mushrooms Archives - Grounded by the Farm

Mushroom Recipes You Will Love

Janice Person — Mon, 11 May 2020 17:23:45 +0000

Last week my family had a funny conversation about mushrooms recipes. It immediately brought up the podcast conversation about mushrooms with Scott at J-M Farms. And I realized it was just a year ago that I toured a mushroom farm for the first time.

Suffice it to say one of our dear ones is not only a fan, but can sniff them out like nobody’s business! Most of us enjoy or are neutral on mushrooms though and they offer a lot of great nutritional value. And they do well solo, as well as pair with a range of meats and vegetables for great taste too. With that in mind, it seemed like a good time to find recipes from farm families who find mushrooms a good add to the menu.

Mushroom Appetizers & Side Dishes

I love mushrooms as a side dish and frequently find myself sautéing them with some garlic and butter. With these ideas, I can also see myself putting more mushrooms on my shopping list!

Marinated & Roasted Mushrooms

No lie, when I saw that my friend Jennifer who writes Plowing Through Life has roasted mushrooms in her air fryer, I thought that sounded genius. Air fryers cook so fast and the early prep is perfect.

Mushrooms can take on a range of flavorings and garlic, soy sauce and balsamic vinegar makes a great combination. Jennifer points out that you want the marinade to have time to really sink in and she sometimes prepares the marinade and lets them sit in it all day. I can see these going fast. Love that she said she’d used an 8 oz package and realized she needs double that as she makes this mushroom recipe.

Stuffed Mushrooms in the Crock Pot

Stuffed mushrooms are a near constant in restaurants and I love the look of these cheesy stuffed mushrooms Jennifer makes. With sausage and cheese, what’s not to like? She says they make a great appetizer or a party food… I can see these at some picnics this summer for sure. And the sign of getting a recipe done well is also learning what can go wrong will… appreciate the tip on cooking then keeping warm rather than long cook times and helping gaming out which cheeses seem to work best.

Mushrooms Pair Well With Meat

So many of us these days are omnivores and look at ways to add more vegetables to the plate. Because mushrooms pair so well with various meats, there seem to be a lot of farm mushroom recipes in my circles.

Hamburger Steaks with Mushroom Gravy

The first time I went to J-M, I remember clearly asking Terry Jurgensmeyer his favorite way to eat mushrooms and he said with a nice steak. I laughed but understood since I have eaten more than a few with steak myself.

But mushrooms aren’t just for steaks! My friend Jent at Farmwife Feeds makes some cast iron skillet hamburger steaks that scream comfort and seriously made me drool. She quickly cooks the mushrooms and onions, then adds the burger patties and gravy.

Mushroom Gravy that’s Golden on Pork

The love of good gravy is something my dad definitely taught me and I think Jent’s family has that same background. This crock pot recipe has a mushroom-based gravy for boneless pork chops. I really haven’t cooked pork chops in a crock pot before, but since her family raises hogs, I figure I should try. Besides she reminds us about using a meat thermometer to avoid over-cooking the pork.

Pasta Recipes with Mushrooms

If your family is like many, pasta is among the go to recipes when everyone has been going in different directions. Mushrooms seem to take the most simple pasta dish up a notch. Farmers shared few recipes with us.

Cheesy Turkey with Penne

When you work with turkey farmers for years, you pick up a few things on cooking with turkey beyond the holidays. My friend Lara at My Other More Exciting Life pairs turkey, mushrooms, penne and a creamy parmesan sauce in what she calls Creamy Parmesan and Turkey Penne and she’s posted it for Instant Pot and Crock Pot. And although she prefers to also bake it a bit to get a good browning to the cheese and let the pasta soften as it soaks up a bit more liquid, she also gives the directions for Instant Pot that makes that optional.

Meaty Spaghetti Sauce

Jent tells us she makes big batches of meat sauce with mushrooms that she will use in a few recipes — spaghetti one night, lasagna another and some to tuck in the freezer for a really quick turn around. She dices the mushrooms really finely since she has a few folks in the house who aren’t fans of mushrooms but they never object to this and she knows it is getting adds nutrition.

What’s your favorite way to eat mushrooms?

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Fresh Mushrooms for the Middle of the Country

libsyn — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 08:03:47 +0000

As a child, I remember mushrooms usually being in cans or bottles — never fresh mushrooms. But today most US farmers grow for the fresh market. It was a shift that really started in the 1970s and was a way for the US farmer to be a preferred source in the global fresh mushroom market. There is some cannery mushrooms. Those are usually mushrooms that don’t meet fresh standards usually. They are a byproduct, a way to use some now that may be wasted.

The company sells into both food service and retail (grocery stores, etc) throughout the region. About 25 percent of their business is retail. Located in northeastern Oklahoma, close to the Missouri & Arkansas lines, they go as far north as Cheyenne, Wyoming, as far west as Albuquerque, New Mexico and cover Texas, Arkansas, parts of Missouri. It’s a pretty good-sized market.

For the bulk customers, they ship in trays or boxes. And for retail, most prefer the small carton or till that is packed & shrink-wrapped by J-M before going out on a truck. They sell whole and sliced to both bulk and retail. I ended up catching some in a store while in Oklahoma visiting a college friend and had to take photos. I had brought a few bags of mushrooms from the farm so I didn’t need to buy anymore!

Types of Fresh Mushrooms J-M Grows

The typical white mushroom is generally called a button mushroom but it can be confusing call button is also the smaller size of mushroom. To be specific, the mushroom we see most frequently is the button white mushroom. J-M grows a lot of those but they also grow other mushrooms including brown ones that are called crimini or portabella depending on the size. The portabella is planted to enable it to grow to the five to six inches. Those are all agarigus mushrooms which means they grow in compost.

These mushrooms have gotten a lot of investment and that has helped make them easier to grow consistently that people will really enjoy. But there are other mushrooms that are getting more investment now too.

There are other kinds of mushrooms that like to grow on wood, especially hardwood so growing them is a little different. Shiitake are on the list of plans for J-M’s future. Scott says the company is investigating various exotic mushrooms and they watch adoption patterns on the coasts. And shiitake have definitely been gaining ground.

Morels are totally different. It is hard to grow commercially and Scott says lots have tried without finding the answer. Scott says he thinks the elusive nature of morels combined with the complexity of its growth will make it hard to do commercially. How much would people be willing to pay?

The Right Place for a Growing Family Business

A farm this size, got its start as Virgil Jurgensmeyer decided to leave his corporate job in St. Louis and branch out on his own in the 1970s. His three sons are running various parts of the business today as it continues to grow.

Miami, Oklahoma ended up being the right place. He looked for an area that had good transportation access, energy access, knowing that the middle of the country was underserved. The company started out growing 2 million pounds of mushrooms and has increased to 26-27 million pounds of mushrooms! With medium sized mushrooms, that would be 18-20 mushrooms per pound and everyone of those millions are hand-picked!

The business has been in Miami for 40 years and there are a lot of long-term employees. Growing the business has also meant a lot of hiring and looking longer term J-M knows that providing employees the type of environment that makes people choose J-M as the type of place they want to work, is an area of focus for Scott and the rest of the leadership team.

Food Safety Developments

The idea of fungus being a safe food… it is something to wrap your mind around. But Scott explains growing fungus in a clean environment is critical to good mushroom production.

Growing the mushrooms in a controlled, indoor environment is a major piece of that, but mushroom farmers have also been pasteurizing compost. That helps make sure the bed produces the desired mushrooms and only that. It also kills E. coli, listeria and more which can happen.

There are also other practices, like having just one person touch the mushroom one time. The vast majority of the mushrooms are picked and placed directly into the container which it will be shipped in.

Creating Compost

Since mushrooms are grown on compost, J-M has a recipe for compost that they make up in mass quantities. The put in ratios of carbon, nitrogen, and manage pH, water, etc. When you are composting, you are really just feeding microbes. They use wheat straw (mostly from within the 60-90 miles), chicken litter, cottonseed meal and gypsum which helps prevent sticking. Everything feeds the microbes, and the oxygen and water come in, the mushroom thrives on it.

Making compost is the part of the process which can be most impacted by weather with rain, heat, cold, drought all impacting the recipe J-M uses.

Spawns Not Spores

The planting of mushrooms isn’t spores, but a mycelium attached to a grain like rye or millet. That grain provides the energy source to get the mushroom started.

Mushrooms don’t need light — so they are kept in rooms that don’t have a lot of light. Mushrooms do need moisture, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. And a combination of microbes and nutrients, the combination of which remains more art than science. Lots of research has been done, but there is still a good bit to learn.

As the mushrooms grow, and oxygen needs to be brought in. And that can end up bringing in drier air, especially in winter. And making sure you get the humidity right means high energy use like other indoor agriculture.

Key Links

There are lots of places to learn more about J-M Farms and the fresh mushrooms they produce!

Video from a tour inside J-M Farms
JP’s first visit to J-M and answering a lot of questions about mushrooms
Find J-M Farms online jrfarms.com, on Instagram at and on Facebook.

The post Fresh Mushrooms for the Middle of the Country appeared first on Grounded by the Farm.

Going into the Dark at a Mushroom Farm

Janice Person — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 03:44:28 +0000

I’m accustomed to seeing mushrooms on pizzas, in pasta sauces, even in my yard when the rain won’t stop. But for some reason, I hadn’t ever really thought about what a mushroom farm would be like. Then last summer I met a mushroom farmer and I asked him all the questions. I had to go back for Grounded by the Farm to get video and an interview!

On this visit, I talked with Scott Engelbrecht who is the vice president of operations for J-M Farms in Miami, Oklahoma. Who showed me a room where crimini mushrooms were growing and explained the way they do flats with compost, peat and the spawn that gets the mushrooms started.

J-M Farms grows a few different types of mushrooms, and they supply grocery stores and restaurants throughout the plains states.

Crimini (also called brown mushrooms) are the smaller versions of portabella mushrooms. The rate of growth for mushrooms in these rooms that are climate controlled to provide the optimal environment is pretty amazing — in fact, once mushrooms are established, they double in size every day!

This mushroom farm produces it’s own compost as well as the shelving the mushrooms will be grown on.

You can listen to the podcast episode in your favorite app or our post here with audio on fresh mushrooms.

If you love mushrooms, you may want to connect with J-M further. They have some great information and recipes on their website jmfarms.com, share some great photos & information on Instagram at JMFarmsMushrooms and Facebook at JM Farms Mushrooms.

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