No one has brought up Porcini. When I got out of cultivation, there was one outfit using a patented process to culture morels year ´round and one other group feverishly seeking to ´crack the code´ with Porcini.

Bob

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Porcini's another famous one that I haven't tried.

One time I had a dish with some sauteed oyster mushrooms from right out of the woods in back of someone's home. They didn't work for me because of a sharpish sensation they gave to the back of my throat. But then, I expect different species will have different characteristics.

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

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Oyster mushrooms are another kettle of (shell) fish . There are some good ones, but from a growers perspective I found them to be meh. They pretty much take on flavor elements from what you cook ´em with. Garlic, shallots, onions, sake, soy sauce, even just butter can take over. Plus, there always seemed to be someone who had greater production capacity who was always willing to sell them for less. Some had peppery and astringent flavors, Nano, which you noted, but pretty much . . .eh. We, for a short while, grew a smaller sized oyster that was Pink, that kept its color when you cooked it. It sold as a novelty. But then the strain ´drifted´ on me and they started growing in as dull dishwater grey. We watched a couple of growers engage in price wars with oysters, and the end result was neither of ´em in the business anymore.
The world´s largest producer of mushrooms is, or at least was,you guessed it, Campbell´s Soup. When they noted their top seller was Mushroom Soup, they muscled their way in in a BIG way growing common white button Agaricus.

Bob

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The Expert's Mind has few possibilities.
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The button mushroom is popular for good reason, isn't it. It seems to be able to rise admirably to any occasion.

Cultivated enokis used to be all the rage; at one time it seemed as if every supermarket had them. I sure liked them a lot; I recall them as being rather refreshing and sweet, you could say. I wonder where they went.

But I've always been interested in the nameko; in Japan I learned to be amenable to slippery/slimy/sticky foods - they're thought to be especially healthy, there - but I never had nameko for some reason, so that's big culinary hole in my life. Besides, I welcome slithery things as a worthy challenge to my chopstick skills.

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

Oh, I think you´ve had namekos They tell me they´re supposed to be a core flavor to miso. I have a long and somewhat humorous tale about a fellow grower, a Japanese-American, who was successful using log culture to grow Nameko. The only thing was, he insisted on turning a medium size city lot in metropolitan Portland,Ore. into a wall to wall log lot .
We were trying to take on a new account and placed a large basket of Black Poplars at a high end green-grocers. That afternoon an elderly Italian Immigrant came in and burst into tears when he saw them. George, the grocer, said the only thing he could clearly catch from the torrent of Italian was: Il Pioppino! Il Pioppino! The man bought the whole basket, and we got the account. This led to a referral to a high end Italian restaurant. We sent out a basket to their kitchen. We didn´t hear back for several days, so I called out there. I got the sous-chef as Salvatore was out. I asked if they had been well received. The assistant said he had no idea since none of them had gotten away from Sal and out of the kitchen We took that as a yes! We heard from some Doctors who took a tour through Tuscany. In a small town, really a village, called Monte Fiore, (how many little towns in Northern Italy are called Monte Fiore ) in the square, some older guys came into the market and set up a bunch of small logs in triangles like muskets, poured water over them, and then put up small canvas tents around them. These were poplar tree limbs. A couple days later the market opened at 4 AM. At 4:30 there were no more Pioppino to be bought!

Bob

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Not everything you can count, counts. And not everything that counts, can be counted

The Expert's Mind has few possibilities.
The Beginner's mind has endless possibilities.
Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi

I haven't been able to completely follow all that's been in this thread.

I found that I really like the Wood Ear Mushrooms that come in restaurant Udon & Ramen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auricular ... cula-judae

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Wood Ears. Love´em. My friends from Chengdu use them to great effect in their Sichuan dishes. Would never try to cultivate them ´tho´. The foragers could bankrupt you for price cutting.
Log culture is fairly low tech. And if you choose, and can find a lab with reasonable prices for spawn, plugs, and other supplies, is a possibilty. I went the hi-tech route, a full tiered operation with a lab built around a Clean Room and Growing Environment to do my own cultures, spawn, and growing blocks. Mother Nature has a much larger kitchen than you or I could ever build.

Bob

_________________
Not everything you can count, counts. And not everything that counts, can be counted

The Expert's Mind has few possibilities.
The Beginner's mind has endless possibilities.
Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi

To give this all a tenuous connection to traditional flute playing. One of the cultures I used to grow Il Pioppino was procured from the American Type Tissue Collection. The Lab notes showed it had been collected from mushrooms growing on scrap Rosewood outside of Mumbai, India. Haven´t yet heard of anyone´s flute sprouting mushrooms .

Bob

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Not everything you can count, counts. And not everything that counts, can be counted

The Expert's Mind has few possibilities.
The Beginner's mind has endless possibilities.
Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi

Mildew, at most.

But seriously, I've never had nameko. I would have remembered; they're too distinctive to miss, especially since from what I see, the Japanese typically use their nameko small and whole, probably no bigger than half a finger-length. I did the lion's share of my eating in the school's cafeteria, and the fare there was for the most part really basic, which meant nothing special in the miso other than what you yourself added from whatever selection they had on hand for the purpose. The only universally core element to miso soup is a dashi, whatever it might be; anything else is elective, and highly regional in some cases. Even when dining out I never came across nameko; my Japanese friends would have taken pains to point them out, as was their habit with any food they considered unique to their culture ("No, Hiro, the Japanese did NOT invent cotton candy."). The first I learned of nameko was years after I got home, and I was like, How did that ever happen?? Talk about sheer dumb happenstance. Seems to me that missing out on nameko would be almost as unlikely as never encountering umezuke, but somehow, that's how things worked out. Mind you, though, I was only there for 8 months, and as a student, that meant somewhat straitened circumstances; had I lived there longer, it would just have been a matter of time at that point.

Raw horse, but no nameko.

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

Well, first, I have to say I was quite startled when I read the Lab note about the Poplar mushrooms growing on Rosewood. Up to that point I had thought Rosewood to be fairly rot resistant. I mean, lets face it, wood growing mushrooms are just very fancy wood-rot.
The Black Poplar ´shroom is a little different than most of them insofar as it mostly consumes the lignin in the wood it is attacking as opposed to shiitake, oysters, elm-tree ´shrooms, and enoki which mostly attack the cellulose. I don´t know about wood ears. I´d have to get out some books in storage on that one. All of this is kind of ´inside Baseball--hyper nerdy´ but it has to do with how you treat the mycelial cultures in your lab, how you create your grain or wood plug spawn, and how you formulate and enrich your enriched sawdust growing media or choose your freshly cut growing logs.
Second. Nameko are not all that common ´in the wild´. Maybe not as common as the highly prized Matsutake. I really have to take my hat off to my buddy Oh-sama for being able to grow them reliably in large quantities. I was told by Oh-sama that one of the uses his client restaurants made of nameko was in their miso stock. I think the difference is in the daishi they make up. (No store-bought instant used here!) I see where the more common practice is to sometimes soak/brew shiitake for part of the daishi. The nameko is sort of the gold foil treatment.
As to umezuki/umeboshi, Oh-sama used to say with a snarky voice that ´if it stood still too long in any Japanese kitchen, it would get pickled, whatever it was.´
If you look about, you may find canned nameko. I expect they would be fairly expensive. Oh-san served some fairly pricey restaurants.

Bob

_________________
Not everything you can count, counts. And not everything that counts, can be counted

The Expert's Mind has few possibilities.
The Beginner's mind has endless possibilities.
Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi

Yeah, here we're getting into specialty dashi types that some restaurants will have as a sort of unique signature, but you could whip up your own, too, if you wanted to step outside the box. In the end dashi can be made from many things, even just konbu kelp alone, but the go-to standard all over is of course your skipjack or bonito flakes (think tuna bacon), konbu, and water: quick and easy to make, and the classic for good reason. Next instead of shaved fish (not the album, thank you) would be niboshi (teensy dried baby sardines). From there things can get creative and even expensive. Temple cuisine and vegans in general use a simple shiitake/konbu dashi, but there are work-intensive turbo-charged shiitake versions out there too, created by obsessed vegan chefs on a mission. I think the only constant in dashi is the konbu, but I wouldn't be too surprised if even that might be substituted on occasion; still, it's hard for me to imagine. Konbu is so endowed with glutamates that most cooks probably consider it indispensable, because the main thing about dashi, no matter how you make it, is that it must above all be an effective umami delivery system, and, of course, be right tasty too. As one of the fundamental building blocks of Japanese cooking, it's best to think of dashi not as simply a broth, but as a seasoning; you should be able to season just about anything with it. And they do. For example, if ever you've had those rolled omelets in a sushi bar, you can take it to the bank that there's dashi in 'em.


Ha. There's actually some truth to that; the Japanese hate to waste food, so if it can be pickled, dried or fermented, they'll do it.

The Japanese learned the hard way not to use metal bentō boxes: over time, umezuke eat holes in them.


The day may come yet. I haven't really been on the lookout, though, to be honest.

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

I've started searching on mycelial products, and I had no idea how diverse and important the potential of this industry is. One question that I can't seem to find an answer to, though: What prevents a mycelial faux-leather product from fruiting?

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

Oh dear! Are we allowed to discuss mushroom Sex on Chiff & Fipple?

Bob

_________________
Not everything you can count, counts. And not everything that counts, can be counted

The Expert's Mind has few possibilities.
The Beginner's mind has endless possibilities.
Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi

You have my blessing, and my undivided attention. Purely clinical, of course.

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

Spore-n?

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