The mushrooms
We only grow what we can grow well all year round, plus pink oyster while the summer lasts. If you want to see how a block becomes a crop, the farm page walks through every step.
The varieties · 01 to 03
Every price here is per kilo, before the €1 a kilo off for standing weekly orders of 5 kg or more. Mix any of them in half-kilo steps, with 2 kg a drop as the minimum.
Variety 01 · All year
Kitchen note
Hot pan, and don't crowd it. Tear the cluster into single fans, lay them flat in one layer and leave them alone until the edges crisp. Salt at the very end, or the pan fills with water and they stew.
The one most kitchens start with. It carries a sauce, it takes a char, and it is the cheapest kilo on the list.
Variety 02 · June to September
Kitchen note
The colour fades with long cooking, so keep it brief: a minute or two in a hot pan and straight onto the plate. It likes the warm months and sulks when the Barje fog comes in, which is why it leaves the list at the end of September.
Variety 03 · All year · Fresh and dried
Kitchen note
Remove the stems, and keep them for stock. They are too woody to eat, but a handful in a pot of bones gives a deeper, rounder stock than you would expect. The caps take a hard sear or a slow braise equally well.
The dried bags do the same job in the stock pot when a fresh drop is still two days away, and they keep for months in a dry store.
Variety 04 · All year
I'll admit it, this is the one I'd grow if I could only grow one.
Lion's mane is the slowest thing in the rooms. From a freshly inoculated beech block to a head I can put in your crate takes about five weeks, the longest of anything we grow. For most of that time nothing seems to happen at all.
Then a pale knot pushes out through the opening in the bag, and over the following week the white spines start to lengthen, hanging down like icicles off a gutter. On a cold, wet evening in the fruiting room it is the best thing in the building to look at, and I will happily stand there longer than I should.
I pick it before the spines yellow. A head that has started to tint at the tips is past its best and turns faintly bitter, so it goes on the compost heap, not into your crate. Most heads come off at 300 to 600 g, cut cleanly at the base the evening before your drop.
You order it by weight like everything else, in half-kilo steps, so a kilo is usually two or three heads. It is the most delicate thing we send. It bruises where you squeeze it, so lift it from underneath, keep it in its waxed bag at 2 to 4 °C, and use it within 4 days.
Tear it, don't slice it. Pulled apart along the grain it breaks into ragged pieces with plenty of edges, and the edges are where the flavour ends up.
Put the pieces in a dry pan over a medium-high heat and press them down with a second, heavier pan on top. The water comes out first and steams off. Then it starts to colour. Turn once, press again, and wait until both sides are deep golden. Only then add butter and a few sprigs of thyme, and baste for the last minute. Salt at the very end.
Cooked like that it is dense and sweet, with a pull somewhere between crab and a well-seared scallop. People reach for those two words the first time they eat it, and they are not far wrong.
You will have read things about lion's mane. I don't make any claims for it, and we don't sell extracts, powders, tinctures or anything in a capsule. It isn't medicine. It's just very good food, at its best on a warm plate with a spoon of brown butter over it.
If you want it every week, tell me early. Small changes to a standing order need a week, but a bigger one takes five weeks to come through, because the blocks have to grow first. Write to hello@myxaris.com with your rough kilos and I'll set the blocks going.
Rok
Not on the list
Four varieties out of three rooms is what two people can grow well, pick on time and get to your door before half ten.
Turned down
No wild mushrooms, no truffles, no button mushrooms.
Spent blocks
A finished block goes back into the ground.
Once a block has given its last flush, it goes to the compost heap or into the neighbours' vegetable beds on the edge of the Barje. We don't sell spent blocks, and the rooms they come out of are scrubbed and steamed every August.