SAVOUR & SIP
Pan-seared is our favourite cooking method
FOOD FOR THOUGHT January Grub START THE NEW YEAR RIGHT WITH DELICIOUS IDEAS TO SEE YOU THROUGH WINTER. KELLY AT MESSIAH MUSHROOMS SHARES HER CULINARY WISDOM
THE BACK STORY We started Messiah Mushrooms as a circular business alongside our flat-packing mannequin company in Great Abington. Inspired by other local waste-free food businesses, we thought: ‘I wonder what waste materials we have?’ One of them, of course, is cardboard – and another is used coffee. If you put those two together, you can grow oyster mushrooms. We’ve become involved with the university, as well as a lot of growers around Cambridge who are doing all sorts of really interesting research themselves. We swap our compost for food, and some of that ends up in experiments with the chefs we work with. We do tours for the chefs, then we’ve got botanists looking around too. We play music to the mushrooms – the solfeggio frequency. That’s the same frequency used in Gregorian chanting. Probably for centuries or millennia, people knew how to chant at certain frequencies to help healing, but now scientists have started unravelling how healing may be able to repair DNA. It has really changed mushroom farming and turned it into something completely different. We restructure water using Viktor Schauberger’s theories to do with water being a living organism. Mushrooms are something between 95 to 98% water. One of the first things we wanted to do is make sure the quality we were feeding the
mushrooms was the best. What’s really nice is that we’re taking all this waste – about 1.5 tonnes of coffee – out of Cambridge city centre now. THE SEASON Once they’ve eaten all the substrate in the bag, mushrooms then start fruiting. In January, if the ground was really frosty, the mycelium wouldn’t necessarily come up and fruit. We grow grey oyster mushrooms, the strain native to northern Europe, and have spent the last two years embedding ourselves and fully understanding the oyster mushroom, going through all the seasons. We’ve gone twice through now. The first ones fruited around Christmas 2020, hence the name Messiah. For millennia, humans have been eating and consuming mushrooms to protect themselves from different diseases. A friend of ours found a man in the Alps thousands of years old with this little bag tied to him, full of all sorts of interesting fungi, some of which were medicinal. THE RECIPES Pan-seared is our favourite cooking method. It becomes part of many batch- cooked recipes to help us get through the week. In winter, the antiviral properties – much like in elderberry or nasturtium, to name a few – have historically been used to naturally boost immunity to viruses!
We work with Kareem Roberts at Trinity restaurant. For January, he recommends pan-seared Messiah Mushrooms with salsa verde. Tristan Welch is currently doing roast beef with fried Messiah Mushrooms and they fry really well at a high temperature. Just drop the heat down a bit and then add garlic and herbs, sage and butter or rosemary, thyme, turmeric, saffron, curry leaves, bay and star anise. The mushrooms taste quite aniseed-like when they’re raw. You can then put them in a cooked breakfast, risotto, Persian stew or curry. Chop them finely to make a kind of mince. The chefs at Cambridge Cookery School are doing quiches with Messiah Mushrooms. Mark Poynton does a coffee- glazed risotto, which has this incredible smoky, creamy taste. MAGIC MUSHROOMS The company counts local chefs including Mark Poynton (pictured above) among its fans
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