“DRYING”

This section of my grow guide is going to cover the best ways to dry and store your personally grown mushrooms. Fresh picked mushrooms can be eaten immediately after picking them if you want to, but most people want to store them away for later use.

After you harvest your fresh mushrooms you can place them in an open container in your refrigerator where they will stay fresh for ten to twelve days. By an open container I mean a bowl (or plate) without a lid on it. If you place a cover over them they will quickly rot and will need to be thrown away within a couple days. This refrigeration storage is for people who wish to eat their mushrooms within a week or so or for people who want to dry them for storage – just not the same day they are harvested.

If you want to store your mushrooms for use weeks, months or years later they will need to be properly dried first. The best and most professional way to dry your harvest is by using an electric food dehydrator to get the task accomplished. One thing that is very important in doing this is the type of electric dehydrator that you use. Some electric dehydrators have temperature control dials (or knobs) on them, which are very important if you want to dry mushrooms properly. Most electric dehydrators that do not have this temperature control feature on them are factory set at 120 degrees, which is way too much heat. If you dry your mushrooms with heat above 95 degrees you will destroy most if not all of their potency. My electric dehydrator is always set at 95 degrees, which retains almost all of the mushroom’s potency. The more heat you use – the less potent your mushrooms will be once they are dried. I have had friends of mine dry their mushrooms in an electric dehydrator that did not have a temperature control and they lost all of their potency and were cooked into a powdery dust.

Another great and inexpensive way to dry your mushrooms is by using a brown paper bag like you would get from a grocery store. Just take a brown paper grocery store type bag and lay your fresh picked mushrooms in a single layer in the bottom of it. Fold the bag closed and fasten it with a paperclip, staple or tape to keep it from opening back up. Now just sit this bag in an out of the way place (your closet?) for four or five days. What will happen is that the brown paper the bag is made out of will draw the moisture out of your mushrooms as it dissipates the moisture into the air outside of the bag. When you open the bag up after the four or five day waiting period you should have some nice dried crisp mushrooms to store away. If the mushrooms are not “crisp as a cracker” you should close the bag back up and sit it away for another day or two until they are “COMPLETELY DRIED”.

Another easy way to dry your mushrooms is to spread some newspaper out in your car trunk, lay the mushrooms in a single layer on top of the paper and then shut the trunk lid. This is a fast way to dry mushrooms during the summer and spring times of the year. They should fully dry in just a matter of hours. Also, do not drive your car during this drying time. The mushrooms will roll around plus there is a chance you could be pulled over and searched.

This is one of my favorite, and fast, ways to dry just a few fresh harvested mushrooms at a time. There are a lot of times that I check my crops only to find one or two mushrooms are ready to be harvested. I hate cranking up the electric dehydrator for this small amount and if I used the brown paper bag method I’d have a closet full of bags sitting around on the floor. I just take these few fresh mushrooms and lay them on top of my cable box, stereo, DVD player or on the top of my computer monitor. They are usually crispy dried in about 16 to 18 hours from the small amount of heat that rises from the unit. But, don’t forget to make spore prints first (chapter 9). Be safe – stay happy.

“STORAGE”

Once you have the mushrooms totally dried to a cracker crisp stage – the next step is to properly store them. There is really just one method I use, and recommend, for storage of dried mushrooms and that is inside a glass jar with a screw on lid. This will keep your mushrooms totally dry for many years. I would never recommend using a plastic baggie to store mushrooms in for more than one week. These Baggies are not airtight and your dried mushrooms will actually absorb moisture through the plastic that the bags are made out of.

ADVANCE to Chapter 12: Mushroom Recipes