Kitchen Mycology

Hello, my name is Gianfranco and mushrooms have been an interest of mine since childhood. Foraging for mushrooms was a feature of family life growing up: my parents always took me and my sister hunting for wild mushrooms, sometimes driving for hours to reach a promising looking forest scouted on a map.   The reward, beyond the pure joy of finding oneself deep in a forest, was the promise of delicious mushroom-based meals prepared by my Italian mother who was a professional cook.

Later, my interest in mushrooms came to include growing my own, either from commercial strains, or by cloning wild harvested species from tissue samples incubated on agar plates in a makeshift kitchen laboratory.  You might call this type of activity Kitchen Mycology.  As an aside, it might amuse you that while I am happy collecting and germinating spores in sterile conditions, I appear to be utterly incapable of growing vegetable crops. Unlike the mushrooms, all the vegetables in my recipes are store bought.

I would love others to share my passion for all things mushrooms and for the tasty dishes you can prepare with them.

Here in Kitchen Mycology I get to combine those two passions and hopefully take you along with me: grow your own mushrooms and prepare tasty meals.

Mush love,

Gianfranco