Mushroom Man

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Hundreds of people swarmed through rows of booths at last month’s ECO-fair, and several people I bumped into told me to go try the “shiitake bacon.” Sure enough, in the middle of the melee was a guy with a beard selling top-quality, fresh shiitake mushrooms and a pan of mushroom bits as savory as bacon.

My roommate bought a pound of his shiitake mushrooms for $10. We sauteed the mushrooms in oil, soy and teriyaki, and ate a few pieces with nearly every dish we prepared for the next week. Just a few pieces would add a different dimension to the vegetables, meats, starches – even breakfast eggs – that we ate. When they were gone, it was like something went missing.

We went to go visit him last weekend, to check out his operation and hopefully get some tips on picking wild morels, which have completely eluded us this spring picking season.

Tucked against the foothills of the Big Hole Mountains, Mountain Valley Mushrooms lies on the edge of expansive alfalfa and barley fields, over which the Tetons rise in the distance. It is a house and a couple of outbuildings – one, a converted hayshed, and the other a converted dairy semi-trailer.

Tye Tilt, the mushroom man, emerges wearing a ball cap with a mushroom embroidered upon it, a necklace with a carved wooden mushroom, a red button down shirt and a red beard that frames his friendly face.
“Well, let’s go check it out,” he said, and he led us into his basement to see his “guest bedroom,” or mushroom lab, full of test tubes, petri dishes, mason jars and some large equipment.

Fresh shiitakes are hard to come by, especially in March in the Northern Rockies. But Tilt and his business partner Scotty Button, self-taught fungal experts who live in Teton Valley, Idaho, make it possible for Jackson to have fresh mushrooms for most of the year.

“You’re lucky I won’t be working in here for another week,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to come in here.”

In order to provide a steady stream of high-quality gourmet mushrooms to restaurants in Jackson, Tilt has to be extremely careful to not contaminate any step of his mushroom growing process, or else hundreds of pounds of mushrooms could be lost.

Tilt’s fascination with mushrooms began more than a decade ago, when he and Button spent days tromping through the woods hunting wild mushrooms. In Teton County (Idaho and Wyoming), those species are yellow and black morel, chanterelle, porcini and pearl oyster.

He and Button began growing mushrooms in Tilt’s garage in 2000. They took a mycological field trip to California in 2002, where he and Button toured mushroom farms, hunted wild mushrooms and met a couple of experts. They decided they could start a full-blown (but small, by comparison) operation in Idaho. The pair had already developed a relationship with local restaurants by selling chefs wild mushrooms, and knew that their friends at the Cosmic Apple Farm, an organic farm in Victor, had already proven there was a consumer base of folks-mostly in Jackson Hole-interested in buying local, organic food.

Tilt sells his shiitake and pearl oyster mushrooms to restaurants in Jackson; Cascade, The Snake River Grill, Rendezvous Bistro and Alpenhof as well as at the Farmers Market and the Whole Grocer.

Tilt is part of a growing number of organic producers in Teton Valley, Idaho, which he reckons numbers about one dozen.

“Agriculture in Teton Valley is overall on the decline, but there are a bunch of new, what I like to call hippie farmers,” Tilt said. “There are about a dozen of us trying to do local, sustainable food.”

The farmers, grocers, and chefs interviewed for the story said that the national trend to eat locally and organically is especially strong in Jackson Hole.
Steve Michel at the Jackson Whole Grocer said they can’t get enough local produce to satisfy the demand, and have begun a program highlighting local producers, which he thinks will make the local food an even hotter item.

Mike Reid, at Paradise Springs Farm in Victor, said in an email that after years of persistent work, he will start selling raw, unpasteurized milk at the Whole Grocer for around $4 per half gallon.

“I recently got milk test results that show my milk to be safer than pasteurized as far as bacterial and somatic cell counts go. It may be the cleanest milk produced in Idaho or anywhere else,” he wrote.

Long days of hard work and no vacations are the status quo for the farming community there.

But what really keeps them alive are eco-minded Jackson Holers taking part of a larger trend: eat organic and eat locally. Tilt said the business wouldn’t have been possible if not for the high-class foodies, holistic moms, and Farmers Market attendees in Teton county Wyoming and Idaho.

In 2002, Tilt and Button began growing mushrooms year round, after a couple of years of experimentation. Tilt has invested tens of thousands of dollars to launch the mushroom operation at his home, which has also evolved, Tilt said, with labor trades from plumber, electrician and carpenter friends.
“I owe a few people mushrooms for life,” Tilt said.

He also uses work shares, and trades shares with the Cosmic Apple, to get labor.
In learning what makes oyster pearls and shiitakes grow, Tilt and Button have gone through the “learning curve” where failed batches of mushroom crop were reacting to the wrong growing conditions, or less-than-sterile production techniques.
“It’s one thing to grow mushrooms for you and your friends, but to have them for a farmers market or for a restaurant, every week, takes a bit of experience,” Tilt said.

Tilt said there is a lot of literature, other farmers to call and a few classes to take, but there are always secrets left out.

“People are willing to tell you a lot about what they do, but they, and the books, always seem to leave out at least one essential fact,” Tilt said.

He hired a consultant, John Donaghue to help him streamline the operation. He and Button also befriended one of the most prolific mycological writers, Paul Stanats. Tilt said he hasn’t lost a major batch of mushrooms in a few years.
Only recently, tilt said, is his initial investment money being recouped. Like other farmers in the area, he said he makes a living but is “not getting rich,” by any means. And five years ago Button came down with Lyme disease after being bitten by a tick while hunting wild mushrooms in California.

Tilt joked about the story I’m writing, because writers can’t resist making puns about “magical mushrooms” when writing about him or his farm, he said. And he said that in doing so they often miss the point; all mushrooms are mysterious, and the same unique qualities of mushrooms that might scare people, or lead them to make jokes about hallucinogens, are the qualities that, Tilt says, make them so great.

“Mushrooms are fabulous,” Tilt said. “Mushrooms are going to be the saviors of our planet.”

Tilt described mycology as an explorer would describe the last uncharted waters in the globe.

“There are 3 to 4 million species of mushrooms, and only 20 percent of them have been named or classified,” he said. “Without mushrooms we’d have no beer, no bread and no wine. And all the plants on the planet have grown in conjunction with mushrooms.”

Mushrooms exist all the time, lying dormant in the soil, under the bark of a rotting log or a living tree, or maybe behind your bathroom wall. The mycelium, the white stuff that Tilt multiplies exponentially each time he inoculates a jar or a clear plastic bag, lies in a fungal mat waiting to reproduce. The perfect conditions of moisture and temperature coax the fruiting bodies – the sexual organ of the organism – out of their hiding spot often in quick flushes that take a matter of days, or hours, to propagate mushrooms.

Despite their ubiquity, Tilt said, they are not well understood. The intricate relationships that cause fungus to fruit are difficult to recreate, and impossible to recreate for many species in a lab. He showed us on a poster some that can’t be reliably cultivated yet, including morels. Patents are filed, scientists make progress, but as of yet no one has pulled it off, Tilt said.

Tilt’s operation emulates those perfect conditions for pearl oyster and shiitake mushrooms. It’s a process that begins in a test tube, and ends with rows of large bags full of mycelium feeding on a wood chip mixture, with mushrooms jutting out of large holes in the bags. The fruits will wind up in the bellies of Jackson Hole diners.

He said the niche market is isolated, and he will likely never expand his business to other markets. The only other market would be Sun Valley. No other town near Driggs –  Idaho Falls, Rexsburg, West Yellowstone – besides Jackson  have a high-end culinary scene that could support Tilt.

Shiitake’s and pearl oysters are his bread and butter, but Tilt hopes to introduce the lion’s mane, and hen of the woods varieties, as well. Two mushrooms with unique appearances and unique flavors. He has produced those two in the past, but only in small non-commercial batches.

The lions mane has dozens of tendrils – similar in appearance to bean sprouts, that hang from it, which have a delicate, nutty buttery taste. The hen of the woods mushroom has been featured recently in numerous publications for its cancer-fighting, tumor-reducing properties, which have yet to be proven in a peer-reviewed journal, though the American Cancer Society at least gives them an expose on their Web site.

All of his mushrooms are matro-nutritional, Tilt said, meaning they have health benefits beyond the typical proteins and vitamins. Shiitakes are high in vitamin D and are also thought to have cancer-fighting properties, and oyster pearls contain a drug that helps reduce cholesterol.

Tilt said there is enough demand to sell three times his current production quantity during summers, but to expand his business he would have to find someone else with the years of experience that he and Button have.

And as far as morel hunting goes, Tilt made us feel better that we haven’t found any this year.

He told us two very important things: just when you think you understand how a fungus works, it tricks you; and this is a miserable year for morel picking.
“When you go walking the woods and hear that crunch-crunch, you know it’s time to hunt for something besides mushrooms,” he said. JHW

Four steps to mushroom cultivation
Step 1: The Lab
First, mycelium – the white, fibrous state of the fungus – from a test tube is placed on a Petri dish of agar made of seaweed reduction, malt, barley and yeast. In a few days the dish becomes colonized with mycelium.

Jars full of a rye berry mixture are boiled to 200 degrees in order to kill any bacteria or mold that could be lurking in them. The jars are cooled, and each is inoculated with the colonized agar piece.

 “I feed the mushrooms the perfect mixture of what they want to eat, and kill off all the competition” Tilt said. “I don’t think the mushrooms care that it’s organic, but I do and my customers do.”

After a certain number of days or weeks, depending on the species, those jars become colonized by white mycelium, and then one jar is spread into about five bags containing the same rye berry mixture. Those bags soon fill with the white, stringy mycelium as well.

Step 2: Inoculation
After the bags of rye mixture colonize, Tilt hauls them in his wooden cart to his packhouse. There, he fills bags with a mixture of wood chips, straw, organic bran and organic barley – which are boiled (like the jars, but on a much larger scale), to kill mold and bacteria in them. The wood chips come from furniture shops in and around Teton Valley.
He spreads one bag of mycelium-covered rye berries around the edges of several bags of the wood chip mixture, and takes them to the incubation trailer.

Step 3: Incubation
The bags of straw are set in a temperature-controlled room, an old dairy trailer, where they become fully colonized by the mycelium. This can take up to several weeks, depending on the species. Once they are ready, Tilt pokes holes in them with a razor-blade arrowhead on a wooden handle. They are taken to the grow room.

Step 4: Grow
The mushroom fruiting bodies burst forth from the bag, and Tilt picks them.
That’s it. JHW



PERMALINK:
Mushroom Man | Planet JH News Article: General News

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