A Mushroom Revolution: Golden Gourmet Bets On Cultivation

If you like mushrooms (and who doesn't?) and if you like to cook you need to give Golden Gourmet Mushrooms a serious look-see. They've been around since 1987 but have only recently come to my attention after they formed a new distribution company, The Kinoko Company. Currently, they distribute four types of cultivated mushrooms imported from Japan and will soon distribute US-grown specialty mushrooms cultivated at a new facility in San Marcos, CA being built by the Japanese Hokto Kinoko Corporation. Grown in re-usable bottles, the 'shrooms are not grown in dirt and thus require no cleaning when you bring them home. Currently, GGM sells Maitake (aka Hen-of-the-Woods, Kumotake, and Dancing Butterfly Mushroom), Brown and White Beech, King Trumpet and Enoki mushrooms.

Now here's the really cool part: Two of the four types are packaged in such a way as to stay fresh in your fridge for 30 days and in some cases, longer! How often have you bought some mushrooms at the store and forgotten about them, only to find their sludge 10 days later? Well, Golden Gourmet's Maitake and Beech (both brown and white) mushrooms come in what I would call super weird magic plastic packages, but what're actually called: "pillow packs." Gas-permeable polypropylene film. Me? I call it magic plastic. It almost rhymes.

Some of the things I made with the mushrooms are: buffalo and venison chili (Maitakes added a complex and earthy flavor to this dish described by Mike Tully as: "OH MY GOD YES."), various stir-frys and a particularly lovely buffalo steak, topped with wine-soaked brown beech mushrooms. Some pix and a sauté video, below..