Mushrooms are a common find in yards and gardens across Central and North Texas, especially after a soaking rainfall. Foraging for mushrooms is becoming an increasingly popular hobby for many in the area, part of a nationwide mycology trend, according to KXAN News.
Chef Philip Speer, the owner of the Comedor restaurant in downtown Austin, is a fan of the fungal food. He says he is seeing a shift toward more mushrooms in many kitchens. In his eatery, there are around 14 items on the menu, with three or four of them containing mushrooms on any given night.
Speer forages for “Chicken of the Woods” mushrooms in his north Austin neighborhood to serve on his own dinner table.
“I think that this is definitely not just a food fad,” Speer suggested. “There really is kind of … a mycology craze right now where people are using [and] understanding the health benefits of mushrooms beyond just ingesting them as food.”
At 15 calories per cup, mushrooms are a low-calorie food with no fat or cholesterol, lending to some using the fungus as a substitute for meat in dishes. They are also a good source of potassium, fiber, phosphorus, and B vitamins and reportedly help lower blood pressure, support mental focus and memory function, and reduce inflammation.
Americans consume an average of two pounds of mushrooms per person each year, according to Travis Breihan, the impact manager at Smallhold Specialty Mushrooms in Buda, Texas. That number is minimal compared to Asia, where the average consumption is between 20 to 50 pounds of mushrooms every year.
However, Breihan suggested that recent interest in the fungus has already caused the average to increase in the U.S. “I think what you’re starting to see in America is we’re starting to see more and more people get interested in mushrooms and kind of become like a mycophile community,” he said.
Smallhold Specialty Mushrooms advertises its products as the “produce of our times.” Each week the farming enterprise harvests thousands of pounds of mushrooms, which it sells to local restaurants and grocery stores. Mushrooms cultivated on the farm include Yellow Oysters, Lion’s Mane, Trumpets, and Blue Oysters.
The Smallhold farm uses high-tech climate-controlled growing chambers to maintain the optimal oxygen, moisture, and temperature levels for growing mushrooms. “We’re trying to replicate nature; we’re trying to create the environment in which the mushrooms are most at home,” Breihan explained.
While interest in mushrooms is growing, there is still much more to learn about them. According to Breihan, there are “potentially hundreds of thousands of species” that have yet to be studied. And it is important to note that some mushrooms can be toxic to humans or pets.
So while it might be tempting to skip the trip to the store and just pluck mushrooms from the backyard, the Texas Poison Center Network warns that “Eating any mushrooms collected outdoors should be considered dangerous. … Eating mushrooms collected outdoors can be very risky, because many poisonous mushrooms look like and taste like ones that are safe to eat. There is no easy way to tell the difference between safe and unsafe mushrooms.”