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THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 2000
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NORTH COUNTY TIMES
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MUSHROOMING TREND
San Marcos
Grower Pioneering New Varieties
By Laura Groch, STAFF
WRITER
WALDO NILO / Staff Photographer
So you thought the mania for exotic mushrooms had ended with the
shiitake, the oyster and the portobello mushroom? Think again. And
say hello to the hon-shimeji and the king oyster mushroom, appearing
now at trendy North County restaurants and in Asian markets near
you.
Steve Farrar, general manager of Golden Gourmet Mushrooms in San
Marcos, holds a cluster of hon-shimeji mushrooms. They are the most
popular mushroom in Japan, he says, and are prized by chefs at area
restaurants such as the Marine Room in La Jolla and Pacifica Del
Mar in Del Mar.
Golden Gourmet employs about 18 people to plant, grow and harvest
its three types of mushrooms.
Above, Bernarda Martinez, left, Barbara Esporsa and Rosa Sanchez
weigh and pack clusters of slender enoki mushrooms.
The hon-shimeji and king oyster mushrooms, as well as the more
well-known enokis, are grown locally by Golden Gourmet Mushrooms
in San Marcos. The company sells most of its mushrooms to brokers,
who sell the mushrooms to restaurants and markets. Golden Gourmet
produces about 400,000 pounds of the slender enokis yearly. It will
produce about 100,000 pounds of hon-shimeji and 50,000 pounds of
king oyster mushrooms this year, doing about $1 million in total
sales, said general manager Steve Farrar.
"The hon-shimeji is so good," said Farrar. "It's got a spicy, almondy
flavor, and has a really good shelf life. The king oyster mushroom
is closer to a shiitake. It's really robust, with a big stem and
cap. It's chewy but tender."
On top of the trend among area chefs using the new mushrooms is
chef de cuisine Ron Oliver of the Marine Room in La Jolla. "I've
been using them since I was in Florida, three or four years ago,"
said Oliver of the hon-shimeji. "We were importing them from Japan
then. "They're a great mushroom. The flavor is slightly nutty, but
delicate. What I love most about them is their natural beauty."
The hon-shimejis, also called brown beech mushrooms, grow in a cluster,
their pale stems contrasting with their dark caps. They make a dramatic
presentation, said Oliver: "I keep them in a cluster on top of a
pomegranate-glazed sea bass -- so it's the first thing the customer
notices when they see the dish."
Chef Chris Idso at Pacifica Del Mar restaurant in Del Mar also
uses hon-shimejis. "I like them all the way around because they're
not too strongly flavored," said Idso, who uses them in a wild mushroom
blend as well as with Asian dishes. As for the king oyster mushrooms,
"they have a similar character" to the hon-shimejis, said Oliver.
"They have a nuttiness in the flavor, a delicateness." This contrasts
with their size, which can be 8 or 9 inches long, with a stem diameter
of 1 to 1 1/2 inches. Unlike regular oyster mushrooms, whose stems
are too tough to eat, the king oyster stems are edible.
"They're like a piece of tender beef" when cooked correctly, said
Farrar. He added that one chef in the Midwest is calling them "scallop
mushrooms," and slicing them in 1-inch pieces to be cooked like
scallops.
"The kings, because of their shape, take real well to roasting
and slicing," agreed Oliver. "You can fan them out to make a nice
presentation." One way he uses them at the Marine Room is to slice
them thinly and cover a piece of salmon with the slices, then sear
the fish mushroom-side down. When the mushrooms caramelize, "the
presentation and flavor is just incredible."
From Japan to San Marcos How did these new mushrooms end up in
San Marcos? Golden Gourmet was started by Craig Anderson of Del
Mar and Nick Connor of Rancho Santa Fe, who were working in Japan
in the mid-1980s, said Farrar. "Anderson ate the Japanese diet in
Tokyo and saw how mushrooms were a big part of it. He couldn't find
them here in the U.S. and realized there was an opportunity for
a niche in the market."
In Tokyo, Anderson, who worked for Lehman Brothers, met Connor,
an importer/exporter, who had seen the same opportunity in the mushroom
market. They started researching and building their company while
still in Asia, and hired Farrar in 1987. Their first crop came in
1988, starting with oyster mushrooms, and when the men returned
to the United States in 1990, their business was well on its way.
Golden Gourmet raises its mushrooms on decayed wood, rather than
manure, which makes for a clean-smelling and environmentally kind
operation, said Farrar. He studied horticulture at Washington State
University, and became interested in mushrooms in a plant pathology
class. "I liked the health aspect of them, as well as the wood-decaying
aspect. I liked the idea of returning the wood into a food." He
is a firm believer in the health benefits of mushrooms, citing studies
that show that some compounds in mushrooms can boost and regulate
the immune system, and that others have inhibited the growth of
tumors. For these reasons, and because the farm can supply a steady
crop, he said, sales of the exotics are slowly growing, though he
declined to offer specific numbers. Word is also spreading among
Asian customers, who don't like the button mushrooms that are most
popular with Americans. "We're a mycophobic society," said Farrar,
using the term that means "fear of fungus." "If it looks like a
button mushroom, it's OK, but anything else we're a little scared
of."
Bottle Fed Mushrooms
A visit to the San Marcos farm, which employs 18 people, is a treat
on a hot day. The mushrooms grow in climate-controlled buildings
whose temperatures range from cool to wintry. The first step is
to create the growth medium -- a combination of sawdust, corn cobs,
wheat bran, soybean meal and limestone. It's shredded and mixed
in a huge machine called a ribbon blender. "Each mushroom has its
own recipe," said Farrar. "It's like I have a cookbook for it."
The procedure is roughly the same for all the mushrooms. The growth
medium is poured into plastic bottles roughly the size of a quart
jar. Another machine fills 16 bottles at a clip, pokes a hole in
the medium, then caps the bottle. The bottles are then sterilized
in an 8-foot-wide chamber "like a steam pressure cooker," said Farrar,
that can do 5,000 bottles at a time. When the bottles have cooled,
they're opened and "planted" with a tissue culture in the inoculation
room, which is also sterile. "We plant six or seven times a week,
5,000 bottles at a time," said Farrar. The bottles then are moved
to the cool incubation room. Farrar uncaps a 5-day-old bottle that
has been planted with enokis. A dark-brown, cottony substance has
developed in the mouth of the jar. At the end of 30 days, the brown
medium in the bottles has turned white, filled with enoki mycelia
-- the mushroom equivalent of roots.
"The mycelia of some forest species can cover acres of ground,"
said Farrar. "They're amazing funguses."
From there, the bottles move to a scraping room, where the cottony
culture is scraped off, "wounding" the mushroom. "This gets it into
a 'reproduce or die' mode," explained Farrar. The germination room
is misty, with 95 percent humidity. After 10 days in here, tiny
enokis are sprouting, looking like couscous scattered across the
mouth of the bottle. Stacked on trays and arrayed on racks, the
mushroom bottles eventually move to a fruiting room, where they
reach their full growth. By this time, a paper cone has been attached
to the bottle's mouth, supporting the tall, slender enokis. Fifty-five
days from planting, the enokis are about 5 inches tall.
Workers harvest the fungi by twisting the paper cone cleanly off
the bottles. Farrar is proud of Golden Gourmet's recycling efforts.
The bottles, which come from Japan, are resterilized and reused;
even the paper cones, made of bamboo, are cleaned and reused. And
once the decayed growth medium has fed its crop of mushrooms, he
added, the material is valuable as a soil amendment. Though Golden
Gourmet's mushrooms mostly go to wholesalers like Specialty Produce
in San Diego or Monterey Mushrooms, they are also available from
sellers at the Vista and Del Mar farmers markets. Farrar will also
"sell a lot out the door" at the farm, especially to Asian customers,
who will buy 50 pounds at a time. "For a lot of the world, mushrooms
are still a staple," he said.
Contact Golden Gourmet Mushrooms at (760) 471-7300.
Contact staff writer Laura Groch at (760) 739-6658 or e-mail to
groch@nctimes.com. 8/17/00
WALDO NILO / Staff Photographer
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