Cultivation Quarters

Ken Litchfield

Morel Cultivation
(Repost from March 2016)

Successful morel cultivation is one of the aspirational goals of the mushroom cultivation aficionado. So often folks have told me of their or someone else’s secret method of growing morels - that truly does work, so they have reliably produced multitudes of morels repeatedly - just not so that there is a fresh or dried specimen to show for it. Maybe they actually have pictures to show me, with hordes of pristine morels shown with what appears to be appropriate lighting and proper proportions to the pleasantly posed people smiling happily at their production. So often these gangbuster hordes of morels are reputed to be being produced in China or somewhere else that has figured it out for their local market, but for some reason those folks haven’t thought to try selling those in our more lucrative American marketplace. Possibly, and most likely, they actually have great sales patter from their marketing department but haven’t really been able to make the actual close on the deal because they don’t actually have the engineers in the R&D department on board with a fully fleshed out production line. Or most likely they just have really good Photoshop people.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t a number of techniques that have been running around for a few years that will successfully produce morels by some relatively unconvoluted process. But for some reason there seems to be a hold up somewhere in the production process that keeps them from actually making an impact in the marketplace. It could well be that someone, or ones, has been successfully growing very tasty cultivated morels, indistinguishable from wild morels, and selling them at wild prices while keeping their proprietary process secret. Or not. I believe that most of the folks who have come up with some sort of workable processes are striving to figure out the species that has the most delectable flavor and that hasn’t yet been a marketable proposition due to technical difficulties understanding the culture of tasty morels. There are folks in China and elsewhere that have produced mass morels for the market but that also still aren’t a marketable proposition - because they are flavorless. Not only flavorless, but the ones I’ve tried are flavorless and odorless, in a really distinctively disappointing way. Perhaps because I’m so used to having the rich morel flavor from wild morels, my brain has a reaction to how bland the cultivated morels I’ve tried have been. It is as if they chose a cultivar, like probably what we jokingly call Morchella ikeaensis, that has absolutely no flavor or smell, or else they have figured out something in the cultivation process that completely eviscerates the nature of the morel. This is not the characteristic you would expect from a morel you’re familiar with from the wild. What’s the point of a mass cultivated morel if mass cultivated button mushrooms have more flavor? You would have a more marketable product by dusting the fresh morels with cheap dried powered button mushrooms to give them some mushroom essence.

It is possible to grow morels in the home cultivation situation and obtain a perfectly gourmet culinarily useful product even if it isn’t quite all the way to producing fully fledged morels. Here is the process, from capturing a tasty wild morel to growing it out and preparing it for a culinary experience.

Next time you are burn morelling in the Sierras and have a nice harvest of plenty of tasty morels, high grade several of the most appropriate for cultivation capture. They should be of the type you have been cooking and eating and know that they are delectable. Or you could even take part of the mushroom and cook it to verify its flavor but reserve some of its tissue for agar capture back home, or maybe even in camp if you have a portable transfer hood.

Morels are hollow and so are quite thin walled with not much flesh to sample compared with other fleshier mushrooms. If any of the morels you select for capture have not been broken so the interior hollow has been exposed to exterior air and contamination, then it is easier to break it open under the sterile filtered air of the hood to sample from the interior surface of morel flesh, as long as the flesh sampled doesn’t get cut through to the outside surface of the morel. Or it is possible to break open the base of a large morel and likely find a thicker sterile ridge or fold from which to sample.

Several wild morel samples should be captured on kitchen made agar spice jars so there are a number of cultures to choose from for further culturing. As you grow out the morel mycelium, note that, like the blewit with lavender mycelium, you can recognize the morel mycelium by its brown color and very wispy texture. Once you have several viable agar spice jars of morel cultures you can transfer them to grain to ramp up the mycelium. However, rather than any old substrate grain, it is best to use a nicely flavored culinary grain like barley, which can make barley soup. As the grain grows out in the barley jar it can be quite as aggressive as a white oyster mushroom mycelium but turning the barley brown grain to a morel brown. You now have precooked, morel-mycelium-impregnated, barley grain that you can pour into a saucepan and simmer into morel barley soup. Not only that, but in a typical quart jar of morel barley grain you’ll find as much as or more than a half cup of morel sclerotia, from pea to walnut sized, scattered through the grain. They have a very rubbery texture like each nugget is a highly twisted conglomeration of rubber bands.

When you simmer the morel mycelium impregnated barley grain and periodically taste it, it will have a very fiberous texture like pieces of lint in your mouth, not very appetizing. However after about 30 minutes of simmering the mycelial lint breaks down and becomes part of the soupiness of the barley. The larger nuggets of morel sclerotia can be sliced and diced to distribute some morel texture throughout the soup. A little butter and smoked salt and others of your favorite ingredients and you have a gourmet bowl of morel barley soup. It isn’t actually necessary to try to figure out a method to get the sclerotia to make mature morels. You have a morel product straight from the grain jar than can even be dehydrated and ground to a powder for a more instant soup.

The method I just outlined is something that the average home kitchen lab cultivator could accomplish pretty simply. Compare this with the more complicated discussion of preparation that Tradd Cotter outlines in his recent book, Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation, and who believes is needed along with the association of certain microbes, casings, floodings, and freezings that require considerable nuanced conjurings for incomplete success.

Morels are one of the species of mushrooms that could be saprobic, mycorrhizal, or parasitic, so it belongs to the fourth mushroom lifestyle of opportunistic. Perhaps different species have different lifestyles, but some probably are versatile so that they could have a rhizomorphic mycelial tentacle running to a saprobic wood chip pile, another tentacle mycorrhizing with a tree, and another parasitizing a different tree, at least theoretically. Back east when an elm dies of Dutch elm disease, frequently the tree’s death is accompanied by the concurrent flush of morels from the root zone that were living with the tree mycorrhizally or parasitically.

It may well be that when the Sierra forest burns, and the morel sclerotia flush so prolifically, this is a similar situation to the elms back east. Perhaps the sclerotia are being produced all the time, and they lie dormant until the forest dies in a burn and the conditions are aligned for mass fruiting. Or perhaps they are produced after the trees die in the burn. In talking to Alan Rockefeller, he said that he has made observations around Mt. Shasta and Pipi that sometimes a solitary Abies concolor tree, the white fir, dies from pine beetles or borers so the whole tree turns to bright orange needles that still cling to the tree, noticeable at a distance like a banner in the green, unburned forest. These needles might cling to the tree for a year or two. While they still cling bright orange it is possible to find flushes of morels at the base root zone of that freshly dead tree during the regular spring burn morel season. He thinks this also happens with red fir, Abies magnifica. It may well happen with most any conifer and is worth further observations in the woods, but he thinks it is with those firs only.

I have believed for some time that there may be the possibility that the morels are constantly producing sclerotia, whether from mycorrhizal nutrition from the forest trees or saprobically from the forest detritus, and that they are stimulated to fruit all at the same time by the smoke extract in the ashy soil of the burned woods. In the regularly burned Mediterranean fynbos of South Africa there are plants that have evolved to need the smoke extract of the fire to stimulate their seeds to germinate. It was once believed that it was the heat of the fire that did this but after more refined observations it was determined that it was the smoke extract. So now it is possible to order smoke extract treated seeds for ready germination and smoke extract to treat your own seeds.


Cultivation Quarters Ken Litchfield Morel Cultivation (Repost from March 2016) Successful morel cultivation is one of the aspirational goals of the mushroom cultivation aficionado. So often folks have told me of their or someone else’s secret method of growing morels - that truly does work, so they have reliably produced multitudes of morels repeatedly - just not so that there is a fresh or dried specimen to show for it. Maybe they actually have pictures to show me, with hordes of pristine morels shown with what appears to be appropriate lighting and proper proportions to the pleasantly posed people smiling happily at their production. So often these gangbuster hordes of morels are reputed to be being produced in China or somewhere else that has figured it out for their local market, but for some reason those folks haven’t thought to try selling those in our more lucrative American marketplace. Possibly, and most likely, they actually have great sales patter from their marketing department but haven’t really been able to make the actual close on the deal because they don’t actually have the engineers in the R&D department on board with a fully fleshed out production line. Or most likely they just have really good Photoshop people. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a number of techniques that have been running around for a few years that will successfully produce morels by some relatively unconvoluted process. But for some reason there seems to be a hold up somewhere in the production process that keeps them from actually making an impact in the marketplace. It could well be that someone, or ones, has been successfully growing very tasty cultivated morels, indistinguishable from wild morels, and selling them at wild prices while keeping their proprietary process secret. Or not. I believe that most of the folks who have come up with some sort of workable processes are striving to figure out the species that has the most delectable flavor and that hasn’t yet been a marketable proposition due to technical difficulties understanding the culture of tasty morels. There are folks in China and elsewhere that have produced mass morels for the market but that also still aren’t a marketable proposition - because they are flavorless. Not only flavorless, but the ones I’ve tried are flavorless and odorless, in a really distinctively disappointing way. Perhaps because I’m so used to having the rich morel flavor from wild morels, my brain has a reaction to how bland the cultivated morels I’ve tried have been. It is as if they chose a cultivar, like probably what we jokingly call Morchella ikeaensis, that has absolutely no flavor or smell, or else they have figured out something in the cultivation process that completely eviscerates the nature of the morel. This is not the characteristic you would expect from a morel you’re familiar with from the wild. What’s the point of a mass cultivated morel if mass cultivated button mushrooms have more flavor? You would have a more marketable product by dusting the fresh morels with cheap dried powered button mushrooms to give them some mushroom essence. It is possible to grow morels in the home cultivation situation and obtain a perfectly gourmet culinarily useful product even if it isn’t quite all the way to producing fully fledged morels. Here is the process, from capturing a tasty wild morel to growing it out and preparing it for a culinary experience. Next time you are burn morelling in the Sierras and have a nice harvest of plenty of tasty morels, high grade several of the most appropriate for cultivation capture. They should be of the type you have been cooking and eating and know that they are delectable. Or you could even take part of the mushroom and cook it to verify its flavor but reserve some of its tissue for agar capture back home, or maybe even in camp if you have a portable transfer hood. Morels are hollow and so are quite thin walled with not much flesh to sample compared with other fleshier mushrooms. If any of the morels you select for capture have not been broken so the interior hollow has been exposed to exterior air and contamination, then it is easier to break it open under the sterile filtered air of the hood to sample from the interior surface of morel flesh, as long as the flesh sampled doesn’t get cut through to the outside surface of the morel. Or it is possible to break open the base of a large morel and likely find a thicker sterile ridge or fold from which to sample. Several wild morel samples should be captured on kitchen made agar spice jars so there are a number of cultures to choose from for further culturing. As you grow out the morel mycelium, note that, like the blewit with lavender mycelium, you can recognize the morel mycelium by its brown color and very wispy texture. Once you have several viable agar spice jars of morel cultures you can transfer them to grain to ramp up the mycelium. However, rather than any old substrate grain, it is best to use a nicely flavored culinary grain like barley, which can make barley soup. As the grain grows out in the barley jar it can be quite as aggressive as a white oyster mushroom mycelium but turning the barley brown grain to a morel brown. You now have precooked, morel-mycelium-impregnated, barley grain that you can pour into a saucepan and simmer into morel barley soup. Not only that, but in a typical quart jar of morel barley grain you’ll find as much as or more than a half cup of morel sclerotia, from pea to walnut sized, scattered through the grain. They have a very rubbery texture like each nugget is a highly twisted conglomeration of rubber bands. When you simmer the morel mycelium impregnated barley grain and periodically taste it, it will have a very fiberous texture like pieces of lint in your mouth, not very appetizing. However after about 30 minutes of simmering the mycelial lint breaks down and becomes part of the soupiness of the barley. The larger nuggets of morel sclerotia can be sliced and diced to distribute some morel texture throughout the soup. A little butter and smoked salt and others of your favorite ingredients and you have a gourmet bowl of morel barley soup. It isn’t actually necessary to try to figure out a method to get the sclerotia to make mature morels. You have a morel product straight from the grain jar than can even be dehydrated and ground to a powder for a more instant soup. The method I just outlined is something that the average home kitchen lab cultivator could accomplish pretty simply. Compare this with the more complicated discussion of preparation that Tradd Cotter outlines in his recent book, Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation, and who believes is needed along with the association of certain microbes, casings, floodings, and freezings that require considerable nuanced conjurings for incomplete success. Morels are one of the species of mushrooms that could be saprobic, mycorrhizal, or parasitic, so it belongs to the fourth mushroom lifestyle of opportunistic. Perhaps different species have different lifestyles, but some probably are versatile so that they could have a rhizomorphic mycelial tentacle running to a saprobic wood chip pile, another tentacle mycorrhizing with a tree, and another parasitizing a different tree, at least theoretically. Back east when an elm dies of Dutch elm disease, frequently the tree’s death is accompanied by the concurrent flush of morels from the root zone that were living with the tree mycorrhizally or parasitically. It may well be that when the Sierra forest burns, and the morel sclerotia flush so prolifically, this is a similar situation to the elms back east. Perhaps the sclerotia are being produced all the time, and they lie dormant until the forest dies in a burn and the conditions are aligned for mass fruiting. Or perhaps they are produced after the trees die in the burn. In talking to Alan Rockefeller, he said that he has made observations around Mt. Shasta and Pipi that sometimes a solitary Abies concolor tree, the white fir, dies from pine beetles or borers so the whole tree turns to bright orange needles that still cling to the tree, noticeable at a distance like a banner in the green, unburned forest. These needles might cling to the tree for a year or two. While they still cling bright orange it is possible to find flushes of morels at the base root zone of that freshly dead tree during the regular spring burn morel season. He thinks this also happens with red fir, Abies magnifica. It may well happen with most any conifer and is worth further observations in the woods, but he thinks it is with those firs only. I have believed for some time that there may be the possibility that the morels are constantly producing sclerotia, whether from mycorrhizal nutrition from the forest trees or saprobically from the forest detritus, and that they are stimulated to fruit all at the same time by the smoke extract in the ashy soil of the burned woods. In the regularly burned Mediterranean fynbos of South Africa there are plants that have evolved to need the smoke extract of the fire to stimulate their seeds to germinate. It was once believed that it was the heat of the fire that did this but after more refined observations it was determined that it was the smoke extract. So now it is possible to order smoke extract treated seeds for ready germination and smoke extract to treat your own seeds.
Mycena News - October 2022