Gourmet mushroom varieties grown in Chicago

CHICAGO — Chefs in the Chicagoland area are creating entrees with gourmet mushrooms grown locally at Windy City Mushroom.

“The cool part of being a local farm is most of our customers are within five miles so we can provide them with the freshest product possible,” said Guy Furman, founder and president of Windy City Mushroom in Chicago.

Furman together with Eric Moens started the indoor gourmet mushroom farm in July 2019.

“We have both top growing and side growing mushrooms and our plan is to have about seven different species,” Furman said.

“We’ve tried over 10 varieties, but canceled a few because they weren’t commercially viable,” he said. “Some of them look good, but they don’t have an adequate shelf life.”

Some of the varieties growing at the farm include blue oyster. chestnut, lion's mane, elm and Italian oyster.

“Our sales increased every month from October 2019 to February and then COVID happened,” Furman said. “Our customers were all restaurants and one home delivery service, so as a result we had to shift our business model and we took the COVID break to renovate.”

The mushroom growers redesigned some parts of their system based on what they learned from growing mushrooms for several months.

“We increased the height of the ceilings, we went to two shelving styles and we changed the humidity controls,” Furman said.

The goal of Windy City Mushroom is to become one of the largest commercial growers of gourmet mushrooms in the United States.

“We redesigned with the expectation that the world is going to get more normal by fall,” Furman said. “And we’re going to work with more retail outlets and home delivery services going forward.”

The mushrooms are grown in bags that contain a mixture of soy hull pellets and hardwood sawdust pellets.

“It is a 50-50 mixture of two byproducts,” Furman said. “Mushrooms are able to decompose and breakdown pretty much anything, so we are growing a quality protein from two products that are considered waste products.”

After the bags go through a steaming process, they are inoculated with the grain spawn of a mushroom variety and placed on racks in the grow rooms. Mushrooms are attracted to both oxygen and light.

“We cut the bag open and the mushrooms grow out the hole,” Furman said. “We will have mushrooms to harvest in two to six weeks depending on the species.”

The first flush of mushrooms always produces the most fruit, Furman said.

“They will keep fruiting until they run out of energy, but the second flush will be a little smaller,” he said. “After the second flush the bags go into compost for other farmers.”

The grow rooms for the mushrooms are controlled for several factors including carbon dioxide, light, humidity and temperature.

“Mushrooms produce carbon dioxide and heat, so we need to remove that heat,” Furman said.

It has been interesting, Furman said, to see the unique entrees that chefs create with the gourmet mushrooms.

“The chefs design recipes around the mushrooms, especially the chestnut because they have a unique look and a robust flavor,” he said. “There is a restaurant a block away from here that uses our mushrooms.”

Indoor growing is a much different dynamic compared to conventional farming, said Dennis Vulich, a partner in Windy City Mushroom who also is a partner with conventional farmers in Illinois and Indiana that are growing corn and soybeans.

“With the mushrooms, every six to eight weeks, we’re rejuvenating, growing something healthy and taking the byproduct and recycling it again,” Vulich said. “I think conventional farmers should all think about trying to diversify and look at alternative grow opportunities.”

The location of Windy City Mushroom in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood also has an interesting history.

“We have floor plans from 1947 when this space was a rendering plant,” Vulich said. “Then it became a spice company, then it was a cooking oil company and now it’s a mushroom company. That’s an amazing reincarnation of this property over the past 70 years.”

For more information about Windy City Mushroom, go to www.windycitymushroom.com.