Collete Zack and Steve Payne's home-based business, Matterhorn Mushrooms, sells blue oyster mushrooms like these harvested in June 2023.

LA GRANDE — What do you get when you put sawdust in a plastic bag? Well, a lion’s mane mushroom, if you do it right.

Matterhorn Mushrooms owners Steve Payne and Collete Zack learned how to grow mushrooms in bags of wood as a COVID project at home in La Grande. Countless tutorial YouTube videos and books later, and after consulting with other mushroom growers, they have all but perfected the process. Now, they look to expand their business and to continue to bring palatable, healthy food to La Grande households.

A La Grande native, Payne, 27, said he never really ate mushrooms growing up. Zack, 26, however, was raised on dishes like mushroom spaghetti and portobello burgers. But, it wasn’t until recently that they tried their hand at growing mushrooms.

“We’re both vegans, so we’ve been eating really clean,” Zack said. “I was learning about how to make different meat substitute options, and mushrooms came down to kind of the coolest, easiest way to do something like that.”

The two took what they learned from YouTube and the books they read and toured around 15 mushroom farms within about a 500-mile radius, visiting growers in Oregon, Washington and even one in Idaho. Then they started a limited liability company under the name Matterhorn Mushrooms in 2022.

“To go from a hobby to a business, we had to scale up slowly,” Payne said.

Besides having a tent at the La Grande Farmers Market, Matterhorn Mushrooms regularly sells its products to Mamacita’s International Grill. Other local businesses have bought from it in the past, and its products can also be found in Nature’s Pantry.

“Our goal is to bring healthy food to the community,” Zack said.

The process

Payne and Zack grow their mushrooms on wood instead of manure-based substrates. Their Oregon domestic kitchen license allows them to grow their products at home.

The process of growing mushrooms from a bag of sawdust begins in a petri dish.

Mushroom spores can be thought of like plant seeds — though the fungal spores aren’t technically seeds, mushrooms develop and grow from them. The first step is harvesting the spores.

Payne and Zack collect mushroom spores by either splitting open a mushroom they’ve previously grown or injecting syringes of spores bought online into a nutrient-dense liquid. Once the liquid “mushroom food broth” is inoculated or once the spores are collected from the inside of the mushroom, they are placed in a sterile petri dish so that there are no competing bacteria.

Next, Payne and Zack put the spores on a grain substrate that will spawn the mushrooms once placed in a plastic bag filled with sawdust. The grain is added to the bag and the bag is sealed. In time, there will be a white block inside the bag, indicating that the mycelium — the equivalent to mushroom roots — have grown from the grain spawn and encased the wood entirely.

Then, they place the white block — still sealed in the bag — in a humidity tent. The bag gains humidity, becoming an ideal environment for the mushrooms to grow.

“It’s kind of like this post-apocalyptic farming, where we’re simulating the tree with the spores inside,” Zack said. “The bag acts like the bark of the tree holding it all together.”

Then, they cut an “X” into the plastic bag, splitting open the “bark” and allowing the mushroom to fruit in the open air.

“(It’s the) same way mushrooms won’t fruit out a tree until they’ve pretty much taken over the whole inside with mycelium,” Zack said. “The fruiting body is the last part before it starts to decay the tree.”

From start to finish, the whole process takes about two months. Once the sawdust bag is in the humidified tent, it takes about 12 to 14 days, Zack said.

Zack said she hopes to ramp up production in the near future, especially now that they can dehydrate any mushrooms that don’t sell out. They have recently developed dried mix packs that are projected to be shelf stable for years.

Adaptogens

Scientific research has pointed to adaptogenic mushrooms’ ability to improve the immune system.

“(Mushrooms) have been used medicinally since at least 3000 B.C.E.,” according to a research paper published by the National Institutes of Health. “Mushrooms are reported to have antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, cardiovascular-protective, antidiabetic, hepatoprotective (preventing damage to the liver), and anticancer properties.”

Zack said that all of the mushrooms they grow — lion’s mane, turkey tail, reishi, to name a few — are adaptogenic. When she first started learning about adaptogens, she realized that she needed to make the food palatable.

“I had like 20 different bags of all these different things and I was like, ‘None of this tastes good,’” Zack said. “I like the idea of all these things in my body, but I need a really easy way for me to consume every day.”

This led to her creation of the Mushroom Cacao Blend, which Zack said is just one step in the right direction to help make mushrooms more desirable to consume.

“Getting people who don’t love mushrooms to drink (them) like a chocolatey beverage … is way more doable,” she said. “It’s been well received.”

Payne grows microgreens and Zack makes jars of sea moss — sea weed soaked in key limes and flavored (or not) with cooked-down fresh fruits and wildflower honey — to sell as well.

“Sprouted seeds and microgreens are often more nutrient-dense than ungerminated seeds or mature vegetables,” according to a National Institutes of Health report.

Now that Matterhorn Mushrooms has been in business for about a year, Zack and Payne hope to provide consistent stock to their customers.

“My six-month goal is to be able to expect lion’s mane at the store the same way you’d expect other produce to just be there,” Payne said.

Adaptogen: a nontoxic substance and especially a plant extract that is held to increase the body’s ability to resist the damaging effects of stress and promote or restore normal physiological functioning.

— www.merriam-webster.com