Okay. I’m making steaks for dinner. The mushrooms would have looked fine on Monday. Today they’re somewhere between a bit spotty and “pretty” spotty. Are they safe?
I have cooked questionable mushrooms many times and lived to tell the tale.
Thanks. I’m goin’ in…If I don’t post tomorrow, my worst fears have been realized.
They’re fine unless they smell like something died.
They should be okay, but expect them to taste kind of fishy. They do have a short refrigerator life.
Well, no one puked. My husband thought dinner was great. I thought it was just OK, but I’m sure that’s because I was aware of the funky 'shroom issue.
Store mushrooms in paper bags to prolong their shelf life. The spots are drops of condensation forming on a plastic bag and then touching the mushroom and discolouring it there.
HIJACK/ Changing the subject somewhat – while I was uprooting the decorative water pond to make room for my 65-year old father’s functional vegetable garden, it occurred to me I want to try and grow mushroom logs under the back yard deck. I enjoy white caps, portabella and shittake.
Anyone got any helpful hints? Recommended places to buy some? (Warning. Le Cheap Bastard within me refuses on g.p. to pay more than $10 for a log, though, so I aine ordering any online. There’s enough fallen hardwoon trees in the yard I can grow my own if I can get the right spores.)
I’ve never done it myself, but mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the fungus, so the spores are right there in your grocery store. My uncle the Wildlife Management prof always put his prey in a net bag when he went mushroom hunting. That way, he sowed spores all over the woods.
IANAM, but this doesn’t look like a good idea to me. It seems like you would have no control over what spores landed on the logs, and what came out looking like a nice edible button mushroom could be the Angel of Death itself.
Uh oh!
BTW, a little triva note, did you know that you can enjoy mushrooms without first singing “badger badger badger …”?
I’m seconding the “paper bag” recommendation.
Your mushrooms turned slimy because they were wrapped in plastic. If they’re in a paper bag they’ll wilt and dry out a bit, but that’s fine because all they’re losing is moisture. Let your mushrooms breathe, people!
Definitely, paper bag.
Also, when mushrooms go spotty, that just means they’re not gonna be great raw. They’re still perfectly safe to cook with.
Different pathogens grow on different foodstuffs. I don’t know the specifics, but I do know that what makes spoiled meat unsafe to eat is very different from what makes veggies slimy. Yucky, yes; dangerous, rarely.
Do not inoculate long-fallen logs – they already have established competing cultures thriving in them. Trying to inoculate them will fail in a number of ways – either simple failure of the shiitake culture, or a bad-tasting or sometimes even poisonous flush contaminated by other microorganisms. If you want to try your hand at log culture, you should fell the trees early in the spring, before leaves appear. (This is when the sap is high, providing the ideal amount of sugars to support your mycelium.)
You must keep the logs off the ground until the culture is established.
Ideally, you’ll want to find a source of plug-spawn. (Small dowells pre-inoculated with shiitake culture.) Then you can drill forty or fifty staggered holes in your log, bang the plugs in with a mallet, and wax the surface to prevent unwanted infection. If you can’t get plug-spawn, and have to start from spores, you’ll have to expand the culture on a sterilized sawdust medium – this is a bit tricky but can be managed with minimal investment in equipment. You’ll need to practice sterile lab techniques to do it, though.
It’s more labour-intensive than you might think at first, but if you aren’t put off by that, I have an excellent, extremely detailed guide on growing shiitake with log or stump culture techniques. (Also sawdust culturing, which offers a higher yield in a shorter amount of time, but is a bit more difficult in that it requires very sterile conditions until the mycelium spreads throughout the entire medium.) I’d be happy to send it along to you.
[/hijack]
OK, what you want to do is drink some orange juice and lie down in a dark, quiet room . . .
Pardon me. Misinterpreted “Mushroom help.” You’re not talking about that kind of mushrooms, are you?