January 15, 2013
Drying Mushrooms
Drying mushrooms can start after you pick your fresh shrooms. Your terrarium will provide the perfect environment allowing each cake to continuously flush. A ‘flush’ is a term to describe a single growth cycle. Each of your cakes can flush multiple times producing new mushrooms each time. Each flush is marked by brief absence of activity followed by renewed growth.
Note: Dunking your cakes in between flushes will re-hydrate your cakes and help produce more magic mushrooms.
Picking
Its flush time and you have five or six mushrooms ready to pick. How can you tell when shrooms are ready to pick? The best magic mushrooms are plump with the cap just about to break the veil. Once the veil is broken the mushrooms cap will open and drop thousands of tiny spores which can become a mess. It is said that potency peaks once the veil is torn, so harvesting just before caps are fully open is a good general rule when harvesting.
How-to-Pick | Wash your hands first and or wear clean gloves. Grab the cake and the base of your chosen shroom and pull. You should feel a soft ‘thud’ as your shroom cleanly breaks from the cake. The holes or dry sockets left in the absence of harvested magic mushrooms can open the cake up to contaminants. For this reason some people prefer to simply cut the each shroom at the base with a pair of clean sharp scissors.
Drying Mushrooms
Once you have your magic mushrooms picked you can ingest them fresh, or dry and store them for later. Properly dried and stored mushrooms can last for years with potency nearly unchanged. The trick is to dry them slowly and completely until they are what’s known as ‘cracker dry’. The point at which mushrooms have no moisture left and will snap like a cracker when bent.
Drying mushrooms too fast with too much heat will destroy the potency of your magic mushrooms. However if you don’t dry them completely the moisture that is left may begin to mold. And trust me… no one wants your moldy shrooms!
Drying mushrooms involves 2 steps:
Step 1| Pre-Dry
Place the magic mushrooms on a plate and cover with a black cloth or towel. Place the plate in a sunny window. If you aren’t lucky enough to have the sun available for drying mushrooms you can place a fan nearby to blow air across your mushrooms. In a few hours your the mushrooms will be dry to the touch, slightly shrivelled and somewhat rubbery. At this point the mushrooms are in great condition for short term storage however if you want to keep magic mushrooms beyond a few weeks then an additional drying stage is required.
Step 2 | Desiccant
A fancy word for moisture absorber. Basically to get all of the remaining moisture out of your magic mushrooms requires them being placed in an air-tight container with desiccant. The most common desiccant used to dry mushrooms is Silica Gel. it is a naturally occurring mineral that is purified and processed into either granular or beaded form. Unadulterated it is non-toxic and has been approved by the FDA as food contact safe. Another benefit to silica gel is that it won’t leave any funny odors or tastes on the dried shrooms.
To use the desiccant place in the bottom of an air-container such as in tupperware. Place a screen above the desiccant and cover with drying mushrooms. The screen should keep the shrooms up above the desiccant so the two don’t touch. Place on the lid and seal the container. Check the container every couple of days until the shrooms are completely ‘cracker dry‘.
