- It's a very exciting day today, guys.
Inside this passion fruit teepee
is a Wine Cap Mushroom bed
that I built off camera from that previous video.
I actually built two other beds in my gardens.
I figured this was a good spot
because it's nice and dark all the time
from the passion fruit vines.
And today's the day, it's actually fruiting.
I think this heat wave that we're experiencing
after a period of cold triggered the fruiting cycle.
So let's go inside and take a look.
Welcome back to Jacques in the Garden.
Today, we're going to be doing something
a little bit different, a little more free form.
This is more of a vlog-style video.
I decided to record this for you guys,
so I could show you how to harvest,
cook and refresh a Wine Cap Mushroom bed.
And I just wanna mention this mushroom spawn
came from Field and Forest Products.
So I'll put a link in the description
for that spawn, if you're interested.
If you don't have anywhere outside to grow something
like a Wine Cap Mushroom bed, though,
I'll also include a link to some countertop mushroom kits
that we sell on the Epic Gardening store.
All right, so here's the entrance to the teepee.
Let's pop inside and see what it looks like.
You can see, I have a GoPro.
It's gonna give us some time lapse,
some nice time lapse footage.
But man, look at those.
So these are the Red Wine Caps,
you could see they've been chewed on a little bit.
Sometimes the tritovores, like the roly-polys
will take a bite.
Doesn't matter, it's still good eating.
I could tell you one thing,
I'm definitely gonna be eating it.
And then here's another one.
And you could see, right here.
All this it stuff is the mycelium thread.
So that's kind of the actual main organism
of the mushroom itself.
And then these mushrooms you could think of
as like their fruit.
So from here, they will release their spawn,
which is like a little powder.
And that's how they propagate.
These are actually the fruiting bodies.
And we have one patch here coming up.
One patch there.
I see another one poking up right there.
And then the straw is lifted over here.
So we have at least four different sites
where this is fruiting right now.
So these will probably be ready today,
especially with how hot it is.
I'm gonna go ahead and spray this
with a little bit of water
to make sure that it doesn't dry out.
And then so that the mushrooms themselves don't out.
(light music)
So here I am inside the Wine Cap Mushroom bed,
and there's actually a couple different sites
that are fruiting right now.
Now earlier, actually yesterday,
I noticed this fruiting but I only saw
like two or three mushrooms.
And I picked one that was just perfectly ready.
And that's this guy right here.
So a couple things I'll talk about.
Is first off, you could see
there's a couple little chew marks
and maybe some pits and holes.
That tends to happen as it comes through the straw
or hits a stick, it'll sometimes pierce it.
And then things like roly-polys or earwigs
will actually come in and start munching on this.
So let's talk a little bit about identifying these mushrooms
and why these are such a good mushroom to grow at home.
And that's because they're so easy to identify.
There's nothing else really, that looks like it,
once you cross off a couple little checklist items.
Let's go ahead and grab this guy over here.
And I'll show you guys what you wanna look out for.
(light music)
Let me show you the difference of what I'm talking about.
So right here, you could see this part of the mushroom.
That's the skirt of the mushroom.
So that's a very unique identifying feature to these.
If it has this kind of appearance,
and then it has these gills down here, that once you touch,
they'll actually stain your finger a purple-ish color.
That's the Wine Cap part of the name.
So you have the skirt, the wine coloration on your fingers,
and then the fact that they look like this,
that's a pretty strong, like actually 99.9% conclusive ID
this is a Wine Cap Mushroom.
The reason why I said this one's tricky
is because it looks like it was still opening.
And the actual skirt itself got stuck to the outer cap.
But I know this is a Wine Cap Mushroom.
I'm gonna rub my thumb against this piece
and yeah, it's actually coloring my thumb.
So that's a great indication.
Couple different things to mention.
There's different stages you could harvest this at.
This is probably the biggest I'd harvest it that.
You could go a little bit more,
and treat it like a Portobello mushroom.
You can grill that straight up on the grill whole.
But a lot of people like to harvest them
in their bun stage, which is more similar to like this,
where they haven't fully opened.
So I'm gonna go ahead and grab this guy.
And you'll notice I'm coming in with a knife,
that's not necessary.
You can just kind of rip them out.
But if you come in with a knife,
you have less chance of that damage
the mycelium network underneath.
So that'll ensure that we're not actually damaging
the mushroom colony that lives underneath the straw,
and will ensure that we have a longer harvest.
So I'm gonna just harvest these three for now.
I'll let the rest of these keep growing.
Maybe we'll get a nice time lapse.
Let's now talk about how do you actually keep
your Wine Cap Mushroom bed producing for a very long time.
And the way you do that is actually by feeding them.
So the mushrooms are actually physically eating
the material that we're growing them in.
So this straw, maybe was up to here at some point,
they've now consumed it down,
because they're breaking down that carbon
to get the nutrients that they need
to produce these fruiting bodies.
So if I were to just harvest these out and leave it,
maybe I'll get one more flush,
but they've already chewed through so much of it
that they'll probably run out and then they'll just stop.
But we can actually refresh it by feeding them more.
And in this case, I'm gonna go ahead
and top it with some garden straw.
The reason I'm using the garden straw is actually multifold.
One of the primary reasons I'm reaching for this
rather than a straw bale is the fact that it's so clean.
There's not gonna be any preexisting,
like fungus or other mushroom spores on this.
I've had trouble in the past using regular straw bales
because they tend to sit outside for such a long time
that they get dirty and they start getting colonized
by other mushrooms like those inky cap mushrooms
tend to really like straw.
And so when I've built a previous bed using a straw bale,
I had a ton of random mushrooms spawning in there
that really wasn't great.
But whenever I use this, which is what you see here,
the garden straw, I actually have much better success
because it's so clean that there's no chance
it's gonna be really bringing any other fungus with it.
And the final step, what we're gonna do here today
is we're gonna come in and water this very deeply
so that all the straw gets nice and saturated.
And also as the mushrooms grow, if you catch them
in their growing stage and then water them,
they will grow faster and they'll probably grow better.
So if you do notice them coming up
it's a good time to also water your mushroom bed.
All right, so we're gonna let that run for about 20 minutes.
And while that's running, let's go cook up some mushrooms.
Now that we've harvested our Wine Cap Mushrooms,
let's go over a simple recipe to cook these
and see how they taste.
I'm actually gonna go ahead and remove the stem,
especially now that it's kind of old.
just a little too woody for me to want to eat right now.
But I also want to quickly share with you guys
how I store mushrooms.
Whenever I collect mushrooms, what I do now
is I get a paper bag and inside I'll put some paper towel,
just like this, put the mushrooms inside the paper towel
sort of ball it up to cover them,
place it back in there, close your bag up
and store it in the fridge.
And by doing that, you could actually
make your mushrooms last up to a week.
If you put them in a crisper drawer,
it apparently lasts even longer.
So we're gonna keep this pretty simple
so we can let the mushroom actually shine
and get all that delicious flavor.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna split this mushroom in half
and then I'm gonna come across and slice it into slices.
So I'm gonna go ahead and do that.
You could see how actually pretty
the mushrooms are on the inside.
They still have some of that red wine kind of color to it.
This one's a little bit old, a little bit more wrinkly.
I think it just sat in the sun more than the other ones
because you could see it's a little bit more tan.
But it should still be good.
For the scapes, all we're gonna do
is cut them into little slices.
It doesn't matter if they're perfect.
You can eat the whole entire part,
including the little flower head.
Just gonna go ahead and do a very rough chop here.
If you don't have scapes,
which obviously most of the time you don't,
you could just throw in a couple cloves of garlic.
So now we're all prepped up.
Let's move over to the pan on the grill.
Like I said, we're gonna keep this extremely simple.
All I have here is a cast iron pan starting to heat up.
Now there are a couple different options.
You could dry saute mushrooms
and it's supposed to concentrate the flavor more.
I don't really find that to be very true or any better.
So I'm gonna use a little bit of olive oil.
A little bit of butter also works great
for something like this.
Now I'm gonna just add in the mushrooms.
I'm gonna mix it a little,
make sure the olive oil gets on every one of the mushrooms,
and then we're gonna sprinkle a little bit of salt
and just let them sit,
so they could caramelize and get some color.
Now we'll check back in a few minutes
and see how they caramelized.
(light music)
Starting to get some good browning here,
so I'm actually gonna come back in
and add the rest of the garlic shapes.
I'm also gonna give it a stir now.
You could really see how well
these kind of mushrooms caramelize.
Like they just really pick up this beautiful brown color,
and it already smells incredible.
I could tell you right now
that I'm very excited to eat these.
And it's probably gonna be,
I don't know maybe two more minutes.
With mushrooms, you have a lot of options
on how you want to cook it.
If you cook them a little on the dryer side,
they get more into almost like a bacon territory
where it's a very intense flavor in a small bite.
If you leave them a little more on the sort of juicy side,
you get more of that, there's more of like
a balanced flavor to the mushroom.
I like them both, but I think I prefer them a little crispy
but I highly recommend that you try it both ways.
(light music)
At this point, I'd say we're actually done.
Everything looks fully cooked.
There's a little bit of caramelization
around all parts of the mushroom
and the scapes have a little bit are browning on them.
So I'm gonna go ahead turn this off
and plate it up and we'll do a little taste test.
So I've never done a taste test video before.
So all I'm gonna do here is try it
and try to describe what I think the flavor's like.
So let's grab a couple mushrooms,
grab a couple scapes and go in.
Mmm, there's really no other mushroom like this
that I've personally ever had and nothing out of the garden
that tastes quite as delicious as this.
I will still take this over any regular old mushroom
from the grocery store any day of the week.
Thank you guys for watching.
Hopefully you learned a little bit
about red Wine Cap Mushrooms, how to grow them,
how to keep growing them and how to eat and enjoy them.
And with that, I'll see you guys next time.