ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Dinner SOS, test kitchen director and host Chris Morocco helps caller Leah get over her intimidation of cooking mushrooms by taking a very special field trip.
Leah lives in New York City and she loves the Union Square Greenmarket. She regularly visits her favorite vendors to pick up produce, herbs, and even local cheese and meat, but there’s one vendor she avoids—Mushroom Queens. Leah is intrigued by the specialty mushrooms they carry, like lion’s mane, oyster, and maitake, but lacks the confidence to cook with them. She longs to feel comfortable enough with fungi to create dishes where they are the star.
In our first-ever Dinner SOS field trip, Chris takes Leah to the Mushroom Queens headquarters in Ozone Park, New York, to get a tour of the urban mushroom farm with owners and brothers Jeff and Adam Novzen. The Novzen brothers take Chris and Leah on a tour of their mushroom-growing facility and even allow them to help harvest the mushrooms.
Feeling more confident after her field trip, Leah still needed to learn how to cook with mushrooms. Adam recommends she start with an oyster mushroom, which has a mild flavor and a texture resembling meat, and for a more advanced move, lion’s mane, which he recommends flattening and cooking like a steak over high heat to deeply brown it. Chris gives Leah two different recipes to fall in love with these more specialty mushrooms—a recipe where mushrooms meld with older flavors, Pasta with Creamy Mushroom Ragu, and one where mushrooms are in the spotlight, Seared Mushrooms with Garlic and Thyme.
Listen now to see how Leah fares in the kitchen after her trip with Chris to Mushroom Queens and whether she’s able to pull off cooking a mushroom dish she loves.
Chris Morocco: Hey there, listeners, future callers, and cooking enthusiasts. Welcome to Dinner SOS, the show where we help you save dinner or whatever you're cooking. I'm Chris Morocco, Food Director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious.
Our caller today, Leah, lives in New York City. Leah called in because she loves the farmer's market that pops up four times a week in New York's Union Square. And honestly, I'm with her. I love a farmer's market in general, and this one in particular is huge. Leah told me that she loves checking out all the vendors, picking up her produce, herbs, even local cheese and meat.
Leah: But there's just this one vendor that I find myself completely avoiding, and that is the mushroom guy.
CM: Oh, okay.
L: And, [inaudible 00:01:01].
CM: The mushroom guy, or we should really say guys, are a staple at the Union Square Farmer's Market, and they have quite the selection of mushrooms.
L: Not just the standard baby bella white mushroom that I have bought in the grocery store and I have used, but these really cool, interesting varieties of mushrooms from lion's mane to shiitake, that are just so funky. And I find myself staring longingly from afar, wanting so badly to be able to shop from that, but I don't know which ones to buy. And then when I think about preparing them, I think, there must be a very specific way that I need to cut this, or cook this, or prepare this because they look like they're from a different planet. It's just the one tent that I am scared to approach.
CM: Now, you mentioned baby bella or cremini mushrooms. Are you actually making that sort of style of mushroom?
L: So I've purchased them, I've cooked with them in a basic stir-fry form, and I do find that when I buy them in the grocery store and I cook with them, they fall flat. They're kind of gummy or slimy. I've gotten to travel for work to places like China and Vietnam, and I've had these really awesome mushroom dishes. And I love to watch Top Chef, and anytime someone makes a mushroom dish, everyone talks about the umami, and I want to experience that and I want to create a dish where the mushroom is the star.
CM: Have you ever tried talking to anybody at the stand, just out of curiosity? No judgment.
L: No, I have not.
CM: Yeah. Well, I think ultimately my goal is for you to be able to walk up to who I'm sure is a very friendly mushroom person, who's going to be so excited to help you in your journey and for you to go, "All right, I want half a pound of those blue oyster mushrooms and half a pound of maitakes. Here's what I'm thinking of doing." Boom, and to be off and running.
L: Exactly, that's my dream.
CM: Leah's mushroom intimidation really stuck with me because, well, she's right. Some of the varieties that have recently popped up at farmer's market mushroom stands don't necessarily look like anything else that we eat. And on top of that, mushrooms have a lot of different use cases. You've got people using them medicinally, as meat substitutes, as flavor enhancers, all that to say the world of mushrooms is big. So if I was going to help Leah out, I needed to go beyond recipe suggestions. After a short break, a field trip. We are in the vestibule of the mushroom guy's lair.
L: Hi.
Jeff Novzen: Hi, welcome.
CM: How's it going? I take it you are the mushroom guy?
Adam Novzen: Yes, I'm Adam.
JN: And I'm Jeff.
CM: Hey, I'm Chris. It's so nice to meet you. Stick around. Leah, when you wrote into Dinner SOS, did you ever think you'd end up here in Ozone Park, in kind of a mushroom factory right?
L: I did not. This is not what I expected at all, but I'm really excited to be here.
CM: It's sort of like immersion therapy or something right?
L: I was just going to say, it's a little bit terrifying. You brought me right into the belly of the beast.
CM: The next time Leah and I spoke, we weren't on either end of a video call. We were face-to-face in a mushroom growing facility, a building on a quiet street of single-family homes not too far from the JFK Airport. And we were there thanks to the mushroom guys.
AN: I'm Adam.
JN: And I'm Jeff, Adam's brother.
AN: And we are at Mushroom Queens, an urban farm in Ozone Park, Queens.
CM: The brothers behind Mushroom Queens didn't grow up eating all the varieties of mushrooms they now grow. Their fascination with fungi. Started with the more medicinal uses of mushrooms, but once Adam started growing his own, he was hooked.
AN: So I started just experimenting down that route, getting some books, watching a lot of YouTubes and buying some Gonzo equipment here and there to create a little mushroom farm setup in my kitchen. I would work during the day in the office and come back at night and just grow mushrooms in my apartment. And then Jeff finally moved back in 2019 and I asked him like, "Hey, do you want to start a mushroom farm?" And he agreed. Here we are.
CM: Adam and Jeff totally get why Leah would be intimidated by their wares. After all, mushrooms are biologically speaking nothing like fruits or vegetables.
JN: Fungi is its own completely separate kingdom. They actually resemble animals more than plants because they consume oxygen. They don't get their energy from the sun. They consume it from the matter around them.
CM: So Adam and Jeff, our mission today is to help demystify mushrooms and maybe even the fungi kingdom for Leah. How's that sound?
AN: Accepted.
CM: Okay, Leah, are you ready to go see how the mushrooms get grown?
L: Absolutely. Let's do this.
CM: We start our tour in the main part of the mushroom growing facility. It's humid, smells pretty earthy, but in a pleasant woodchippy kind of way. Adam explains that in this main room, they do all the harvesting. We were all with them until...
AN: There's some incubating mushrooms right here. The mycelium is growing and then further down all the substrates mix, sterilizations in our lab to inoculate the substrate.
CM: Substrate? Mycelium? Huh? Okay, so in case you don't remember all the way back to your high school biology class, I've got you. Mushrooms are part of the fungi kingdom just like humans are part of the anamalia kingdom and apples are part of the plantae kingdom. So if we think of these fungi, we think of an apple tree.
AN: Mushrooms are just like the apple. The mycelium is the main organism. So the mycelium is like the roots, the tree, the branches, the leaves, it's everything else. The substrate is both the habitat and the food for the fungus. So all these mushrooms that we grow typically grow off of dead or decaying trees. So they really like wood to produce the best mushrooms.
CM: So mycelium is the organism that mushrooms grow from and the substrate is their food and habitat. At Mushroom Queens, they replicate that damp wood that mushrooms love to grow on by using a substrate made of hardwood pellets, the same stuff that you'd burn in a wood pellet furnace to keep your house heated or in a wood-burning pellet smoker, and they add ground-up soybean hulls as food for the mycelium. Leah gives it a feel.
L: It feels almost like a sawdust, but maybe the pieces are slightly bigger.
CM: Once that substrate is mixed with water, it gets put into plastic bags, then each bag gets sterilized. The sterilization room is hot and it has a very distinctive smell.
L: I worked at a distillery and it smells like the distillery floor. It smells like you're making bourbon and why do you have to sterilize it? Why is that important?
JN: So we just... by mixing everything together, we made a perfect substrate, a perfect bed for fungus to grow on, and we just want our fungus to grow. But in the air, there's fungus everywhere. Every time you take a breath, you're breathing in fungus spores. So if we didn't sterilize it, all the fungus that was all around us would start growing in there. So we want to start off with clean substrate for just our fungus to grow.
CM: Don't worry, Adam and Jeff maintain, it's cool you're breathing fungus all the time, but it's going to work out. After the bags of substrate are sterilized, Jeff and Adam add in the mushroom spawn, kind of like a seedling to go back to that apple tree metaphor. Then they seal the bags and leave the fungi to take over. Now at this point, we've already seen a lot of steps mixing substrate, then sterilizing it, then inoculating the substrate with the mushroom spawn, and these mushrooms haven't even sprouted yet.
L: When you see a mushroom in a forest, it's just kind of growing on that tree. But this is kind of like a high-maintenance process.
CM: Growing a tomato seems like very relaxed compared to this.
AN: Right. So now we're going to go to the incubation room where all these... the mushroom bags or the mycelium, some has been growing for a week, some has been growing for months as the mycelium colonizes the substrate.
L: Oh my gosh, I'm surrounded. They're everywhere.
CM: We were surrounded. The incubation room is maybe 10 feet wide by 15 feet long, full of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves, and those shelves are stuffed with plastic bags full of what looks like dirt. The substrate that we'd seen Adam and Jeff work so hard to make, then sterilize, then inoculate. But in most of the bags that dark brown substrate was slowly but surely giving way to whitish fuzzy-looking growths. Like imagine that you left a hunk of cheese in the back of your fridge and forgot about it for weeks. The last step in the process is to cut holes in each bag to let in some oxygen and allow the mycelium to fruit A.K.A. grow the mushrooms right out of the bag.
L: It looks like a cauliflower that is fuzzy or furry bursting out of a plastic bag.
CM: These mushrooms are erupting out of these bags. I mean, yes, they're growing, but I mean they're so over the top in terms of having... I think the comparison to coral is a really apt one, almost like this brain coral kind of quality to them. They're so puffy and voluminous.
AN: So this lion's mane is... I mean it's ready to harvest-
CM: Adam handed Leah and me some gloves and told us it was time to harvest the mushrooms right off the bag they were growing on. Oh.
L: Oh no.
AN: So with lion's mane, you can just grab it and twist it as you're pulling away and it should come off.
CM: So twist and try to keep it intact?
AN: Yes.
L: I'm nervous. This seems like a very large piece to try to break. Is there any way to ruin it? Is it fragile at all or?
CM: I feel like you got it now.
L: Okay. Okay. All right. I did it. Wow. Oh, wow. It's so soft and light.
CM: Light. Yeah.
L: I'm feeling so in awe of the process end to end and just a mushroom as a food and as a fungus. It's really cool.
CM: But of course Leah's SOS was a two parter. First, she wanted to get past her intimidation with mushrooms, check, but then she wanted to learn to cook with them too. So since Adam is an expert at explaining his wares to farmer's market shoppers, I asked him to recommend a great entry level mushroom for Leah.
AN: Oyster mushrooms are a very easy begin, especially like the Italian oyster that we do. The flavor isn't very strong. It's actually my favorite mushroom. I eat it the most. It's really versatile. A lot of people say the textures more resemble like of meat than mushroom. So sauteing that and adding to dishes is an easy way to go.
CM: I feel like across the board I always find that mushrooms definitely need salt and they often want fat. As well as rich as they are and as much umami as you can possibly develop on them, there's something that happens when you brown a mushroom and the way that the mushroom's flavor becomes amplified in concert with salt, that I think is really compelling. And a great starting point, I fully agree. So if oyster mushrooms are sort of the way in, what is the next more advanced move?
AN: So if you really want to take that step, that leap, lion's mane would be what normally people are a little apprehensive about, but cooking that correctly really changes the game for everyone who comes by the mushroom stand. A lot of times people now are... they're pressing it down as they're cooking it, kind of squeezing out water and getting the texture to be less tender. And a lot of people say it reminds them of steak that way.
CM: And you're saying that in a good way, meaning that you would seek to kind of compress or almost flatten lion's mane into more of a steak-like sort of flat two-dimensional experience, really get some heat on it, brown it and kind of treat it almost like a cut of meat.
AN: Yeah, exactly.
CM: I wanted to give Leah two different recipes to try to fall in love with these more specialty mushrooms. First, an approachable recipe that lets them kind of meld with other flavors. Pasta with creamy mushroom ragu, and then a recipe that puts the mushrooms right in the spotlight.
Seared mushrooms with garlic and thyme, which employs just like a very standard French cooking technique of searing something, finishing with a good knob of butter, and basting the mushrooms with that butter as you're kind of seasoning with salt, gets that fat everywhere, carries the salt everywhere, evens out the browning right? The mushrooms are going to want to brown where they're contacting hot fat in the skillet, so that applies to the sort of initial sear kind of phase of that cooking process. But once you're basting with really hot fat, it starts to carry the cooking process around every little nubbly bit that is going on in that skillet right? So finishing with a cracked garlic clove or two, a sprig of thyme if you have it, if you don't, doesn't matter. Just as a way to kind of take mushrooms from their raw state to really crispy, salty rich umami forward. That is a great process to know about and frankly, if you toss that onto some pasta and finished it with Parmesan, you probably wouldn't be too upset about it.
L: They both sound delicious and they sound like dishes and flavors that I'm more familiar with. So then it's like bringing in the mushroom as a new component is a little bit less intimidating. I'm actually feeling excited and ready to actually start cooking with some mushrooms and less scared actually.
CM: Well, and now you know the mushroom guys right? People are going to watch you going up to these guys high-fiving them and they're going to be like, "She's probably a chef."
L: I'll stand there and I'll tell other people about the mushrooms.
CM: All right. Cool. Well, we can't wait to hear what you come up with. Adam and Jeff, this has been wild. I mean, honestly opening up this space to us, letting us invade and poke things and ask questions has been huge. So we appreciate it so much.
JN: Thanks. It was great having you.
AN: Thank you.
CM: So Jeff and Adam hooked Leah up with some golden oyster and lion's mane mushrooms.
L: Oh my goodness, these are so awesome.
CM: And she got to cooking. After another break, we'll find out if Leah was able to capture that elusive umami in her own kitchen. Leah, how are you doing?
L: I'm good. How are you?
CM: Good. Well, the last time we saw each other we were on a mushroom farm, well in a mushroom farm, I should say deep in Queens, New York and Adam and Jeff of Mushroom Queens had just handed us brown paper bags full of golden oyster mushrooms and lion's mane mushrooms. Take me back to that moment going home with that bag full of this food that you've had, let's just say a complicated relationship with up till now.
L: I was excited. I think I guarded that paper bag with my life on the way home. I was city biking home at one point and I was like, this needs to be strapped in very well and I actually stopped at the grocery store on my way home and I was just trying to capitalize on the momentum of the day and the excitement of the day getting the mushrooms and knowing how to work with them.
CM: All right, and I understand we have some tape from the moment right before you began cooking. Can we play that?
L: All right, here we go. I wish I had an air horn to be like [inaudible 00:20:00]. I'm really hype after our mushroom day, so I think that's why my energy is so high. I'm feeling some pressure because we saw the whole process of growing the mushrooms and how much work and time and science goes into the process and now I feel like I have to do them justice and I can't waste them. All right, here we go.
CM: Wow. What did you end up making?
L: I ended up making the mushroom ragu.
CM: Oh, with pasta?
L: Yes. And then I had leftover lion's mane, so I did make the lion's mane with garlic and butter and thyme and that was the recipe that really was the unlock and I think exactly what I was looking for and really blew me away.
CM: Wait, okay. I want to dig in on this kind of unlocking moment and so interesting that it was the lion's mane, which is a mushroom that is pretty singular relative to all the other mushrooms we encountered at Mushroom Queens. What was that like?
L: I think it was a technique and how it is such a simple technique and the focus was on the mushroom and I think that's kind of what I was looking for. I ended up with just the lion's mane with the garlic and butter and thyme and it was so delicious and I could still add it to other dishes or I could eat it as its own thing and that made me excited to try and emulate it with other mushrooms or just something that I knew I could continue to make over and over and over again.
CM: Were you shocked by the sort of butter, that big knob of butter going in at the end kind of basting the mushroom with it?
L: Yes.
CM: You were? Okay
L: Definitely. It was one of those things where you're halfway through but you're in too deep and you're like, "Oh no, this is a lot going on," and then you just had to trust the process.
CM: Wow, so you really went for it.
L: Yeah, I really went for it. I figured why not? And it was awesome. I felt when I was cooking the ragu, I think the timing might have been a little bit off in the way that I prepared it, so the mushrooms really cooked down.
CM: They sort of shredded apart almost.
L: Yes. Yes.
CM: Interesting.
L: So if I were to remake it, I think I would add them in maybe a little bit later or use larger chunks. I really chopped it maybe a little bit too finely.
CM: Did you use both types of mushrooms in the sauce or did you only use the oyster mushrooms?
L: I use both.
CM: Oh, okay, so you use some of both. Interesting. I would say that the pasta with creamy mushroom ragu, that is a sauce where you can just use regular degular cremini mushrooms, which you just kind of do a rough chop or quarter them or whatever and you'll kind of retain a lot of their body throughout the cooking process. Yeah, the oysters, I can see how a really nice fresh oyster mushroom might have more of a tendency to just kind of disappear in there, especially if you're just giving it a pretty decent chop before it goes in. Were you cooking both of these recipes, I should say alone or were you cooking for your roommates as well?
L: The ragu, my roommates were kind of in and out throughout the process and then they all had the final product and claimed to really enjoy it, so it was a success in that sense and that made me excited because I always liked something that we could potentially make any together. The second recipe, so the lion's mane, just with garlic butter, thyme, I just kind of whipped up for myself.
CM: I love this vision of you kind of quiet luxury mushroom for one. Did you just sit there and knife and fork it out of the skillet?
L: I did. I did. I tried it toward the end and I was like, this... I, mean if you put garlic and butter and herbs on anything, it's going to be delicious, but I know that or I've heard that lion's mane kind of has a weird taste or some people don't like the taste, so then I was very afraid that I was going to make it and maybe not like it and it was awesome. It was delicious.
CM: Wow, I love that for you. I'm so fired up that you did that and you trusted the process. Tell us a little bit more about at the end of that sear, butter, garlic, thyme, what was the flavor like to you?
L: It felt almost steak-like, like it had that consistency almost, but also still had that really earthy... I did have that moment where I was like the umami, I got it. I know what it means and it's here. And it went really well with the garlic and the butter and it wasn't slimy or flat like other mushrooms that I had just thrown into a stir-fry or tried to cook with. That kind of fell really flat for me. It felt more lively and more interesting as its own food.
CM: First of all, love that you found the umami. Second of all, really struck by this connection you had to that mushroom and what an incredible outcome you achieved because you were really putting the mushroom in the driver's seat in terms of the cooking process. I think you can probably see so much more readily now that if you are just whacking a handful of mushrooms around on a stir-fry and there's 15 other ingredients in there that that's not really privileging the cooking process for the mushroom itself. So bringing that level of intention to just that one mushroom and all of the love and attention you put into it, but that you really felt like you got something back. You got this rich, savory, umami forward results. I couldn't really ask for anything better.
L: Yeah, it was a moment where after I was done I was like, "Oh, it was that simple."
CM: Do you feel like you're going to be visiting Adam at the mushroom stand now? I mean, are you thinking of other dishes with mushrooms that you'd want to try out?
L: Oh, definitely. I'll be there this weekend probably. Lion's mane for sure I'll be purchasing again. Seeing mushrooms walking by their table at the farmer's market, I always assumed there would be a lot of prep to make them edible and there's really not. It was as simple as taking off that stem and you're good to go. They were pretty low maintenance in terms of working with them.
CM: Yeah, I mean there's a whole host of options out there, but now that you kind of know what to look for and you have some techniques in your back pocket and you are going to be set up for fungi success, I'd say.
L: I agree. There's so much to dive into.
CM: If you have a dinner emergency on your hands, write to us at dinnersos@bonappetit.com or leave us a voice message at (212) 286-SOS1. That's (212) 286-7071. We'd love to feature your question on the show. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and review on your podcast app of choice and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. You can find the recipes mentioned today on the Epicurious app, brought to you by Conde Nast. Just search Epicurious in the app store and download today. Huge thanks to Adam and Jeff of Mushroom Queens for taking the time to show us around their facility and providing Leah with her mushrooms. If you too want to sample their wares, you can find them at the Union Square Farmer's Market on Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays or at mushroomqueens.com.
Thanks for listening to Dinner SOS. I'm your host, Chris Morocco. Our senior producer is Michele O'Brien. Peyton Hayes is our associate producer. Cameron Foos is our assistant producer. Jake Lummus, Vince Fairchild and Pran Bandi are our studio engineers. This episode was mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. Chloe Prasinos is our consulting editor. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's Head of Global Audio. Next week, Rachel's the kind of plant-based cook who loves free-forming it. No two dinners turn out the same and she likes it that way. But she's setting up a dinner for her parents and her partner's parents to meet each other for the first time. And she wants everything to be perfect.
Rachel: And the dietary restrictions and preferences are actually insane and I'm really not sure what to do and still keep integrity in terms of serving a dish that feels like it came out of Rachel's kitchen.