Your Asian supermarket will have lots for you to practice with.
Only a few bucks!
Making concentrated powders from fungi is by far the easiest way to get the most from your mushrooms. It extracts the maximum amount of constituents from the fungi and includes the whole fungal body in the final product. That means that you get it all, every benefit that the mushroom has. You can’t do better than.
Tip: buy your dried mushrooms pre-sliced to save time and energy cooking them.
Working with quality fungi can be expensive, so to practice making remedies from them, consider visiting your nearest Asian supermarket. They have all kinds of dried fungi you can purchase cheaply to practice before you unleash your talents on pricey organic stuff.
Cooking the mushrooms
Crock pot method
The pressure cooker method (covered below) is the fastest and most effective way of working with fungi. Some Folks, however, are a bit scared of using the hissing, steaming beast that is a pressure cooker. This method is a great compromise.
All you need to do with this method is to rehydrate your mushrooms or powder by leaving them to soak in twice the amount of water (by volume) as there are dried mushrooms. Powdered mushrooms take 3 times the amount of water to mushroom powder. Once soaking has been done, put the mushrooms and any water that is left over from the soaking into your crock pot and cover this with 5 times the amount of water by volume.
Put your crockpot on the ‘high’ setting with its lid on and leave it overnight, stirring it up a little every time you get up to have a wee.
In the morning, it should all have rendered down nicely. Let it cool and put it in your blender, ready for simmering.
Powdered mushrooms. 
Add 5X the amount of water by volume.
Pressure cooker method
For this method, you don’t need to pre-soak your fungus. Place the mushrooms in the pressure cooker and cover them with 5 centimetres of water (being careful not to exceed the maximum fill level of your cooker). Put your cooker on its high setting (if you’re using an electric one) and cook away. The time that you cook depends on the type of fungus.
- 30 minutes – fresh mushrooms, Snow fungus, Black fungus, and rehydrated dried mushrooms except for those below.
- 60 minutes – Woody or Leathery Polypores (Turkey Tail, Reishi), whether fresh or dried, Shiitake, or other dried fungi that you haven’t rehydrated
- When the time is up, and the pressure cooker has calmed down and is ready to be opened (safety first, folks), put the cooked fungi into your blender and blend them to mush.
Simmer with the lid of your crockpot cracked open. Whichever method you use, you will end up with mushroom mush.
However you cook your mushrooms, you need to simmer the cooked results down to a really thick paste. The thicker the paste, the less drying time will be needed. Put your mushroom mush into your crockpot, slow cooker or pot on the stove. Add twice the amount of water by volume and simmer it until it is thick. It should fall off of a spoon in blobs rather than pour off.
Leave the lid of your pot open a crack to let the steam escape. Set your slow cooker to ‘high’ for this step, but reduce it to’ low’ if that setting boils the liquid. Slowly is the trick.
Dehydrate
Allow your paste to cool enough to allow easier handling, and spread it evenly on your drying tray. Not too thickly, though; otherwise, it will take longer to dry. When the trays are nearly dry, flip the mushroom concentrate over to allow for even and complete drying.
Near the end of the drying process, flip the now leathery, drying mushroom paste over and continue to dehydrate. This ensures thorough drying.
The finished product should be of a tough, leathery consistency.
Slather the mush out onto fruit drying trays.
Flip them over to ensure complete dryness.
Dry to a tough, leathery consistency.
Pulverise
The final step is to throw your dried mushroom leather into a blender or grinder and grind it as finely as you want.
The colour of your final result will vary depending on which variety of mushroom you used, how long it was cooked, and a couple of other factors that I’m not sure about at the moment.
You will have a powder that has released most of the beta-glucans and other compounds in a form that will be easily accessible upon rehydration of the powder. It also contains the whole mushroom, so whatever medicinal properties it has will be easily accessible now that you have broken down the tough cell walls.
The colour of your final result will vary depending on which variety of mushroom you used, how long it was cooked for, and a couple of other factors that I’m not sure about at the moment.
You will have a powder that has released most of the beta-glucans and other compounds in a form that will be easily accessible upon rehydration of the powder. It also contains the whole mushroom, so whatever medicinal properties it has will be easily accessible now that you have broken down the tough cell walls.
Using your concentrated mushroom powder
This technique renders your mushrooms into an easily used and assimible form. You can use a couple of spoonfuls in any meal, though the powders excel in soups and stocks.
Add some concentrated mushroom powder to your day’s nutritional smoothie, or make a delicious mushroom tea with them. I find half a teaspoon to a cup of hot water is the right amount for me; it could be a good starting amount for you.
Everyone has different tastes, so experiment with quantities until you fund an amount that suits your taste.
Isn’t it just drying?
Definitely not. Drying just removes the moisture, but constituents such as beta-glucans are still bound in the cell walls.
Concentrating powders is far more effective than drying them. The process liberates so many of the goodies contained in the mushrooms and combines them with the mushroom body, giving you access to all of them.
When you have dried and concentrated powders side by side, you can see, smell and taste the difference. The concentrated mushroom at the top of the pic below is so much darker and richer in every way than the powdered mushroom at the bottom, even though they are both foraged Saffron Milk Caps.
