There are many, much touted medicinal benefits in certain mushroom varieties such as Turkey Tail, Reishi and Shiitake, that need a bit of effort to extract but there are other compounds that are literally ours for the taking. This page will give you some basic preparation techniques that are common to most extraction methods. There’ll be links to each method as I finish the pages, So keep an eye out.
Fibre and Beta-glucans
Beta- glucans are the darling of the health industry at the moment) and both kinds of fiber (soluble and insoluble) are well know for their health benefits. All of these are found in mushrooms, both medicinal and not. Fortunately, these constituents are reasonably easy to extract and incorporate into our diets.
We should already be aware of the myriad of benefits of having both kinds of fibre in our diets. They help feed our gut biome, reducing the effects of diabetes and producing many awesome compounde such as seratonin. They reduce cholesterol and generally help with digestion. They’re awesome!
Beta-glucans are a little more complicated. They form a large part of fungal cell walls and are, fortunately, water soluble (with a little effort). As we ingest them they pass through our intestinal walls and into our bloodstream where they are are picked up by the macrophages that clean up. Once taken aboard by them, they are recognised bu all of our immune cells and they ramp up their production of compounds that protect us from everything from colds to cancer.
Beta-glucans, literally give our immunce systems a workout and regular ingestions of them keep us in tip-top shape.
So, how do we get to them?
Water extraction methods
Fungal cell walls are tough. Very tough. They are composed of Beta-glucans and Chitin woven together. As most of the medicinal fungi that we are likely to have access to are dried, it takes a bit of an effort to extract anything from them.
You can give them an overnight soak or pressure cook your mushrooms for around half an hour to soften them up. Don’t throw away the water in the cooker though, it’s already full of the goodies that we’re after!
Slow cooking in a crock pot.
Softer Fungi such as Black Fungus or White Fungus, your regular Button Mushrooms or even your freshly foraged Fungi can be boiled for a while before adding to meals. My favorite method along these lines is to cook them overnight in my crock pot, with the setting on ‘high’. Mine is an old, well loved unit and the high setting doesn’t boil what is in it. If yours does, use the high setting to get it hot, then put it to ‘low’ for the whole night. Low and slow are good tips here. Let the heat really get in there and you will get a Beta-glucan rich broth.
Pressure cooking
The other method is to pressure cook harder, woodier dried Fungi such as Reishi or Shiitake. Pressure cook for half an hour at least. They’ll still be pretty inedible but you can use the water in the slow cooker and cook them up a treat.
You can combine both techniques if you want, pressure cook, then slow cook to really break it all down. If you’re eating softer Fungi, add the fungal body to our brew and extract all of the goodness when you eat it.
Double extraction
You can remove the leftovers and tincture them in 50% alcohol to extract additional alcohol soluble compounds. Some sources say to do the tincturing first, then the water extrsction but if you water extract first, the mushroom pieces and their cell walls have already vern prepped for alcohol access.
Polysaccharides such as Beta -glucans are insoluble in alcohol and you will see the suction go cloudy and they precipitate out of solution as a fine sediment. Don’t worry though. If you shake up your tincture bottle before using, you’ll get the best of both worlds. More details on double extraction can be found here.
Powders for full extraction
You can combine everything into an easy to use powder. We have a page detailing that here.
