DINING

The future of food might be growing at a Buda mushroom farm

By Clara Wang
Special to the American-Statesman
Trumpet mushrooms on Sept. 23 at Smallhold Mushroom Farm in Buda. The Buda location is one of several across the country that Smallhold uses to grow and supply six varieties of mushrooms to grocery stores and restaurants.

America is tripping out on mushrooms right now. The fresh, edible kind you use for cooking, that is.

Mushrooms of all varieties have always been a prominent part of Asian cuisines, but until recently, Americans were fussy about fungi. Consumption was limited to a few varieties used in whatever trend was popular: portobellos on top of pizza, button mushrooms in salads, shiitakes having a moment in the early 2000s.

The tide is turning: 2020 saw a 20% to 30% increase in mushroom consumption, according to marketing research company IRI, and the U.S. mushroom market is projected to grow from 15.25 million in 2021 to 24.05 million by 2028. Americans are becoming more familiar with the sustainability and culinary potentials of the fungi kingdom. In the Austin area, Smallhold Mushroom Farms, which opened a farm in June 2021 in Buda, is helping to make sustainably grown, fresh mushrooms widely available for local restaurants and grocery stores.

Founded in 2017 as a Brooklyn-based startup by environmental consultant Andrew Carter and his former college roommate, Adam DeMartino, Smallhold has macro farms in New York, downtown L.A. and now Buda, along with a smaller South Austin farm they opened in 2020. They supply to 400 distributors nationwide, including Whole Foods and Central Market, and local restaurants such as Uchi, Suerte, Commodore and Oseyo.

Andrew Carter is CEO and co-founder of Smallhold Mushroom Farm and an environmental consultant. Smallhold plans to open a network of farms across the country to supply mushrooms to local communities.

Smallhold’s owners aim to network farms across the U.S. to supply locally, so that everybody has access to farm-to-table fresh mushrooms without the environmental impact of cross-country shipping.

“There’s definitely a growing perception of functional benefits from certain kinds of mushrooms in the adaptogen space right now,” says Lauren Glanzer, regional principal forager at Whole Foods Market. “Consumers are more aware of what the positive environmental impact of mushrooms can be as a whole. In the culinary space, I’m seeing Austin chefs play with mushrooms in new and exciting ways — no longer the forgettable dish to placate your vegetarian friend.

“Producers like Smallhold are meeting the consumer demand where it is — far beyond the standard button mushrooms of the 1990s.”

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Smallhold’s mission is rooted in a rising consciousness around sustainability and increasing the diversity of foods we eat. Fungi is one of the five kingdoms that all living things are biologically classified under, and mushrooms are the aboveground reproductive spores produced by mycelium (similar to a root network) in a process known as fruiting. Mushrooms are the perfect carbon-friendly food: Along with being nutritionally dense, they are sustainable to grow, requiring little other than water and a simple substrate like sawdust, and have growth cycles as short as six weeks.

Yellow oyster mushrooms are one of six varieties grown at Smallhold Mushroom Farm in Buda.

For Carter, who studied environmental sciences and ecological design in college and worked as an environmental consultant, growing mushrooms is an ideal way to integrate sustainable design and food pathways. He learned about mushrooms in college when working on bioremediation — using plants and ecology to clean polluted environments — and now is collaborating with the City of Los Angeles to try to clean up pollution through mycoremediation, which uses fungi to help break down oil issues such as hydrocarbons and uptake heavy metals.

“I think designing spaces to imitate nature is really intriguing and really important for the future if climate change continues on the way that it’s currently going,” Carter says. “We need to figure out how to live and grow food in environments that imitate the past.”

At Smallhold’s Buda farm, science and people work together to efficiently feed the community. Spread through a large, empty industrial complex, the actual mushrooms grow in rows of bright rooms that are temperature and humidity-controlled using patented climate management technology. Shelves of alien-like mycelium in bags of hardwood sawdust substrate, with mushrooms sprouting in various stages of growth, fill each room. They grow six varieties of mushrooms: blue oyster, yellow oyster, lion’s mane, maitake, shiitake and trumpet. Growth times vary depending on the species, but they all grow fast; Carter tells me that by the end of the day, the mushrooms I saw will look different.

Jessi Flores and Shan McGinnis work Sept. 23 at Smallhold Mushroom Farm in Buda. Mushrooms have a short growing cycle and require little more than water and a simple substrate to mature.

The sound of Skrillex blasts (apparently mushrooms don’t mind music) in the warehouse as harvesters, growers and operators scurry around in lab coats and hairnets checking things off on clipboards, harvest and sort ready-to-pick mushrooms, and pack them for shipping.

Smallhold picker R.L. Cubit II, a longtime chef with a certification from Le Cordon Bleu who found the job through a farm ad, is cogent about the culinary potential of the fungi he picks, sorts and packs.

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“We’re breaking ground with what can be achieved with mushrooms; how we eat them, perceive them, how they can help with communities, the substrate blocks that help with other plants,” Cubit says.

Cubit adds: “On the culinary side, we’re just starting to come into our own with the availability of fresh gourmet mushrooms.”

Mushrooms have long been underappreciated in the American culinary scene, but thanks to consumer demand for plant-based food options, along with a more globalized, adventurous customer base, restaurants are now embracing fungi’s possibilities. According to the Bloomberg Intelligence Report, plant-based food sales are expected to quintuple by 2030, and umami-packed, versatile mushrooms are a boon to chefs.

Smallhold supplies to many Austin restaurants, and chefs like Oseyo’s Mike Diaz are excited about having a wide variety of fresh mushrooms to play with.

Blue oyster mushrooms grow Sept. 23 at Smallhold Mushroom Farm in Buda. The farm distributes to grocery stores such as Whole Foods and Central Market and to area restaurants.

“Texas is such a meat heavy culture, and mushrooms can be super filling and nutritional but at the same time flavorful,” Diaz says.

At Oseyo, Diaz makes banchan (freshly pickled Korean side dishes) out of Smallhold shiitakes and royal trumpets and stock out of leftover dried mushroom stems, and grills an assortment to serve like barbecue.

“My approach to any mushroom is to get inspiration from the actual mushroom itself … flavor, texture, visualizing the dish. That’s my inspiration for when I work with a lot of food, but mushrooms especially are so unique and different,” Diaz says.

“I kind of just let the mushroom guide me.”

As climate change makes finding sustainable foodways more pressing, consumers are looking for plant-based foods that don’t taste like they were made in a lab. Smallhold holds a tiny torch at the end of the tunnel. The future of food may just be fungi.