GastroBlog
we were looking for a reason to go on vacation someplace a few months ago when i turned on the travel channel and saw a guy eating mushrooms at the mushroom festival in kennett square, pa.
sold.
i've always been a little averse to going to philadelphia, for a number of reasons that are too complicated to list. but its a city with a lot of history, and i like history, so i was willing to give it a shot.
the kennett square mushroom festival was fun, very small-town. the whole festival is like a craft festival meets county fair food court. of course, most of the food was mushroom related, but not all. we tried the wild mushroom bread pudding, and it was good, but it was a little heavy for me at that time of day, so i tried to be careful. most of the other mushroom offerings were some variety of "fried," so i skipped most of them, too. there were two kinds of mushroom ice cream. pass.
there was a local potato chip maker that was passing out snack bags, and the signs said they were going to be passing out mushroom flavored chips. that i was up for. but they didn't seem to have any. and we were there just as they opened on the first day, so it wasn't like they ran out. oh well.
the coolest thing, by far, that we did was get on a bus and head out to a mushroom farm for a tour. they took us to basciani mushroom farm, which we later learned sends its mushrooms to tampa, where they are distributed through cooseman's, and go to publix. publix then repackages them and makes it look like publix grows its own mushrooms, which of course, they don't.but a mushroom farm is pretty much just a big cinder-block barn, with a lot of smelly land around it. wow, it smells bad around there. i don't know how people live there. but the smell is the compost being made. i'm not sure if its the compost they eventually grow the mushrooms in, or the compost they take out of the mushroom houses after the shrooms have depleted it. either way, it stinks.
so they took us into the barn, and we're faced with a block wall with a bunch of doors and a thermostat by each one. and the guy tells us that each room is taken through its paces, going up to 165 degrees to pasteurize the soil, then taken down to 55 degrees to grow the shrooms. "please let today be a 55 degree day," i thought to myself. it was. he opened the door, and after all the smells outside, i was really expecting the shroom rooms to be unbearable, but they didn't smell at all. it was cold, dark, damp, and dank, but not smelly. so they turned on some lights, and we got to walk around what looked like 5-foot wide, by probably 40-foot long bunk beds, stacked 4 or 5 high. on each bed, you could see mushrooms, though none of the beds we saw were at peak production. there were a lot of little shrooms in there, but when one is full, you can't even see the dirt, its so overwhelmed with the shrooms.
then we went back to the festival, and the big star this year was a cooking demo by ilan hall, who won season 2 of top chef, tho i am still not sure why. he didn't seem prepared, he got there late, and the dish he made was pretty simple. he dished about some behind-the-scenes stuff on the show, tho, and that was fun. i didn't dislike him on the show, but i thought he was clearly no better than the fourth-best cook on the show, so i'm still scratching my head how he won. but, whatever.
ahhhhh, fungus
Saturday, September 8, 2007
kennett square mushroom festival, kennett square, pa.
