Shiitake atau Cendawan Hioko

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Cendawan Shiitake (Lentinula edodes) atau cendawan Hioko dan sering ditulis sebagai cendawan shitake adalah cendawan makan yang berasal dari Asia Timur yang terkenal di seluruh dunia dengan nama aslinya dalam bahasa Jepun. Shiitake secara harafiah bermaksud cendawan dari pokok Shii (Castanopsis cuspidata) kerana batang pohonnya yang sudah reput merupakan tempat tumbuh cendawan shiitake.

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Speses ini dahulunya pernah dikenali sebagai Lentinus edodes. Ahli botani Inggeris bernama Miles Joseph Berkeley menamakan spesis ini sebagai Agaricus edodes pada tahun 1878.

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Shiitake banyak ditanamkan di China, Korea dan Jepun dan sering dijumpai di kawasan liar di di pergunungan di Asia Tenggara.

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Shiitake dalam bahasa Cina disebut (Hanzi cendawan harum"), sedangkan yang berkualiti tinggi dengan payung yang lebih tebal disebut (Hanzi: cendawan musim dingin") atau ("cendawan bunga") kerana pada bahagian atas permukaan payung terdapat motif retak-retak seperti bunga mekar.

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Di Indonesia kadang-kadang dinamakan cendawan jering ("jamur jengkol"), kerana bentuk dan aromanya seperti jering walaupun bagi sebahagian orang, rasa cendawan ini seperti rasa petai.
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Gambaran

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Cendawan shiitake tumbuh di permukaan batang kayu yang reput dari pokok Castanopsis cuspidata, Castanea crenata (berangan), dan sejenis pokok oak Quercus acutissima. Batang dari tubuh buah sering melengkung, kerana shiitake tumbuh ke atas dari permukaan batang kayu yang ditegakkan. Payung terbuka lebar, berwarna coklat tua dengan bulu-bulu halus di bahagian atas permukaan payung, sedangkan bahagian bawah payung berwarna putih.

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Cendawan beracun spesis Omphalotus guepiniformis kelihatan agak serupa dengan cendawan shiitake sehingga banyak orang yang tertipu dan keracunan.
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Sejarah penanaman

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Shiitake juga dikenali dengan nama Cendawan hitam China, kerana asalnya memang dari Tanah Besar China dan sudah ditanamkan sejak 1,000 tahun yang lalu. Sejarah pertama tertulis tentang penanaman shiitake ditulis Wu Sang Kuang pada zaman Dinasti Song (960-1127), walaupun cendawan ini sudah dimakan orang di China sejak tahun 199 Masihi.

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Pada zaman Dinasti Ming (1368-1644), doktor bernama Wu Juei menulis bahawa cendawan shiitake bukan sahaja boleh digunakan sebagai makanan tetapi juga sebagai ubat untuk penyakit saluran nafas, melancarkan peredaran darah, meredakan radang hati, memulihkan lelah dan meningkatkan tenaga chi. Shiitake juga dipercayai dapat melambatkan proses penuaan.
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Penggunaan dalam masakan

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Cendawan shiitake segar atau dalam bentuk kering sering digunakan dalam berbagai masakan di banyak negara. Shiitake segar biasanya dimakan sebelum payung bahagian bawah berubah warna. Batang shiitake agak keras dan umumnya tidak digunakan dalam masakan.

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Sebahagian orang lebih menyukai shiitake kering dibandingkan shiitake segar kerana shiitake kering mempunyai aroma yang lebih kuat. Shiitake kering diproses dengan cara dijemur di bawah sinar matahari dan perlu direndam di dalam air sebelum dimasak. Asas masakan Jepun yang disebut dashi didapati dengan merendam shiitake kering di dalam air.

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Di Jepun, shiitake merupakan isi sup miso, digoreng sebagai tempura, campuran chawanmushi, udon dan berbagai jenis masakan lain. Shiitake juga digoreng hingga garing dan dijual sebagai keropok shiitake.

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Rusia juga menghasilkan shiitake dalam jumlah yang banyak dan dijual sebagai acar dalam bungkusan botol.

CENDAWAN

(Dipetik dari majalah Agromedia Bil. 7/1999)

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Cendawan ialah sejenis sayur yang lazat dan berkhasiat. Ia mengandungi pelbagai zat pemakanan yang baik untuk kesihatan.

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Keistimewaannya: ia mampu mengurangkan kolesterol tubuh dan menghalang pendarahan otak.

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Cendawan memerlukan bahan organik yang telah reput seperti kayu dan daun sebagai makanan. Ia terdiri daripada dua bahagian iaitu bahagian di atas permukaan media pertumbuhan (substrat) yang dinamakan jisim berbuah dan di dalam substrat iaitu bahagian tampang. Jisim berbuah terdiri daripada tudung yang sedap dimakan dan tangkai.
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Di bawah permukaan tudung terdapat insang-insang yang menghasilkan biji benih iaitu spora. Bahagian tampang berfungsi untuk menyerap bahan makanan melalui struktur seperti akar yang terdiri daripada miselium iaitu sekumpulan bebenang hifa yang halus. Miselium mengeluarkan enzim yang dapat menghancurkan bahan organik sebelum ia diserap untuk pertumbuhan dan pembiakan.

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Jenis cendawan yang banyak ditanam di Malaysia pada masa ini ialah:

• Cendawan Tiram Putih (Pleurotus florida)
• Tiram Kelabu (P. Sajor-caju)
• Abalon (P. cystidiosus)
• Shitake (Lentinus edodes) dan
• Cendawan Telinga Kera (Auricularia polytricha)
• Cendawan abalon, tiram putih dan kelabu yang segar amat popular, diikuti cendawan kering shitake, cendawan butang dalam tin, abalon dan cendawan jerami padi.

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Dewasa ini terdapat ratusan pengusaha yang menanam cendawan. Antara faktor yang mendorong mereka berbuat demikian ialah cendawan mengandungi khasiat pemakanan dan perubatan, mendapat keuntungan yang tinggi dalam masa yang singkat, bahan sampingan pertanian dan industri yang banyak (hampar kapas, habuk kayu getah dan habuk kelapa sawit) dapat menjimatkan kos substrat dan pasaran cendawan segar yang cerah.

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Umumnya, mereka terdiri daripada penanam padi, penanam sayur, pengusaha kantin, pesara dan kakitangan kerajaan. Negeri Selangor mempunyai paling ramai penanam cendawan diikuti dengan negeri Kedah, Pahang, Perlis, Johor dan Melaka.

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Kebanyakan mereka memperoleh teknologi penanaman cendawan daripada agensi kerajaan seperti MARDI dan Jabatan Pertanian (50.40%), negara luar seperti Thailand, Taiwan, Australia dan Jepun (26.48%), buku dan kawan (20.49%) dan universiti tempatan (2.56%).

Perantaraan pasaran cendawan segar terdiri daripada pasar tani dan pasar malam bagi pengusaha umum, pengguna institusi (hotel, restoran, pasar raya) dan juga pengeksport. Harga bergantung pada jenis dan kualiti cendawan segar yang dipasarkan. Pada umumnya harga runcit antara RM3.00-RM11.00/kg.
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Oleh sebab permintaan melebihi bekalan, harga dan import cendawan meningkat dari setahun ke setahun. Contohnya, pada tahun 1996 cendawan segar yang sejuk dan terproses telah dimport sebanyak 25 ribu tan bernilai RM52 juta, berbanding dengan hanya 3 ribu tan bernilai RM22 juta pada tahun 1990.

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Pada tahun 1993 harga runcit bagi cendawan tiram kelabu dan tiram putih segar di Semenanjung Malaysia masing-masingnya RM7.08/kg dan RM7.33/kg. Harga ini telah meningkat kepada RM7.16/kg dan RM8.11/kg pada tahun 1997.

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Menurut FAMA, pengeluaran cendawan segar tempatan pada tahun 1989 ialah 17 tan dan pada 1990 berkurangan kepada 15 tan dan dijangka terus berkurangan pada tahun-tahun berikutnya.

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Pihak institusi merupakan pengguna terbesar komoditi cendawan ini. Jumlah penggunaan setiap bulan bagi cendawan segar, cendawan kering dan cendawan dalam tin, masing-masing ialah 41.79%, 50.55% dan 7.75%. Manakala purata harga belian masing-masing pula ialah RM11.00/kg. RM71.00/kg dan RM2.14/tin.
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Jumlah cendawan segar yang dibeli oleh pihak institusi dalam masa sebulan ialah 1 501 kg. Jumlah ini terdiri daripada 310 kg. tiram putih dan kelabu, 591 kg. abalon, 17 kg. cendawan jerami padi dan 583 kg. cendawan butang dan shitake. Jumlah pembelian cendawan dalam tin sebulan pula ialah 20 530 kg. (20.52 tan) iaitu 4 060 kg. tiram putih dan kelabu, 3 910 kg. abalon dan 12 560 kg. cendawan butang. Bagi cendawan kering, jumlah permintaan sebulan ialah 2 013,07 kg.

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Jenis masakan yang dihidangkan dengan menggunakan cendawan bagi restoran dan hotel mengikut keutamaan ialah sayur campuran, masak dengan daging, masak dengan ayam atau itik, masak dengan ikan, sup cendawan dan masak cendawan sahaja.

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Pada tahun 1990, Malaysia mengimport cendawan segar atau disejukkan hanya 54 tan bernilai RM336 ribu, tetapi meningkat kepada 487 tan bernilai RM2 juta pada tahun 1996. Import cendawan yang diproses juga meningkat kepada 24 ribu tan bernilai RM50 juta pada tahun 1996 berbanding hanyak 3 ribu tan bernilai RM21 juta pada tahun 1990.

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Memandangkan penggunaan dan pengimportan cendawan yang semakin meningkat dari tahun ke tahun maka pengeluaran cendawan tempatan oleh pengusaha sangatlah cerah.

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Pengusaha cendawan tempatan yang sedia ada atau yang baru melibatkan diri perlu menggandakan pengeluaran bagi memenuhi permintaan pengguna yang semakin meningkat disamping dapat mengurangkan bil import cendawan oleh Malaysia. - Dipetik dari majalah Agromedia Bil. 7/1999

Morel mushrooms popping earlier than normal this year

by Pat Curtis on April 17, 2010

in Recreation & Entertainment

Morels found by John Waite on April 13 near Mt. Vernon.

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One of the sure signs of spring is beginning to pop up in Iowa – the morel mushroom. This year, mushroom hunters like John Waite of Anamosa are finding morels earlier than usual.

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“This is the earliest I’ve ever found morels,” Waite said. “I’ve found just a handful of small ones so far, but my prior earliest was April 17th and that was six or seven years ago.” Typically, the morel mushroom season begins in late April or early May.

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The recent warm spell could have something to do with the morel’s early arrival, but not everyone is reporting as much luck as Waite. The 31-year-old computer programmer started a Facebook page he dubbed The Iowa Morel Report just over a week ago. Today, the group has over 1,200 “fans” who share morel hunting success stories and photos.

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Not everyone is willing to share their secrets, but patches of mushrooms are often found in moist areas around dying trees. Some Iowans will find morels in their own back yard. Waite prefers hunting in state parks.

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“It’s great to have a private place to go if you know a private land owner, but there’s plenty of public land out there and a lot of morels to be found,” Waite said. Morel hunters are also using Facebook to share recipes.

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“My personal favorite is just slicing ‘em in half, wash, sauté in butter, maybe add a little salt and pepper and you’re good to go,” Waite said.

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“They taste just great at their bare minimum. We’ve stuffed ‘em and made steak de burgo with them, which was excellent. Anything you can do with a mushroom, you can do with a morel.”

false morel

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Mushroom hunters do need to be careful about misidentifying morels. So-called “false morels,” if eaten, can cause severe illness and even death.

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Waite says true morels are connected to their stems and are hollow from the bottom to the top.

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The false variety’s body hangs out over the stem unattached, more like a traditional mushroom. False morels are often heavier as they do not usually have hollow stems.

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See more about morels on this website: www.thegreatmorel.com

Do-It-Yourself Mushrooms

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
Published: April 14, 2010
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HAVE you seen the Mushroom Man? No? Well, have you looked in the Secret Garden? It’s a real place, you know, a half-hidden community garden at the corner of Linden Street and Broadway, in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

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The Mushroom Man is real, too. His name is Kendall Morrison — he’s 47 years old and semiretired from the publishing business — and on any given weekend, you’re likely to find him in a shady grove of silver maples, cultivating eight varieties of mushrooms.

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You might not be able to tell right away what Mr. Morrison is doing. He may be wielding a hand drill, for instance, boring holes into a salvaged oak log. Or he may be pounding inchlong dowels into the wood with a mallet, each little peg impregnated with shiitake mushroom spawn.

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“We started right around November,” Mr. Morrison said, referring to his 15 volunteers, “and we haven’t stopped. As long as we can work back there, we worked. Even when there was snow on the ground.”

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There are perhaps 200 billets now, stacked like Lincoln Logs. While the wood sits impassively, as logs will do, long strands of mushroom — or mycelium — are infiltrating the grain and starting to decompose it. Later this spring and in the fall, the logs should flush with “fruit” where the spawn went in.

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The reward? About a pound of edible mushrooms per log.

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Mr. Morrison hopes to distribute this harvest to his many helpers. His nonprofit group, EcoStation: NY, will also be selling the mushrooms — at a very reasonable price, he said — to neighbors who drop by the Bushwick Farmers’ Market held at the garden from late May through Thanksgiving.

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Yet more mushrooms are growing in burlap sacks stuffed with wood chips. There are 250 of these bags stacked in piles three feet tall that snake around the garden’s pathways.

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“It looks like World War I,” Mr. Morrison said. “Like you’re in the trenches. In a way, this is the mushroom revolution here.”

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If small-scale mushrooming is indeed a movement, Mr. Morrison seems to have a growing number of comrades nationwide. “Plug spawn sales are increasing dramatically,” said Paul Stamets, a prominent mycologist and founder of Fungi Perfecti, the Washington-state company from which Mr. Morrison orders many of his spawn and supplies.

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“The mushroom kit sales are increasing at maybe 25 percent per year, for the last three years,” he said. “The plug spawn sales are easily double that over a three- or four-year period.”

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Mr. Stamets, 54, attributes this new popularity to the “magical” flush of the mushroom. “They’re seemingly invisible, and yet they erupt into view within a day or two,” he said. “There are mushrooms that will break through concrete, and there are mushrooms that form fairy rings. People are curious about that.”

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Cooking shows and food magazines now call for something more than the standard plastic-wrapped button mushroom, according to Mary Ellen Kozak, 50, who is an owner of the mushroom-supply company Field and Forest Products in Peshtigo, Wis. A recent Martha Stewart Living recipe recommended beech mushrooms, Ms. Kozak noted. “I don’t know that I would have seen that five years ago, even,” she said.

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Feeding those foodie appetites — and the farmers’ markets that sell to them — has created new demand for mushroom spawn and gear, said Joe Krawczyk, 53, Ms. Kozak’s husband and business partner. “We’ve shown a real steady uphill growth of 5 percent a year for the last 10 years,” he said. “But we’ve seen a real jump of sales — 20 percent — in 2009. And we’re 20 percent over last year, already,” year to date.

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Shiitake mushrooms have been grown successfully in Japan for at least a millennium, Mr. Stamets said. But if old photos are to be believed, the “soak and strike” method required a certain comfort level with chilly water, colossal hammers and crippling labor. The tamer and more reliable backyard business began in the United States around the same time as his company — that is, 1980 — with the concept of nurturing all kinds of spawn in grain and then shipping them by mail.
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Mushrooms like the shiitake, wine cap, oyster and lion’s mane have taken to home domestication. All are widely available in spawn form and are reasonably easy to grow. But other gourmet varieties, like chanterelles and truffles, continue to defy most human meddling.

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The mushroom’s temperament in a word: capricious.
Most backyard growers tend to inoculate — that is, seed — wood chips, logs or straw. But Cory Finneron, a 27-year-old census temp, in Asheville, N.C., has developed mycelium on recycled coffee grounds and pine kitty litter. And Ron Spinosa, a 67-year-old mental health worker, in St. Paul, Minn., has raised oyster mushrooms on rolls of toilet paper. (He recommends that the paper be unbleached.)

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The most convenient way of raising mushrooms, though, is with kits that come with the spawn already inoculated into toaster-size blocks of sawdust, wood chips and grains. Cut open the top of the breathable plastic bag, spray it periodically with a mister and wait for the fruit to arrive.

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Beyond shipping some 20,000 of these kits a year, Mr. Stamets is a big thinker and innovator in the mushroom world — the Steve Jobs of fungus, perhaps. Mr. Stamets’s research has led him to believe that mushrooms can play a potent role in decomposing pollutants — filtering contaminants from waterways and restoring microbial diversity to barren soils.

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Mr. Morrison discovered these ideas in Mr. Stamets’s latest book, “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.” Before it was a mushroom forest, the Secret Garden’s woodland was better known as the neighborhood dump. Remodelers heaped construction waste there in six-foot-high mounds.

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After hauling the garbage out over a period of three years, starting in 2007, Mr. Morrison and his friends carted in 180 cubic yards of wood chips. He hopes that the oyster mushroom spawn he has introduced into this mulch will help to produce a new, healthy soil system. (Though mushrooms may disassemble toxins into less noxious substances, this fruit will not be for sale.)

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Just as mushrooms form vast underground complexes of mycelium, the act of growing them seems to create a social network of its own. Mr. Morrison, for instance, gave a handful of lion’s mane dowels to Mark Stonehill, a 22-year-old city parks worker who volunteered a couple of weekends at the Bushwick garden.

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Mr. Stonehill went on to inoculate a pair of logs in his parents’ basement in Astoria, Queens. He extended the mushroom chain by inviting his own helpmates: his girlfriend, Miriam Goler, a 22-year-old AmeriCorps volunteer and food activist, and one of her co-workers.

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Ms. Goler declared this midwinter event a party — though admittedly a tame one. “We checked on my parents every once in a while to make sure the sound of the drill wasn’t bothering them,” Mr. Stonehill said. “Luckily, we finished before they went to bed.”

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The idea of mushroom “inoculation parties” may sound every bit as zeitgeisty — and unlikely — as the key parties of yore. But Ms. Kozak, who founded Field and Forest Products with her husband 27 years ago, reports that it has been shipping extra-large batches of shiitake plug spawn to gatherings across the country in the past five years.

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“It’s an activity meant for socialization,” Ms. Kozak said. “Sort of like shucking peas.”

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Some of these inoculation parties double as teaching workshops. For five years, Ken Mudge, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University, has been leading an annual mushroom cultivation weekend at the university’s Arnot Teaching and Research Forest. He calls it Camp Mushroom.

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Mr. Mudge believes that mushrooms are an ideal market crop for Northeast farmers, and others who own small and neglected forest lots. Fresh shiitakes fetch around $16 a pound at a farmers’ market, he said.

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Those delicacies represent a bargain, he argued, compared with month-old grocery store slop. “I would describe that stuff as looking like shoe leather,” he said.

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This year’s Camp Mushroom, which takes place on Friday and Saturday, filled up fast, as usual, Mr. Mudge said. But he has plans to add three more seminars to meet the growing demand.

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WITH just an e-mail message or two, Jeremy and Aimee McAdams attracted 30-odd souls to the free mushroom workshop they held in their Minneapolis garage on a nippy Saturday in March. The permaculture crowd had turned out, including a lissome woman in her 30s wearing a pair of gray mouse ears, who was handing out her address for a kombucha-brewing session the next day.

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Mr. McAdams led the assembled past his 10-by-4-foot “fruiting coral,” explaining in an easy patter how he stands the logs upright to form a shapelier mushroom. For her part, Ms. McAdams had baked pumpkin-and-chocolate-chip muffins.
If urban homesteaders ever get their own Food Network show, this is what it might look like.

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The McAdamses have lots of time to audition for the part. Mr. McAdams, 36, lost his job in commercial architecture more than a year and a half ago. Ms. McAdams, 31, is an out-of-work librarian.

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Having bought their 1890s home out of foreclosure for $30,000 (the architectural style might best be described as “Still Standing”), the couple has begun to turn it into a tiny city farmstead. There’s a home-sewing business to open, for starters, and a root cellar to finish. For now, though, the mushrooms are keeping them busy. Mr. McAdams hopes to market some 200 pounds of shiitakes under the name Cherry Tree House Mushrooms to local restaurants. This harvest will come from the 110 logs laid out in a kind of grid in the side yard. Another 125 reside at a neighbor’s house.

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A few days after the workshop, over a pot of Keemun hao ha tea, Mr. McAdams announced that they still needed more space.

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“I’m in negotiation with someone two or three blocks up,” he said.
Ms. McAdams added: “He buys eggs from us” — they have a chicken coop, of course —“so we’ve kind of gotten to know him.”

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They’ll have to reach an arrangement soon. After 90 minutes or so, Mr. McAdams excused himself: he had an appointment to keep with a landowner on the far northern fringe of the Twin Cities, the kind of half-rural country where you slam into deer at dusk. Mr. McAdams had a line on a loaner van, and the timber was stacked to go.

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If everything went right, another 100 logs would be ready to seed by Friday night.

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Source : NY Times