Growing the Rarest Edible Mushrooms

every day i get engaged with mushrooms and i help them live they help me live it inspires me to work really hard every day to make sure that i'm helping to make the world a better place mushrooms to me are like the hooked on phonics of ecological literacy getting to know mushrooms you have to get to know something else because all mushrooms have a symbiotic relationship with something it helps you to learn the language of nature and how everything else is working [Music] my name is william padilla brown i'm a citizen scientist i travel around the world looking at interesting organisms figuring out how we can utilize them to help alleviate economic stresses and just uplift humanity in general mushrooms particularly piqued my interest some mushrooms just grow on so many different diverse materials and really only need a little bit of moisture to grow anybody can grow mushrooms and whether or not you're selling them you have food that you can feed yourself or feed somebody else which can reduce the amount of money that you're spending you can be stranded on desert island and if there's mushrooms growing on it you can grow them as well we're here today in my basement i've been running some urban agriculture experiments down here for a while [Music] into the mushroom grow tent now look we got a little oyster mushroom friend here this is where we produce gourmet mushrooms and we experiment with different species of mushrooms that haven't been cultivated before then we have some lion's mane and oyster mushrooms and things like that in here is where we experiment with cordyceps mushrooms in collaboration with different laboratories but specifically for medicinal production of compounds so not for high yields or anything like that really fun to be playing around with this tent and thinking about all of the people that might benefit down the line from what we learn in here usually when i wake up i go check on all of the living things in my house maybe i go hiking and i'm looking for for some new mushrooms to bring into the lab so i do a lot of expansion of wild mushrooms that i find so that i can grow it on my farm check on the greenhouse make sure it's all situated before the heat of the day comes in water everything in there if i have to every day is different it's not a typical day on the farm [Music] we're going to be doing some simple mushroom scrambled eggs which is like beginner favorite people that don't like the texture of mushrooms this is my favorite thing to get them introduced into mushrooms we'll see mushrooms like pleurotus mushrooms or oyster mushrooms have cholesterol reducing statins in them if you mix the cap with the stems for a lot of mushrooms the texture's different in the cap and the stem so some bites will have a different chew to them which kind of throws certain people off and the stems can always be saved for mushrooms i'm going to eat these fresh you want to make a soup stock these are great for soup stocks but just keep in mind that they will absorb some water or hold on to some water so it's important to cook the water out the onions are properly cut whenever your eyes start to cry so before we get the pan all oily i'm going to go ahead and put the mushrooms in there and the reason that i don't add oil at first is because i oil doesn't mix with water and if you coat the mushrooms in oil it's going to make the water stay in the mushrooms and this will lead to a soggy texture with your final mushroom product put it in a non-stick pan so i can get these eggs good [Music] i think the biggest problem that i've seen in communities around the united states is a lack of attention on the humans that are in the communities the majority of the people in the united states are living in low economic situations where they're not able to afford most of the things that they see advertised to them and i'm only speaking from personal experience and things i've seen i mean i was in that wheel of things i wanted that i couldn't have before i realized that everything that i could ever want was right in front of me i didn't grow up anywhere particularly i spent a lot of time moving around my dad was in the military my mom worked for the department of agriculture so i spent a lot of time up and down the east coast with my dad and with my mom i lived in london in mexico and taiwan i decided to start growing mushrooms when i was like 18 19 years old also because i wanted access to organic food and it wasn't accessible to me really at a price point that made sense i figured i could do a better job myself so i realized because there was nobody to teach me that if i figured out enough to be able to teach people that i'd be in a good position to be able to educate people around me mushrooms are constantly helping to clean and maintain harmonious symphony in the ecosystem they can be trained to deal with hydrocarbons there are some mushrooms that help to feed trees or establish connections of communication between trees there's some mushrooms that help to break down dead and dying material on the ground to feed plants we've done a lot of damage to the soil in the united states with deforestation for building cities or monocrop agriculture allows a lot of soil to run off our economy is not the best and it's not super easy to to accumulate a lot of wealth here coming from from my position in the united states at least mushrooms grow on agricultural and urban waste products so it doesn't cost really anything to get started growing mushrooms i learned to grow cordyceps by watching a bunch of thai youtube videos i had no idea what they were saying i just watched them what they're doing in their labs and replicated what i saw so before i started growing the mushrooms in the united states there was no public display or any information that you can find about anybody cultivating cordyceps mushrooms in the united states the only culture that you could buy of it was about 300 if you wanted to grow it yourself and it wasn't capable of producing mushrooms right now you can get like between six and eight hundred dollars a pound in the united states depending on your quality and who you're selling it to [Music] we're here with the cordyceps and this is my bread and butter this is the main staple of the whole organization the whole progress the whole process these are mushrooms that haven't really been grown that much in historically i was actually one of the first people in the united states to figure out how to grow these we have uh our cordyceps here in a couple different forms some fully fruited and ready to harvest and then we have them in their wild form over here so this is kind of where it starts for us in the process every summer i go out into the wild and i find cordyceps growing on their insect hosts here in pennsylvania we find them growing on a couple different species of moth pupa occasionally we'll find them growing on the caterpillars or the moth larva and whenever the insect is maybe sick or there's some sort of issue in the environment because it doesn't always happen the mushroom will take over the insect and put it in a prime position for the mushroom to grow out and release its spores into the environment i'll bring it into my lab and we'll either take the spores or we'll take some of the tissue and grow it on a nutritive media it's kind of like jello and then we use the mycelium the fungus that grows on our little agar plate to grow it on rice where we can then harvest lots more cordyceps indoors than we could ever find outside [Music] my biggest success with cordyceps would probably be teaching about cordyceps at the telluride mushroom festival which is one of the biggest mushroom festivals in the world but after i taught there it really solidified and validated me to the community because like i was doing legitimate science but like i was just some young black kid from some random place in pennsylvania and it validated me to the public and after that i got a lot more work we got the king oysters we got the cordyceps and we're going to make some dumplings and i do not wash my mushrooms unless they are dirty but for the most part mushrooms come pretty clean we don't need a lot of bit because cordyceps a little goes a long way the chili's in there too this ginger in there some garlic some of these green onions a little scoop of this ginger tamarind herbal jam some local hemp oil from here in pennsylvania and a little bit squeeze of half a lime in there yeah cordyceps tastes like a mild like sweet cheese yeasty nutritional yeast kind of flavor the king oysters more of like a scallop kind of texture fresh sweet mushroom kind of flavor each individual mushroom is toting its own health benefits we'll see mushrooms like the cordyceps help us to get more oxygen into our body it's good for respiratory health and it's good for energy production it's also an aphrodisiac they've been called the tibetan viagra [Music] so many bright flavors those mushrooms if you gave that to somebody and told them it was pork or shrimp they wouldn't be able to tell the difference sow them the advice that i would give to people that don't have access to affordable and healthy food is to grow your own start small get a feel for the for the life that you're trying to develop a relationship with i mean develop a dialogue with the organisms that you're trying to work with whether it's a tomato or whether it's an oyster mushroom or whatever it is and once you feel like you have a good connection with it then start to grow it on a bigger scale and you'll see more successes that way i think i will grow mushrooms for the rest of my life [Music] you

Channel: Munchies

Views: 768,770

Keywords: MUNCHIES, farm life, food, homemade mushrooms, how to grow mushrooms, mushroom farming, mushrooms, vice, will padilla brown, mushroom cultivation, mushroom recipes, science of food, food scientist, mushroom scientist, cordyceps, how to grow cordyceps, fungi, mushrooms fungi, how to cook mushrooms, best mushrooms, growing mushrooms, eat better, Padilla-Brown, citizen scientist, scientist, grow your own oyster mushrooms, grow your own mushrooms

Id: GKMQpjo--HM

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Cromsmountain34]

This is absolutely amazing. I love mushrooms and it’s great young people are experimenting with new/cool ideas.

[u/fetusfarm]

And you can, too! r/mushroomgrowers