Hi there
HumbleTraveler wrote:Thank you so much for taking the time to respond and explain
You are more than welcome
HumbleTraveler wrote:If I may ask, what is the point of a pressure cooker in this context? Does it simply speed up the process or make the environment better for growing??
Of course you may ask, it is an honest question to ask if you are totally new to this topic.
It will probably be better if we cover the basics, and then it will become clear why it is necessary to use a pressure cooker when making rye cakes.
When we are growing shrooms, we are cultivating a fungus, fungus needs food and water to grow and make mushrooms. Given that we provide enough water and food, when the fungus has fully grown and the conditions are right, mushrooms will grow, but at first we are not growing mushrooms, we are growing the fungus that will produce the mushrooms. When the fungus is not fruiting, fruiting is the stage where the fungus produces mushrooms, our fungus is often referred to as mycelium.
When growing shrooms, we need mushroom spores, the strain normaly grown is called Psilocybe cubensis. These spores usually comes in the form of a spore syringe
This is a syringe of spores ready to be injected into our rye, you can order a syringe online in most countries and most states.
So we have our spores, now we need something for our spores to grow on, so we are going to be using rye grain. We went over my own way to prepare grain before we pressure cook it, so I wont go on about that here
So why boil all this rye, put it into cakes and then have to pressure cook it?
Well when we are injecting our spores into our cakes, we are inoculating our grain with our mushroom spores, but if there are any other spores or existing bacteria, other mold, infections etc in our grain before we inject our spores our whole project will 100% fail!
Yes even after boiling our grain, it is still infected! simply exposing grain to the open unfiltered air for more than a few mins will infect our grains and our project will fail!
When growing mushrooms, how clean you can keep things is the number one factor in success or failure. Sterility at every stage is so important! if ignored it will cause 99% of your grows to fail!
Soooo ... We use a pressure cooker because it sterilizes our grains! A pressure cooker heats up water, as it evaporates and turns into a gass, it raises the pressure into the cooker. Because the pressure in the cooker increases as the water is turned to steam it means the water can then be heated so high that it greatly exceeds the temperature of boiling water. Also the effect of very heavy inner pressure cooker pressure is that the process causes lots the steam in to be forced intro every nook and hole in your rye cakes and it is literally forced into the grain itself. so after you have pressure cooked your cakes for 90 mins (sometimes i give em the full 2 hours) at 15 psi, they will be 100% sterile almost 100% of the time.
After this stage, we would normaly make a glove box, like this one.
So after our pressure cooker has cooked, we would clean out our glove box with bleach, peroxide and alcohol, then place the pressure cooker close to the box and then quickly move the cakes, wearing gloves of course, in to the box and close the lid, make sure you place the syringe in there along with some kitchen tissue and alcohol.
We then put our hands into the gloves, wipe the syringe with alcohol on the tissue, inject the spores into the cakes, you should have 2 layers of foil on your cakes, so inject it into the inner layer so the outer layer adds cover to the hole you just made in your cake.
then place in a ideally 80f clean dark place, a plastic tub in a warm room would work fine.
in about 2 - 4 weeks you will have fully colonized jars, then they are ready to fruit. (I can say how I go about fruiting cakes some other time if you like?)
that's pretty much it.
So we use a pressure cooker so we can sterilize our grains so only the fungus we want to grow actually grows rather than some other contaminant, some of the rarer contaminants can be dangerous to smell or breath in, so cleanliness = safety and success, nothing worse than waiting a month only to see everything go green with contaminants, and its back to square one! been there a few times.
I hope this helps
Love and peace
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