Plant of the Month: Oyster Mushroom

Presented by Wendy Reistle
January 9, 2023

Botanical name: Pleurotus ostreatus
Common name(s): Oyster Mushroom, Pearl Oyster Mushroom
Family: Pleurotaceae

[MUSIC—EASY AND FUN]

[WENDY] Hi, everyone. My name is Wendy Reistle and I’ll be talking about the plant of the month, which is actually not a plant. It’s a mushroom. But until the 1960s, mushrooms were considered to be in the plant kingdom. The mushroom that I’ll be talking about today is Pleurotus ostreatus. And it’s also known as the Pearl or just the Oyster Mushroom. What we see here is the fruiting body. You can think of the mushroom as pretty analogous to the apple on an apple tree, because most of the parts of the mushroom we are not able to see. They are either underground or in the substrate. So, I want to give you some hints to find these Oyster Mushrooms, because mushrooms are really challenging to identify, I found. But it’s a new hobby of mine, and I’m really excited about trying to figure out what they are. So, if we look at the Oyster Mushroom, it’s one of the easier ones to identify, and it’s also one of the most choice edible mushrooms. I’ve harvested some chanterelles and some puff ball mushrooms. But I think my favorites are the Oyster Mushrooms. The cap of the oyster is a fan-shaped. It’s smooth, two to 10 inches. It’s usually white to light gray or tan. The gills are very white. They become yellowish with age and the gills on the Oyster Mushroom stretch from the edge of the cap all the way down to the stalk. This is where the spores are found in the Oyster Mushroom. The stalk, or the stipe, as it’s called, is short and thick, if present at all. And spore prints on the Oyster Mushrooms are white and sometimes lilac.

So, I just want to give you an idea of how to do a score print. I picked some Oyster Mushrooms from the woods at UHCL and I took them home. I put it on a dark piece of paper, I covered it up with a bowl, and I left it overnight, and this is what the spore print looks like. Spore prints really help you to identify what type of mushroom that you have. So that’s one of the really important tools to figuring out what you’re looking at. A lot of the mushrooms look so similar but sometimes they will have different color spore prints. Now, if you have one that you expect the spore print will be like a brown or a black, you’ll want to put it on white paper, and sometimes, if I don’t know what it’s going to be, I’ll put half white and half black paper, and put the mushroom right in between, so I’ll be able to tell what color the spore is.

It’s always a good day to go out to look for mushrooms, but it’s nice to go out after a rain so like right now is a perfect time to go out in Houston looking for the Oyster Mushrooms. They grow in subtropical and temperate forests around the world. Found always in shelf-like clusters on rotting wood or fallen logs. The best time to find them is October through April. So, we’re right in that time frame here in Houston. They’re found only on dead or dying deciduous or conifer trees.

Oyster Mushrooms work to decompose wood rather than feeding on it, which means that they’re very important to the ecosystem. Oyster Mushrooms are referred to as saprophytes.

And in the 1980s, which is something I learned with researching this mushroom, they are also carnivores. The mycelia of the Oyster Mushroom release a chemical that attracts nematodes that are found in the soil. They paralyze them with a sticky toxin, and then they consume them basically for a boost of nitrogen. So that’s a really cool fact about the Oyster Mushrooms.

So, when I go out and looking for Oyster Mushrooms, I always take my handy dandy Oyster Mushroom basket with me. And I have a knife that has an orange case, so I don’t lose it, a magnifying glass, paper bag, and a ruler.

Mushrooms don’t like to go in plastic bags. They get mushy pretty quickly. So paper bags are always the best way to collect them.

Two books that I really like—Mushrooms of the Gulf Coast States is a fairly new book, and it’s a great resource for our area. Also, Texas Mushrooms is another good book. It’s a little bit older. And when I come home, I always look at The Mushroom Expert. It’s a website. If I kind of know what the mushroom is, I can put the information in there and get a lot more information about it. There’s another website that I love. It’s called Learn Your Land from a fella out in Pennsylvania, but he has great resources on mushrooms, and a lot of the ones that are found on the east coast are also found here in Texas.

So, when you cook mushrooms, you want to gather them when they’re young and tender before they become old and leathery, make sure that they’re not yellow, because that means they’re a little bit older, and make sure that you look for any insects that like to live in the gills unless you want extra protein with your mushrooms.

You’re supposed to use a very minimum amount of water, maybe even just take a paper towel and get off all the dirty parts of the mushrooms. These mushrooms are pretty mild flavored. They can be dried and put in the freezer, and also rich in vitamins and minerals and folic acid.

We’re going to look at a quick video of harvesting and cooking some mushrooms right now.

[VIDEO STARTS]

[WENDY] Hi! Here we are at home with our Oyster Mushrooms that I collected out at the UHCL Nature Trail, and I’ve got two bunches of them. These ones are really fresh looking, and so I’m planning to eat them and show you how to cook them up.

And then this one over here. These ones are a little bit older. I am probably not going to cook these.

These are the ones that I’m going to cook up. Going to slice them up just the way that you would cook mushrooms from the grocery store. I’m going to put them in our cast iron pan. We’ll get some butter in the pan. Our butter is getting nice and toasty brown. Add the mushrooms.

Any time that you are eating mushrooms that you have forged from the woods be 100% sure of what you’re eating.

When you’re first trying mushrooms be sure that you just take a little bit, because, even though they’re edible, not everybody’s stomach agrees with mushrooms. For the first time that you try a new type of mushroom, be sure and just try just a couple pieces of it and see how that works with your digestive system.

Oh, these smell so good.

[ON SCREEN] But how do they taste?

[ANDY] Mmm, good.

[WENDY] Alright. There you have it. Andy Sipocz thinks the mushrooms are good.

[VIDEO ENDS]

And the last thing I want to leave you with is the poisonous look-a-likes. There are three of them that I found on the Internet that say that they are a poisonous look-a-like. The first one is the Ivory Funnel mushroom. But there are a few clues here that will help you distinguish it from the Oyster Mushroom. First of all, it grows in lawns, meadows, and other grassy areas, and the Oyster Mushroom is going to be growing on dead wood, a log. It’s going to be growing in a shelf-like arrangement.

Also, the gills of the funnel mushroom stop at the base of the stem, and they don’t go all the way down the stem like it does on the Oyster Mushroom.

The next two are in the same genus. This is a Western Jack-o’-lantern and the Ghost Fungus, but the Ghost Fungus mushroom is found in Australia and Japan and India, so as far as I can tell, we don’t need to worry about that here in North America. And then the Western Jack-o’-lantern mushroom is orange.

If I’m looking for an Oyster Mushroom. I’m going to be looking for a white or a gray, or maybe a brown mushroom, but definitely not orange. So, there’s just some tips to keep you safe. I hope you all have a wonderful time out looking for mushrooms.

Thank you.

[MUSIC—AND THAT’S IT]