Pioppino, nameko and shimeji

Three cluster mushrooms: pioppino’s bunch, nameko’s slippery cap, and shimeji’s long stem inside a chimney.

Three clusters, three readings

Pioppino, nameko and shimeji come out in clumps from a block of wood, and at first glance they look like the same work as an oyster with a smaller cap. They are not. An oyster warns you with a long stem when air is missing, and it forgives a mild room. These three are slower, they want the cool, and each has a signal that a beginner reads backwards. Pioppino weeps amber drops and looks ill. Nameko has a slimy cap and looks like mould. Shimeji, if you give it plenty of air at once, makes a wide cap and a short stem, and looks “successful” exactly when you have lost the form it is grown for.

It is worth keeping them as three readings, not as three twin recipes. The food is the same kind: grain colonised from a liquid culture, then sterilised wood, not plain straw. Pasteurised straw is a race that oysters win, not these. The fruiting climate is cool, with differences. Pioppino sits between 14 and 20 °C. Nameko wants it colder, around 12–16 °C, and in a room at 18–20 °C pioppino may still start while nameko sits still. Brown shimeji sits at about 13–18 °C, and its form depends more on the plastic chimney than on half a degree. Colonising all three in the cool is the opposite mistake: the white advances slowly and the bag stays undefended. Colonisation wants an ordinary room, around 20–24 °C. The cool arrives when the block is white and firm.

None of the three is a result in ten days. Grain can ask for two or three weeks. A wood block as many again. Throwing out a clean bag because the oyster, on that date, already had pins, is comparing different clocks.

Pioppino, the bunch

Pioppino is Cyclocybe aegerita. On older labels, and on many syringes, you still find Agrocybe aegerita: that is the previous name of the same fungus, the one of the poplars. In cultivation you do not need a living poplar. You need sterilised wood, beech or another hardwood, dense and without competitors. The strain in the syringe is selected for that substrate. The poplar’s name explains the ecology, not a pot to stand next to the bag.

The fruit is a bunch: pale stems, brown caps, convex while they are young. You bring it out of an opening at the top, with a low collar that holds a little humidity, or from a short side slit if you prefer a tighter cluster. Pins want humid air, not drops on the caps. If carbon dioxide stays too high, the stems become threads and the caps stay pinheads. A bit of stem is the cluster. A coral of stalks is still air. You increase the exchange without aiming a draught at the block. If the caps open flat in two days and the stems stay stubby, you gave too much air too soon: next time the collar stays a little taller.

Harvest the whole bunch, twisting it, while the caps are still buttons or just convex, before they flatten. Once the cap is open, pioppino dumps brown spores, dark ones, that dust the bag and the room. The fruit is already more open in texture, and the block has spent the flush. Stumps in the cut rot. Paper in the fridge, a few days.

During colonisation it is normal to see amber drops on the plastic, sometimes many. Cyclocybe expels metabolites. If the smell is fresh mushroom and the white is advancing, those drops are not a bacterial lake. You do not open the bag to dry them. You open it, and you discard it, when the smell is acid, the grain is stuck together, or a powdery green appears. That distinction, amber drop against a stink, is the difference between a healthy pioppino and a lost bag. Anyone who misses it throws out the metabolite and keeps the bacteria, or the reverse.

The band 14–20 °C belongs to the fruit. At 22 °C the stems grow weak or the pins never commit. Below 14 °C the bunch can sit still for many days without being dead. A soak of a few hours, once the block is light after the first flush, then a draining, can help the next one. It is not owed. A second flush is common if the mouth stayed clean. A third is possible.

The pioppino liquid culture is the seed. The name Agrocybe on the syringe is the old name. It goes into grain, not into bare wood.

Micelio Liquido Pioppino 10ml Agrocybe Aegerita Coltura Viva Funghi Gourmet€8,91

If you want to see the colony before you commit the wood, the pioppino plate is the same fungus on agar. The advancing edge tells you whether the white is clean. A green sector does not get transferred. The plate does not fruit: it keeps you from seeding a problem.

Nameko, the cap that looks wrong

Nameko is Pholiota microspora, also called Pholiota nameko. It is the most cold-loving of the three. It colonises around 20–24 °C, like the others, and it fruits around 12–16 °C. A kitchen that suits pink oyster, or even a room at 20 °C that pioppino still accepts, is already warm for nameko: pins that do not advance, caps that open badly, or no pins. In summer, in a flat that will not cool down, this species waits for the season. You do not stimulate it in a kitchen fridge, which is dry and still. You stimulate it, if the word means anything, by putting it somewhere genuinely cool once the block is white, with an opening and with humid air.

The signal that makes people throw out healthy harvests is the slipperiness. A nameko cap has a gelatinous pellicle. It is glossy, wet, slippery, sometimes already on the pins. It looks like mould, or like a mushroom gone bad, to anyone who has only an opaque oyster in mind. It is not. Under that pellicle, if you rub it, there is a normal orange-brown cap, often with a thin veil between stem and margin while it is young. The smell is mushroom. The stem is clean. That skin is the species. It is part of the fruit, not of an accident.

Mould looks different. It is powdery or hairy, green, black, or a cobweb grey that runs over substrate that is not colonised. Bacterial slime is something else again, and it is inside the bag during colonisation: grains stuck together, a puddle, an acid smell, not a glossy cap on a cluster that smells right. If the block inside the plastic is a lake before any pins, that is not nameko “starting.” It is a bag to seal and discard. If the caps, outside, shine, and the rest is firm, that is the fungus.

It is grown on sterilised wood, in clusters, from an opening at the top or from a slit. The caps stay small if you harvest them before they flatten. Once the cap is open the gluten dirties with spores and the fruit loses its form. The whole cluster, not the caps alone with the stems left to rot. You rinse it in the kitchen only at the moment of cooking, if you want to remove part of the pellicle: in cultivation you do not wash the block to “clean” the caps. A bath of the block, a short one, makes sense only if it is light after the first flush. The long icy shock of a shiitake is not this species’ method. The method is the cool and the opening, once colonisation is finished.

The nameko liquid culture is the seed. Ten millilitres split across the grain. What remains stays in the fridge, between 2 and 8 °C, never in the freezer. Freezing ruptures the hyphae, and a nameko killed by frost does not become slippery. It becomes nothing.

Nameko Coltura Liquida 10ml Pholiota Microspora Micelio Vivo€9,42

Shimeji, the chimney and then the air

Brown shimeji is Hypsizygus tessellatus, the beech mushroom whose Japanese name is tied to beech itself. Sterilised beech wood is its natural food in cultivation. The form you recognise, long stems and small tame caps, is not the form the fungus makes if you open the bag the way you would open an oyster. It is a form managed with carbon dioxide.

On a white, firm block you cut the plastic at the top and pull up a tube, a chimney taller than the cluster you want, often fifteen or twenty-five centimetres of plastic above the block. Pins form on the upper face and grow inside the tube. Carbon dioxide stays higher than in the room, humidity stays, and the stems lengthen. The caps, in that phase, should stay small, almost pinheads. If you open everything on the first day, the stems stay short and the caps widen. It is the same fungus. It is not the tight-bouquet form. You did not get the species wrong. You skipped the tube.

When the stems have the length you are after, several centimetres, and the caps are still tips, you lower or cut the tube and give fresh air and humidity for a couple of days. The caps colour, they stay buttons, they do not become plates. If you never give that air, the caps stay fuzzy attempts, or they abort: too much carbon dioxide, all the way. If you give it too soon, you lose the stem. The chimney is not a sealed jar to forget. It is a phase, and then it opens.

The room, in this second phase, sits at about 13–18 °C. Warmer, and the stems grow thin and the caps open in a hurry even inside the tube. Colder than a nameko already at its limit, and everything slows. Indirect light aims the cluster. Darkness makes it paler. You do not mist inside the tube onto the caps: drops blotch them. You keep the air humid.

Harvest the whole bouquet when the caps are still small and convex, with a twist at the base. A flattened cap has had too much air or too much time. Afterwards, rest. If the block is light, a short bath, a draining, and a new tube only if you want to repeat the same form. A second flush is possible and often smaller. It is not a calendar.

The brown shimeji liquid culture is the seed of this form, not of white shimeji, which is a different selection and makes a pale cluster even with the same chimney. The chimney lengthens. It does not bleach a brown into a white.

Coltura Liquida Shimeji Marrone Hypsizygus tessellatus Gourmet€8,91

What gets confused

The three mistakes get swapped between the species, and it is worth stating them side by side.

On pioppino, throwing the bag out for the amber drops. On nameko, throwing the fruit out for the pellicle, or, the other way round, keeping an internal slimy, acid bag because “nameko is like that.” On shimeji, ripping the tube off on the first day because long stems look like the oyster’s defect. On all three, fruiting in the room where you colonised, at 23 °C, and calling it laziness of the mycelium. On all three, injecting the syringe into bare wood and waiting. Grain is the taxi. Two or three millilitres in different places in a bag of grain, then the white grain into the wood, about one part in five, is the path that leaves the fewest undefended days.

A powdery green gets discarded closed, in any of the three. A white fuzz on shimeji stems inside a tube you have never opened is mycelium still growing over the fruit: more air, not more water. Nameko caps that are dull and dry, with no pellicle at all, in a room with the heating on: that is a fruit stressed by dry air, not “a nameko without slime because it is cleaner.” The pellicle is missing when the humidity is missing. You correct the air. You do not look for a different syringe.

Label the species and the date. While white, the three bags look alike. Once they fruit, they do not: a brown bunch, a glossy orange cap, a long-stemmed bouquet. If you have put them in the same cellar at 15 °C, nameko is the closest to its band, pioppino is at the low edge, and shimeji depends on the tube. That cellar is an honest comparison. It is not proof that one of the three syringes was empty.

What this guide is not

It is not a promise of bouquets and it is not a recipe. It is the reason nameko’s slime stays, pioppino’s drops get smelled before they are thrown out, and shimeji goes from a closed tube to a little air only once the stem is already there. If the nameko cap shines and smells of mushroom, it is not trouble. It is the fungus.