GROWING GOURMET - Anto2ni.it

296 GROWTH PARAMETERS
and poplars can be inoculated via plug or sawdust spawn. Stump culture should be possible, given the
success with this species close relatives.
Recommended Courses for Expansion of Mycelial Mass
toAchieve Fruiting: Cultures grown on
nutrified agar media can be immersed into sterile water and chopped in a high speed blender for several
seconds. The resulting broth can inoculate sterile water fortified with maltlyeast and fermented
for 48 hours using the
techniques described in Chapter 15. This liquid inoculum is then transferred
directly into sterilized grain. Grain spawn should be used within one week of inoculation. No more
than two generations of grain spawn are recommended. If the fermentation is continued for 5-7 days,
asexual conidia form, facilitating the direct inoculation of bulk substrates.
Suggested Agar Culture Media: MYPA, CMYA. DFA or PDYA.
1st, 2nd and 3rd Generation Spawn Media: Liquid or grain spawn throughout. Sawdust can be
used as the final spawn medium if desired.
Substrates for Fruiting: Sterilized hardwood sawdust (maple, oak, beech or elm), pasteurized
wheat, rice or paddy straw.
Recommended Containers for Fruiting: Bags, colunms, trays or bottles.
Yield Potential: Biological efficiency rated at 50-75%, higher on sawdust based substrates than on
straw.
Harvest Hints: Mushrooms should be picked before the caps expand beyond convex. Individual
mushrooms can become quite large unless cluster formation is promoted. The stem is edible.
Form of Product Sold to Market: Fresh mushrooms and dried are sold in Thailand, Taiwan, China
and elsewhere in Asia.
Nutritional Content: Not known to this author.
Medicinal Properties: Not known to this author.
Flavor, Preparation & Cooking: This mushroom can be cooked like most Oyster mushrooms in stir
fries, in white sauces or adorning lamb. Please refer to the recipes in Chapter 24.
Comments: My experience has been that cultures from Thailand and Taiwan, where this group of
mushrooms is commercially cultivated, produce abundantly on rice straw and perform less productively
on wheat straw. Strains are more narrowly specific in their fruiting
requiring
sustained warmth, and must be more carefully matched with the fruiting substrate than, for instance,
P. ostreatus, a species more adaptive to a wider variety of materials. For more information, consult
Guzman et al.(199 1), Jong & Peng (1975), Peng (1974) and Miller (1969).
PDF compression, OCR, web-optimization with CVISION's PdfCompressor