go around and actually if you guys want to check out these mushrooms that we got so this is just uh one example this is an oyster mushroom um you guys want to pass us around so you see the texture of it this a really big one they got a little bit overgrown cuz Eric's out of town right now the guy it actually owns the farm anyways we're we're going to add ourself on this overo so you can introduce yourself all right hello I am KK can everybody hear me okay it's kind of weird to talk into a microphone and not hear yourself uh thank you Chris for um inviting us to do this it was um it's really fun to be a part of the community so if you've seen me around I'm also part of uh The Villages grown as well and have that podcast so we are here to talk to you a little bit about mushrooms and the importance um we also have some things we'll be handing out to you we actually brought some lines made which we'll cover um we also have some stickers up here some Rishi um and some dried morale so we got a little bit of stuff we can pass around uh my name is Rand Simson my undergraduate degree is in chemistry and I'm at the Brownwood Farmers Market every Saturday well I try to be U I'm going to be here this next Saturday we're going to have a a smaller supply of mushrooms just because we ramped up ramped down a little bit for the summer you know it's the it's the cooling down months you know but we will have a full display uh you know in the fall here and I welcome you guys all to come check out what we got and yeah do you want to talk about the sign up as well oh yeah there's a also a signup sheet if you do want any items we will uh we'll bring them out specifically for you on Saturday and uh you can just text me whatever you want and they'll I'll bring it out there yeah uh so a little bit bit about myself um so I am a plant biologist I actually did my schooling in Mano Minnesota and I just loved plants in general growing up I would always go to green houses with my mom and find those little succulent leavs on the ground and try to take them home to grow them um so that's kind of where everything started gardening with my mom um so at Mano I was studying plant biology but then also came across this amazing mushroom that I've never seen before um and so I just kind of was enamored with the connection between plants and fungi so that's kind of a little bit about what got me into it I also love listening to podcasts on plants and fungi but found that there was nothing really on the scientifically like getting down and nerdy with it um so I decided to just make my own and yeah Zephyr gills I also like to help out there um he actually started listening to my podcast uh Eric did the owner of zephyr gills and so he invited us to hang out at his farm and help him out and now we're all kind of partners with that so you kind of build that myal Network or just kind of bridge out and meet other people and it's really awesome and passionate can you want to talk more about yourself no we can we can just we can just all sounds good yeah so what is a mushroom does anybody know anybody what is it Melia yes so it is a if you could think of I guess it's part of the fungi Kingdom it's not a plant it's not an animal but it's actually more related to us than plants so that's really interesting as well but yeah so here is a good example of a mushroom and some of the components that make up of it so we have spores that is the reproductive um bits of it so that can grow into another mushroom a mushroom is a combination of all of the melal networks or mycelium put together into a mushroom shape so um all mushrooms are fungi but not all fungi are mushrooms if that makes sense so this specific category right here are all of the fruiting mushrooms or fungi so if you see things with a cap um those are specifically mushrooms but fungi could also be SL molds it could also be um other things that you're not even seeing so like bread molds things like that yeah so uh analogous to a plant uh this would be what would be called the fruiting body so the everything else the uh underneath the soil and everything like that is analogous to the stems the Le the vasculature of the plant uh it's not a plant it's a fungus but the analogy is that this would be the avocado so it's it's a thing that actually produces another organism and then the uh the spores that come out of it would be the seed and then the mycelium would be the root structure is to plants so why mushrooms uh there's been so many studies on health benefits with mushrooms as well as they're tasty to eat and um there's so many different ities so here you're actually looking at all oyster mushrooms which is the one we've passed around so we've also learned that there's tropical mushrooms that can withstand this floor to heat so that is the pink mushrooms the pink oyster and then also the yellow oyster I am working on getting mushrooms growing at uh The Village's grown as well so I'm starting to work on that and our biggest obstacle is uh the temperature and trying to make everything fit so I'm trying to convince them you can still grow mushrooms it is hot but some mushrooms actually really like the the heat so also mushrooms are plant-based as well so that's um a big factor I um I was vegan as well and this was a big staple in my diet making um portella type of burgers and just including mushrooms into every meal as to Sprouts or micro greens um so that's what Villages grown has so I kind of also mix micro with my mushrooms and you can just make it as a meal or also put it onto other vegetables and things like that something I've made uh that is crueltyfree is crueltyfree crab cakes yeah we have yeah so um environmental benefits so here is a picture of that oyster um I think this was actually taken at zhr gills as well so musroom can be grown indoors which means you can actually grow them all year round um requires less land so how most mushrooms are grown is actually on a shelving system like this where you can just keep growing them vertical so you can kind of stack things up uh there's also tons of different um I guess compartments that you can grow mushrooms into so it's all climate controlled um and also uh reduces the need for deforestation like you can also use them in your in your yard so you can actually um create spawns into our logs and grow mushrooms directly from your backyard so you can actually use logs or trees that are already decaying and these fungi can be produced out of these logs and then low carbon footprint as well so yeah waste reduction recycling I think we covered a lot on that you can use these to help decompose your yard if you could imagine the Forest right now if all the leaves would stay there and there would be no mushrooms you would have leaves just piling up on top of each other um every year so every year you kind of go into the the woods and you're like wow there's uh not that many things on the ground it's because the mushrooms are doing their job so they help with um decomposing and also you can use mushrooms there's a lot of studies now you can use mushrooms to uh break up Plastics so that is one of the newest research that is coming out um so actually covered um a a quite few of people on my podcast about how they are coming up with this different study of oyster mushrooms um there's also ones that can survive without oxygen um things like that so it could be like buried down into piles of garbage so that' be really amazing yeah this is another summary slide of it uh so environmental sustainability is really important uh you know I think the the Farms producing meat you know it takes about uh what is it 10 times the amount of grain to produce uh an ounce of meat that it does for the same protein and PE or something like that forgot the stat but it's a huge amount compared to what you can just produce if you're producing like all of the uh fields of corn out there the vast majority of that is feed corn very little of that is actually you know the type corn that humans eat that ends up you know in food and uh so you know if we can produce stuff that is similar to meat but healthier and produced at a lower cost and also doesn't involve factory farming which I think everybody can agree is not a really good practice um I think that that's really important for the future going forward and another point of mushrooms which is really important is that uh there's a lot of research going into anti- oncological things such as a turkey tail another one is Ri so this is a RI tincture a lot of mushrooms you can't eat outright such as the uh ri right there and uh that is because it is a very Woody mushroom but has been used in traditional Eastern medicine for a very long time now and uh one of the chemicals in turkey tail called poly saride K which is uh chemical that has been used in so how they found out about it is during the 2011 uh incident with the reactor meltdown in Japan what happened is radiation got out and then they found that a certain subset of people weren't having the rates of cancer others are not cultivatable like morels you only find them in the wild but um mushrooms themselves can be grown because of because it's that vertical uh growth they take very little space so there's very little actual physical footprint for these uh mushrooms to be farmed in and uh yeah you know it's for the future it's it's a great way to get a nutritional value out of uh you know wood that would just otherwise be decaying and turning into carbon dioxide and you know um me and things like that so it's it's a really good way to produce food yeah I am passing around a container of dried Morrow um so that is what you will see some mushrooms are cult cultivatable is that the word yeah um but then also ones are just strictly from the wild so most morels um are all from the wild there's also chantells um so very high quality edible uh mushrooms are usually wild forested and that is why it's hard to uh get a hold of but there's tons of things that you can cultivate as well so working on some Rishi oyster uh this one's actually Chestnut mushroom so all mushrooms have different textures and flavors which is also amazing um so this one's a little bit nutty a little bit sweet um has a really like crunchy texture so um you can kind of experiment with different types of mushrooms and find your favorite because a lot of people say that they don't like mushrooms um and that's probably because you've only tried one different mushroom so in the grocery store when you see the white button the baby Bella and the portella those are all the same mushrooms just at growing different growing stages so if you say that you don't like mushrooms but you've only had that one you've only had one mushroom um it a really exciting field because uh you know this is just what we've uh come to discover with edible mushrooms and the number of edible mushrooms is tales in comparison to the number of mushrooms that are actually out there like for instance in Minnesota there's about eight mushrooms that you can eat and there's over 12,000 species that we've discovered and those little little brown mushrooms that you see in your lawn those are actually you know thousands of species and then like most of them aren't edible and we there's there's not a really good way to determine which ones actually are so I don't recommend eating those at all um but lbms is what we call them yeah yeah they're they're abbreviated lbms which literally stands for little brown mushrooms and if you look up the the terminology yeah you know it's it's a really creative name I know but uh yeah you know that's that's just what they're called and so something that's really interesting is that if we're just studying the ones that are edible you know uh I think that it's uh you know there's something on the horizon where we could be looking at a full assay of all these other chemicals that are being produced as secondary metabolites for the mushrooms and uh yeah it's it's promising for the future but right now yeah polysaccharide K is in turkey tail is approved for use only in Europe uh but it is actually sold as a pharmaceutical uh drug and uh but you can you can still get tinctures are medically relevant uh you just got to be sure to uh you know Source your tin Again by the way you know I'm not a doctor I'm uh I just have a degree in chemistry and so you know talk to your doctor before doing anything um you know it's just by the way you know it's uh but there is there is research that's promising about that and I think more people should be paying attention to it and I think it's really super interesting um you know and there's other chemicals that are uh statins in mushrooms are a very important part of it but I'll talk about those a little bit later if you want yeah I wanted to go I wanted to go back just to well we can tell who the chemist is here uh so this is Eric the owner of zepher gills and this is um him holding a Rishi block so that's actually what we were passing around right there and so um it just kind of grew to the the shape of the bag which is really interesting we have we're um also have blocks at home that are growing out of the the ventilation that we have and they're they're just trying to grow any way so also uh red do sodium because they don't have sodium in there uh mushrooms are very low in calories so I think in a cup of mushrooms it's like 25 calories so um there's also some protein in there too which is an important part to uh vegan or whole whole food plant-based diet so that's something that I really uh try to get enough protein on my diet um also lack of cholesterol so that is also a plus as well here's um I got something add to that whenever whenever you're done you all right okay so the the cholesterol is also tamped down by the statins that are in the in the mushroom so it's helps to reduce that and uh yeah so the mushrooms produce natural statins it's a whole class of chemicals and um yeah you know it's really interesting even just A4 cup of mushrooms added into your diet can significantly reduce inflammatory markers as well yeah uh so this is uh one of the mushrooms that is very easily cultivatable it's a lion's man and oh yeah is that a sample of it y nice for everyone there I made Lion's Main Barbecue so you can taste how wonderful lion main is thank you for bringing that I love that I'm going to have to get that recipe actually too cuz if you did it without oil youed to right oh absolutely that oil all right that's interesting U because I I always cook with oil so you know it's always good to get interesting talk yeah um yeah just handed out a L's M thing so they can look at yeah so this one is lion's man uh it's you know Prim cultivated because it's delicious and it peels apart similar to the like string cheese and so you can make crab cake with it you can make apparently barbecue with it uh it's a really good meat substitute cuz it has that texture it doesn't impart a ton of its own flavor to the recipe so you got to be sure to spice it up and include whatever flavor you want to add into your meal into the mushroom most mushrooms are like that where They Don't Really impart their own flavor so much as they uh absorb whatever flavor is around them and lions Mana certainly like that and great and crab cakes yes yeah it's it's my favorite mushroom uh also for the cogn cognitive benefits of it so these are it produces a class of chemicals called horom and horon I I don't remember what the mechanism of action is but uh they yeah they they they were studied to reduce Alzheimer's dementia and I take it in so I have I have ADD and instead of taking a prescription medication for that um I supplement with liance man extracts um if you want to do liance man extract yourself it's important to know that the horanone actually evaporates out at after 100° Fahrenheit so what you want to do is uh you want to add it into something that's going to prevent it from getting above that temperature so you can pressure cook it in a alcohol tincture and then do a separation that way yeah yeah cuz it's these are balide type chemicals so they I think they or nonpolar it'd be it'd be polar okay yeah do you make the tinctures and sell them the tinure that we have right now is the ri tinure and I'm going to be doing Li main tinctures eventually we haven't gotten around to doing that yet um but that is something that's on the horizon yeah um I can also recommend a uh a place that does sell like turkey tail tincture that I do know has uh like fully like packed tinctures a lot a lot of time if if you buy if you buy a tinure from somewhere like Amazon or something like that and you evaporate it out you'll notice that there's very little left behind in the bottle and so you got to you got to you know be aware of where you're sourcing your stuff from but uh desert Alchemist if you look up desert alchemist that that's a good place that I recommend getting tinctures from uh we do have RI tinctures though and uh we're at the Brownwood Market most Saturday and so yeah if you want to come by and check out the ri tines or check out the stand or just get some mushrooms you know welcome you to do that yeah don't you don't you also sell Lion's man powder we do yeah yeah yeah yeah I put that in my my coffee my alternative coffee every morning yeah that's one of my favorites I I like to add it into uh my protein shake so I have it premixed into protein powder and then it's uh really easy to just take that and it's uh I can't do whey powder so I just do uh um what is that PE powder PE protein another thing that you need to make sure that you get into your diet is vitamin D there's a lot of vitamin D3 in uh animal um products so getting D2 from mushrooms is uh very helpful so getting um at least 20 minutes of sunlight um with sunstream but also so um yeah having the D2 from mushrooms is also important so that is another aspect or plus to it as well so how to cook mushrooms I think that's what everybody's waiting about so here is some of the lines name here on this B morels for instance are a very renowned delicacy but you can actually if you eat raw morels you can get something called Morel poisoning and so that that can be dangerous um you know most most mushrooms that you can eat uh aren't going to you know kill you but it might give you diarrhea or something like that if you don't cook it and it's also really important to cook them because the cell wall has to break down for all the nutrients to be bioavailable kit and yeah the the kiten has to break down so that you can actually digest it and if you don't have it broken down by cooking it you're going to get a stomach ache from your stomach trying to digest something that it can't digest yeah yeah kiten is the fiber to a mushroom so uh if you know what like crab shells are made out of it or like your hair or your nails that's what kiten is so just having that raw is very hard to digest and could uh hurt your stomach so uh what what she's showing here is that you can you can either cut them or it's just as easy to tear them apart and so you know if you don't want to cut them you can just and you don't even have to make that noise while you're doing it can if you want yeah yeah I know a lot of people that don't even believe in using knives to cut their mushrooms because that's like against something so and sorry I don't think I answered your question fully so the the thing that I'm doing uh when removing these because I didn't the mushrooms that we sell at the market we pre-cut off the part that uh meets with the sawdust and that that they grow on so you don't have to worry about the mushrooms that uh we sell uh because they in most places that retail mushrooms aren't going to include the mushroom media in what they're selling you they shouldn't at least they should be you know selling you just what you're supposed to eat um but yeah you know if you are growing your own mushrooms you do want to be you know sure to cut off that part that actually meets the melium it's itself and that's uh it's not going to hurt you too much but you don't want to eat a whole lot of sawdust you know yeah yeah lant yeah and some of the mushrooms like you saw in the beginning that stem was very hard to um even break off so it'd be a challenge to eat so a lot of shitake uh stems aren't edible just because they're very very fibrous so I usually PL pluck those off so it's kind of up to you if you want to try to cut through that or not but yeah what I did right there was I took a piece of the mushroom and I threw it in the pan just so that I can gauge how hot the pan is and you can go low and slow or you can get a nice sear on one side by going high and hot uh you know there's there's a ton of different ways to cook them and uh I'm no Chef you know so uh you know I think that there's there's ways to incorporate mushrooms that are you know infinite yeah and also we're experimenting with different things to add to it so um adding some lemon juice also to mushrooms brings out that flavor and so that's something that we also were doing um something else to add is onions uh shallots garlic like all of those uh good things that you can add to just bring out that flavor as well as like thyme oregano salt salt is something that we add usually um directly to the pan as well because it PS the the liquid out of the mushrooms a lot of mushrooms are very uh liquid dense so if you like squeeze a fresh mushroom you might actually see some water drip out and so um it's easy to just kind of sear that in or um yeah so adding the salt to it actually pulls out some of that water to cook faster and better so yeah we are still in the The Cutting process there was a lot of mushrooms that we wanted to uh cut up so yeah and and we really wanted just show you guys how easy it is to just I mean you just cut them up throw them in a pan and you know like similar to what you do with your vegetables that that'd be a really good way to do it is to just cook them all at once um and then have them in the fridge so you can add them into stuff later mushrooms are similar to uh to like fish in that the fresher they are the better they taste you know when I'm working at the stand oh yeah yeah of course I was going to wait till you were finish no you're fine um you know the Portell mushrooms the big and and sometimes people stuff them yes do they clean out that I don't usually do that um the more that you get that wet the harder it will be to kind of dry out um and I don't really always want to steam my mushrooms but you can you could scrape it out um but you could also to stuff it probably scraping it out um but just searing it as like a burger substitute or something like that I just kind of um season it and then press it down is that the is that really healthy for you or do you recommend eating that or not um I think it's based on what You' want to do um it's not unhealthy at all um it's maybe a different texture and longer to cook um that would be my only input yeah with with sorbot mushrooms as long as you're cooking them you're sterilizing them essentially so you don't have to worry about you know I think uh you know those that are growing on the factory scale you know kind of do get a little bit dirty but I I don't see any wrong with just throwing them in a pan I've always just thrown them in the pan instead of washing them and I haven't really had any issues with it uh you know I think some people would say to wash it but I think most people that I know that eat a lot of mushrooms don't usually wash their mushrooms they just throw them in there some yeah something else that you could do is have like a wet paper towel and then you could like rinse it off that way or just kind of clean up little areas um so you're not submerging the mushroom because I I don't like submerging the mushroom at all just because and it you have to get it dry again to cook and it's just kind of gets a weird texture so people don't like that um slimy mushroom texture it's um because you're probably having it too wet however if you are doing wild mushrooms such as morels you do want to be absolutely sure to uh soak them and look out for insects insects love mushrooms as much as we like mushrooms yeah and you know it's it's something you know it comes with wild forging mushrooms you know so if you if you are finding them out in the wild you know which is something that people have done for Millennia you know and I don't know it's still around so you elaborate on the brown bag and you just put it in the fruit what you were doing there yes yes so um the way that I store mushrooms is so actually Zephyr gills I I love their packaging because it is in a cardboard box so what you're seeing in grocery stores is usually uh like a plastic or something that holds on to the moisture but you want to actually uh let the mushroom breathe and so their boxes are amazing but if you also have a brown paper bag I just store all my mushrooms in there and then uh just keep them in my crisper drawer or in the fridge to last longer because do you inter miix them or do you keep the variety some separate bags I honestly just mix them together but uh you can if you don't want um sometimes there's like the Spore print from mushrooms will actually go onto other ones so if you want it to look nice you can separate them but we're all I'm going to probably cook them together so I just let them mingle yeah there's some mushrooms that they stay in the refrigerator I would and should we put them in the refrigerator yes I would put them in the refrigerator CU once you pick them or bring them home uh they'll start to age so mushrooms are always a living um uh type of thing so it's like a plant um it's always kind of um I don't know how you want to say it but it's always kind of surviving um so if you put in the fridge it slows down the decomposition of it and so that's whatever these are the spices I used uh it's really simple simple just black pepper onion garlic uh you know just really basic spices you can use anything though uh I think mushrooms have a sort of amami flavor to them so if you want to bring that out you know you're going to use your your garlics onion and those kind of you know spices for that and yeah I mean you can get crazy with it and do something wrong yeah when you're putting in that paper bag or you're trying to store them can you store them with um some sort of paper between them towel or or wack paper yeah the whole idea of the paper bag is to allow the the moisture in the mushrooms to not condense at on the side so with plastic what you have what happens is you have the mushrooms breathing out and then PPA and then when they come into contact with that plastic it retains the moisture right there and that causes the mushrooms to expire faster yeah so uh you can do this even with the port Bellas that you get from the store you know store them in a take them out of that plastic and store them in a paper bag and they'll last a little bit longer and then if you really want to be have them last a long time uh you can put the paper bag in a plastic bag and then that will the cardboard will absorb a little bit of moisture and the plastic bag will stop it from escaping all the way um but you know again it's like fish where the fresher that it is the better it tastes and the more nutritious it is so it's it's sort of like you know vegetables too like anything that you eat freshly picked is going to be better and probably also uh retain more nutrients so that's kind of like the downside with some vegetables is um yeah it kind of loses the nutrients as it ages so um and your your question about how long I would say around a week um I've honestly forgotten about my mushrooms in the fridge um so it was like for two weeks and they were still still fine so so we we have a what was the bottle of lemon you had next to what you cooking lemon juice yeah we put some lemon juice in there to brighten up the flavor cuz it was yeah we tried it after I recommend having some sort of liquid in when you're sautéing them just to transfer the heat you know from the pan to the mushrooms um so here is another I wish we uh could what's it I know maybe at the end of this we'll we'll leave this up and then everybody can take take a picture yeah or we can email the I'll put it on Facebook recip awesome so here we have a stir fry recipe um so yeah you can use any of your mushrooms and just kind of also have some peppers onions um and then right here I put some garlic or broth um even a little bit of maple syrup just because I could also um bring out that Umami flavor this is the most common way that we prepare them yep I usually just mix mushrooms with my vegetables and call it a great meal um if anybody also uses nutritional yeast yes so that's also what I put on there extra protein extra vitamins um and also tasty so that's something that I always add to my mushrooms and vegetables I have the clicker uh so mushroom soup uh this is a very common uh favorite one so using also you um the mushroom stems that we were saying that you can take off you can actually soak in the water and make uh your own mushroom broth of it and then use that mushroom broth to make mushroom soup another thing with the mushroom soup is that if you're using Lion's man to make it you're retaining those Horas Nots in it when you cook it in the soup right because the the water is going to absorb that and uh you know as long as you're not uh going too long you could also do a a pressure cooker with the soup and then that is going to you know so that the steam isn't coming out you know cuz if you're keeping it below 100° then um or if you're keeping it above 100 degrees then the raason already evaporating out but if you use a pressure cooker what you can do with the soup is have it in there and then you don't have to worry about the steam coming out and you can cook it nice uh this is that crab cake recipe so hopefully uh we can also we'll talk after about your uh the other recipes that people have um pictures that you've been seeing are actually my past um people that I've interviewed for my podcast so this is um the guy from mushroom Revival so that's also a podcast and he talks all about mushrooms and interviews other mushroom people um this uh past one was he does um mushroom tarot cards so I interviewed him and he designs each card um as a different mushroom and so it was really fun to interview him any questions comments yeah and we also have uh some health benefits and Stu I also buy your dried mushrooms and I and I use either dried mushrooms or the fresh mushrooms to make a mushroom gravy yes and that's delicious and I love to make um sweet potatoes or mashed potatoes and then put the mushroom gra that's that's a great Point too you can prolong your mushrooms and dry them and then um pretty much like that jar that I was passing around you can last for a long time have you seen the movie fantastic guy and for all the new people that are here today maybe you could talk about that movie just yeah yeah actually um so Howard sprous is um one of my first people that I interviewed and he works with Paul Samons and so Paul Samons if you know he's the main mushroom uh mushroom guy um he's written melium running which is the book that I actually got introduced to um so he talks about all these different things how to how to find mushrooms ID cooking um but yeah fantastic fungi um Paul Sam also put on and so they actually were talking about micro remediation how they are decomposing Plastics and they just they have such great visuals in that movie that um explain so many things like underneath the ground like how can you even see the mycelium or roots and I believe it's still free yes on Netflix it was on Netflix it's free I highly recommend everybody fungi yeah uh something I didn't add before uh that's really interesting research is they found out that there's actually uh so with psychedelic mushrooms they're they found that it stimulates neural growth so it actually stimulates um neural uh neurons to grow and what theyve found out more recently is that there's also chemicals in um liin man and uh RI that stimulated without the Psychedelic experience so uh you know that's a new new route of research and I think that's really interesting and then also um there's Corps mushroom which you guys know maybe from the The Last of Us TV show but it's it's actually a it's a real mushroom and and it uh it targets insects and it's called a zombie fungus it actually it's really super interesting uh but yeah they cover that in fantastic fungi I believe too yeah and uh that one that one's super interesting but it's it can be it could theoretically be used as a insecticide you know you could use it on an ant hill and then you you know you kill all the ants and it's actually being blocked by the insecticide companies so the insecticide companies uh Lobby true yeah they Lobby again to have this law pass to prevent it from being used because we all know that you know chemicals are where it's at right you know right it's great so yeah thank you thank you we'll yeah cool