're already in now it is kind of the end of summer it is cooling off a little bit but we still do get some pretty warm days so you might be thinking why would you be growing oyster mushrooms instead of a greenhouse but pink oysters really are one of those species that doesn't mind the heat at all not so much as maybe a reishi mushroom that actually thrives in the heat but pink oysters are one of those species that you can easily grow in higher temperature areas or higher temperature conditions so all we're going to be doing is basically opening up these grow bags and putting them in fruiting conditions which is this greenhouse keeping them nice and humid and then we're going to start to see them grow and in about a week or so maybe a little bit more we're going to be able to harvest some beautiful pink oyster mushrooms so let's get started so here are the pink oyster mushroom fruiting blocks and these are just simply our hardwood sawdust fuel pellets or hardwood fuel pellets and bran that have been inoculated with pink oyster mushroom grain spawn in fact it's a pink oyster grain spawn that i made when i use the liquid culture inoculation technique in one of my other videos so as you can see you know the pink oysters are already starting to fruit inside of the bag they're ready to go so basically all we're going to do is i'm going to fold over the top of the bag and then i'm going to cut a big slit right across and that's going to provide an area for the mushrooms to grow now if you want to kind of speed the process up a little bit this maybe isn't the best example let's see something over here oh look at this one you can see that it's actually already broken through the bag i don't know if you can see that but the the mushroom is actually starting to already fruit through the bag so these are definitely ready to go like i said if you want you can find blocks that have maybe already started the fruit and kind of cut them along the lines where the fruiting bodies are forming like here for example and might cut cause them to fruit a little bit quicker but yeah just to keep things simple like i said we're just going to fold over the top of the bag and then cut right across with an exacto knife and they should fruit right through that slit [Music] [Music] when you're fruiting your blocks of course there's lots of different ways you can do it this method i simply like i said just fold it over the top of the bag and then i used an elastic to kind of just keep the bag down and then went ahead and cut a slit right across the top of the bag and this kind of mimics the way that oysters like to grow nature because they'll grow on dead or dying logs and they'll kind of poke through the bark of the tree so this plastic kind of acts like the bark and the oysters can find their way through this crack in the bark or the slit that they cut through the bag but if you wanted to you could simply just cut off the top of the bag and have the mushrooms fruit out the top that can work quite successfully especially with pink oysters it works great but i kind of like to do this method because it's just nice and clean and will typically perform well and just kind of have these nice beautiful bouquets of pink oyster mushrooms that are coming out through the top of this block basically all i'm going to do now is put these blocks inside of this mini greenhouse and over the next little while just kind of keep it humid maybe go ahead and spray it with a spray bottle or hose it down every once in a while just to make sure it's humid in there and kind of watch as these mushrooms form so not too much to do now other than put these into fruiting conditions and grow some mushrooms so when you're growing mushrooms outside like this it's pretty simple all you really got to do is make sure that it doesn't get too hot it doesn't get too dry um and that it stays out of the wind and the direct sunlight other than that it's kind of set it and forget it one nice thing about this mini greenhouse that like i said is just some chicken wire inside of this garden box with some shade cloth and some poly super simple to make and it does seem to keep the bugs out as well so you're going to be less likely to run into that problem where the bugs kind of bury into your mushrooms and kind of ruin your growth of course that can still happen and we're going to pay attention make sure that doesn't happen and hopefully in a week to 10 days we're going to have some pink oyster mushrooms so some of these blocks clearly aren't wanting to pin where i've cut the slice um and actually this one it just kind of broke that cluster right through the bottom of the bag and it's kind of happening again right here so clearly these mushrooms want a fruit but they don't want a fruit where i wanted fruit so no big deal i'm just going to go ahead and cut a slice kind of around where it's already fruiting and maybe flip that one over too and yeah they should have no problem growing right there because yeah they won't always grow exactly where you want them i mean it they would eventually grow through there but um since they're already pinning quite nicely i'm just going to go ahead and let them grow where they want to grow [Music] you can see that this one is actually growing quite nicely this is the one that just broke through the bag i didn't even have to cut it and oyster mushrooms will do that they will find a way to grow most of the time uh no matter how you try to stop them so yeah it just broke a little pinhole through the bottom of the bag and that beautiful cluster is growing right out of that all right so let's take a look at the little pink oyster greenhouse as you can see there's lots of pink oysters coming along this one is doing really really nice um they're not growing as big or as fast as i would have expected and that's mainly because it's actually been pretty cold at night it's kind of uh you know september here already and it's getting pretty cool at night so these are growing a lot slower but the greenhouse is keeping it warm enough and it's warm enough during the day that these are growing pretty nicely and as you can see they're growing out of the bottom of the bag where they were all pinning underneath the bag and where i cut some of that plastic back but they're also starting to pin on those original slices so if i would have just left them as they were where i sliced the bag they probably would have grown just fine you can see that back here on this one as well you have that cluster growing at the top where i cut the bag where it was already pinning but also down here right where i cut that slice across the bag you can see the fruits are starting to show up there as well really nicely so you can see that over here as well so i'm probably going to let these grow for another few days at least before i harvest them and we'll see just how big they can get but otherwise they're looking really good and i really haven't done anything except for every once in a while i'll take this hose and i just kind of mist the entire inside of the greenhouse and you don't have to worry about getting the mushrooms wet directly it's no problem just kind of soak it down really nice and make sure you keep lots of humidity inside of the greenhouse all right so it's been about two weeks now just under two weeks since i put these pink oyster blocks in the greenhouse and as you can see we have some nice big beautiful pink oyster mushrooms here and we did get some pretty nice clusters and some pretty good sized fruits so we definitely got a good bounty but honestly i think it could have been better one of the reasons why these are smaller caps than you would usually see is because it's kind of difficult to get a lot of fresh air exchange inside of that mini greenhouse oyster mushrooms in particular are kind of sensitive to fresh air if they don't get enough fresh air they'll kind of form these smaller fruits pink oysters aren't as bad as some of the other ones but you still want to try and get as much fresh air as possible which is difficult to do while maintaining that humidity so that greenhouse does a great job of maintaining humidity and also kind of maintaining some of that warmth especially during these cooler nights that we're having but it doesn't do a great job of getting a lot of that fresh air in there to decrease the co2 concentration and help get those big beautiful fruits but still i think it's worth it because it turned out really good we did get a lot of beautiful pink oyster mushrooms and you can see those are absolutely perfect and ready to harvest which we're going to be doing in just a second the other reason why they're kind of a little bit smaller is because it is quite cool we were getting really cool temperatures overnight below 10 degrees celsius or so so that would have stunted the growth a little bit i think if the temperatures were a little bit warmer kind of room temperature or better we would have got much bigger caps and in fact i had one of these blocks just sitting in my office out in normal room conditions and we did get much bigger caps on that one although it wasn't as humid which is why we didn't get you know as prolific of a fruiting so either way super happy uh how this turned out it definitely fruited a lot better on top of the block where the pins were already forming and all i had to do was kind of open up the plastic but you can see it did really start to pin especially on this block where i cut that initial slice right across the front of the bag and you can see there that the mushrooms just ended up fruiting through there no problem so i think what i'm going to do is harvest these bigger clusters and then just put them right back in the greenhouse allow these smaller fruits to grow a little bit bigger but also allow for a second flush because once we harvest these if we put them right back in fruiting conditions we will very likely get a second flush out of these same blocks because oyster mushrooms are quite prolific and quite often you can get two maybe even three flushes out of the same block before you have to put it in the compost pile pink oyster mushrooms have a really short shelf life even shorter than much of the other oyster mushrooms pink oyster mushrooms you basically want to eat them right away and since this is kind of a shorter video i thought it'd be fun to tell you a really nice way to cook these up and tegan's going to help me do this but you can make them taste just like bacon if you cook them just right which is kind of unique and is one thing that people often do with pink oyster mushrooms so we're gonna make these little bacon bits okay so here's our freshly harvested bounty of pink oyster mushrooms just harvested them and tegan is actually going to show us how to make some tasty pink oyster mushroom bacon bits yeah it's a really easy recipe and you can top it on really anything you want you can put it on your breakfast you can put it on your sandwich you could top it onto salads anything you want simple recipe really three main ingredients you have the oysters some oil in the pan and your smoked paprika main ingredients and then we're also going to add a little salt just for a little you know salty deliciousness uh why don't you show us how you're going to make them all right so first we're going to start by preparing them just by cutting them so we're going to cut off the stems and then we're going to chop them into a little bit smaller pieces depends how big you want your bacon bits they will shrink down a little bit but just see what size of bacon bits you want and go with that so we are cutting them approximately yay big see that for our bacon bits your shirt really matches the pink oysters thank you i did not plan that this is a lot of pink oysters yeah it's a ton look at this all right finished preparing the mushrooms they're cut up into nice little small pieces i have my pan behind me just warming up we're gonna go ahead and toss those in the pan we've used coconut oil here but you can add any oil that you want or say you're a fan of butter butter is also a good choice pink oysters are this beautiful pink color but when they do hit the heat they will change so take a look at what's happening here unfortunately you lose a lot of that pink color but they're still just as delicious so we're going to add a little bit of salt while they're cooking but i'm not going to add the smoked paprika until closer to the end because i don't want it to become too bitter and add off flavor to the bacon in order to get that really great fatty mouth feel that you find in bacon i have added two relatively large scoops of coconut oil to this but trust me it's worth it so we're going to cook our mushrooms over medium heat if they have a little more moisture in them you might want to do a medium slightly medium high heat just depends on the moisture content and how fast they're cooking i'm going to go ahead and add a little salt you can see that they're finally starting to brown a little bit starting to crisp up so we're just going to keep cooking them and stirring them until they're fully crisp now our mushrooms are nice and crispy right now take a look so i'm going to go ahead and add the smoked paprika and the smoked paprika is going to give it that nice smoky flavor reminiscent of bacon you can also add other things if you're feeling creative like garlic powder onion powder liquid smoke anything like that that you might feel that it would bring out a really great flavor all right these are ready to come out of the pan okay so these look like bacon bits they smell like bacon bits now for the big test they actually taste like bacon do they taste like bacon bits let's uh let's give it a try here oh my god those are so good and they even have that kind of crispy kind of chewy meaty texture that's really really nice and you could put these on basically anything right or you can just eat them as is yeah they're salty they got that smoky flavor i don't know what it is about pink oysters i mean you could probably honestly do this with other oyster mushrooms get pretty similar results there is something special about the pinks though so in that big batch of pink oysters that i used i used probably about four tablespoons of coconut oil and one heaping teaspoon of smoked paprika which i added at the very end because sometimes it can become a little bitter if you cook it too long so i added it right at the end when i had turned off the heat okay and there's something important about the smoked paprika versus just paprika right yeah the smoked paprika is gonna give it that really nice smoky flavor that's gonna bring you back to that taste of bacon yeah so if you happen to have some pink oyster mushrooms at home uh go ahead and try and make some bacon bits uh you won't regret it they're delicious so good i need to find a good one you need i got a big one here i know oh my gosh that's so good i think i might just eat this whole plate so cheers see you guys in the next video

Channel: FreshCap Mushrooms

Views: 38,847

Rating: 4.9601531 out of 5

Keywords: pink oysters, growing mushrooms, pleurotus ostreatus, mushroom, mushroom recipes, mushroom bacon vegan, mushroom cultivation, grow mushrooms at home, mushroom kit, mushroom farming, freshcap mushrooms, pink mushrooms, growing pink oyster mushrooms, pink oyster mushroom, pink oyster mushroom time lapse

Id: 0sWdheEg-xU

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021