Happy Nice Mall

When new buds appear on the trees and the soil warms with the arrival of spring, foragers spread out into the woodlands, combing the leaf litter for morel fungi.

Arguably the most iconic of the wild mushrooms, morels are 3 to 6 inches tall and feature a special cone-shaped lattice head in shades from cream to chocolate brown. Prized for their nutty, earthy taste, these products sell for $50 a kilo fresh and $200 a kilo dry. In New York, they appear for a short time, usually from late April to early June.

Experienced morel hunters return to well-protected areas each year and often exhibit some form of selective hearing loss when asked where they collect their prey.

“There’s something about morels — they have a mystery that fascinates people,” said Gregory Bonito, a biologist at Michigan State University who studies morels and other fungi. Dr. Bonito explained that unlike some wild mushrooms that can be grown easily, morels have an interesting life cycle, making them notoriously difficult to grow.

Growing morels is not impossible. Until 2008, at least one US breeder produced them commercially. Dr. Since 2014, farmers in China have been doing this outdoors in the spring, but yields can be variable, Bonito said. He manages a small morel farm project in Michigan and surrounding states funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. All participating farmers, but one grew at least one morel last year, but this year’s numbers are increasing.

But expectations for morel on demand seem to be rising. In December, after forty years of research, twin brothers Jacob and Karsten Kirk from Copenhagen announced that they had developed a method to reliably grow high yields of morel indoors year-round in a climate-controlled environment.

The 64-year-old Kirklar, who often mutters each other’s thoughts, says they’ve grown around 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of mushrooms using their system. Last year’s crop yielded about 4.2 kilograms in a 22-week cycle; this equates to about 10 kilograms per square meter (or 20 pounds per yard) per year.

“This is really too much,” said Jacob Kirk. “We can now see the commercial side of it.” With their method, Karsten Kirk added, “the cost per square foot of producing a morel would be roughly the same as producing a white button mushroom.”

It is not yet clear what the Kirk brothers’ success will mean for the possibility of supplying morels more widely and affordably. But if it does happen, it “will be a game changer for the food industry,” says Kenneth Toft-Hansen. Danish chef and 2019 Bocuse d’Or winneran international competition often described as the culinary Olympic Games.

Jacob and Karsten Kirk said they were fascinated by the cultivation of morels as undergraduate students at the University of Copenhagen in the late 1970s. Even when they were younger, they were fervent biologists who set up a home laboratory for themselves to recreate the experiments and observations described in their textbooks. They also loved to forage for mushrooms and other wild foods. To compound these interests, they began cultivating white button and oyster mushrooms, which are relatively easy to grow. But after learning how expensive they were and that they were never successfully grown, they set their sights on morels.

After graduating from college, Jacob and Karsten started digging. Using a specimen they found in the forest, they grew morel mycelium (the fungal equivalent of roots) in a dish, and after a few years began producing structures called sclerotia, which are hardened mycelial nuggets and some other species, which store morel-forming nutrients. mushrooms are based on fruit.

But just then, in 1986, two Michigan State University researchers and another Californian caused an uproar in the mushroom growing world. published the first of three patents defining A method of enlarging morel sclerotids and inducing them to produce morels. In 1988 the Kirk brothers found an investor to finance their effort to replicate this method. Since then, they have rented space for their privately funded studies on the agricultural research campus of the University of Copenhagen. Denmark Morel Project.

The method described in the 1980s worked great, according to Gary Mills, one of the patents inventors and general manager of Gourmet Mushrooms, a private mushroom growing company in Scottsville, Michigan. Mr. Mills said that during the 1990s and between 2005 and 2008, he and his colleagues grew hundreds of pounds of morels each week at facilities in Michigan and Alabama. Tom Monaghan, who founded Domino’s Pizza, became an investor and built the first pilot plant for the commercial cultivation of morels. But in 2008 the financial crisis hit and morel farming operations stopped.

Mr Mills said Gourmet Mushrooms plans to return to morels, but there is a major challenge in making the growing process economically viable due to the high energy and labor costs. One of the university professors has often stated that anyone who learns to grow morels can easily become a millionaire. “Well,” said Mr Mills sarcastically, “I can tell you, this may or may not be true.”

But the Kirk brothers say they’re not particularly motivated by millions. “We’re both learning and having fun doing these experiments,” Karsten said. Jacob said the brothers never copied their US patents, and they’ve heard of other scientists around the world having problems as well. They believe their new method is highly sustainable.

Developing was a spiral process. By 2003, they had made some gradual strides, but the brothers had not yet grown a single morel indoors. Money was running low and it looked like they were going to have to close the shop. But just when they needed support most, a small outdoor cultivation project came to fruition. In these experiments, the Kirks set out to recreate the growing conditions for a large cluster of morels they had found in nature. In a short time, they said, they managed to turn their outdoor success into indoor morel growth. “We now had a standard method that we could develop step by step,” said Jacob.

They have been working to perfect this method since 2005. They created and optimized artificial soil and two different types of nutrient substrates and tested different climatic and light conditions. Based on their observations in nature, they found that adding grass to their soil somehow stimulated the mycelium. After developing a prototype for several cultivation strategies, they designed and built a moving pallet system to commercialize the most efficient.

The Kirks work alone and keep meticulous records of their experiments. Only two people know all the details of the operation: its investors and Karsten’s daughter Helena Kirk, who helps with communications. “As siblings, they’re not afraid to offend one another, as friends or colleagues might do,” Helena said. “They always have small arguments with each other and always make up within an hour.” Overall, though, they’re pretty similar in temperament, she added. “Jacob is a little more creative,” she said, “and my father is more realistic.”

After so long working resolutely on the science of growing morels, the Kirks are still trying to figure out how best to commercialize their produce. So far, they’ve given most of their returns to their investors and a handful of chiefs, including Mr. Toft-Hansen.

He first connected with Kirks in 2014. At the time, she was training for her first Bocuse d’Or, which asked contestants to use materials sourced from their country. Mr. Toft-Hansen said, “I had heard that these two guys were doing this crazy project – morels in Denmark.

The chef noted that morels cultivated in the kitchen have some major advantages over those that are fed. Wild-grown morels often carry dirt, bugs, and slugs, but washing away junk food means soaking up the fungus that spoils its texture. Collected mushrooms are also exposed to the destruction of sun and rain. “If it rained the previous day, the cork is probably wet and the quality starts to deteriorate,” he explained.

So far, the Kirks say they’ve been able to grow morels from 92 of the 102 specimens or variants of a particular type of morel called the black morel they’ve collected over the years. Last year’s crop came from sclerotia of two – variants 195 and 234.

But the brothers’ morel experiments weren’t over yet. This season they tested 22 new variants they found last year and have harvested nine kilograms (20 pounds) in the past few weeks. All new variants produced morels and six were particularly fast growing and plump. One of them, 340, is the couple’s new boyfriend. “It’s like finding gold when you find a new species,” Karsten said.