Mushrooms are the unexpected ingredient securing a spot in locally minded Hawaiʻi dining.
Down a muddy road in Waimanalo, half an hour from bustling Honolulu, Fung Yang cuts airy portobello mushrooms from miniature landscapes of white mycelium inside of a temperature-controlled shipping container. He plucks them from composted wood chips nestled in cardboard boxes, and carefully puts them in a clean new box.
Hawaiʻi is the most geographically isolated population center in the world, and for decades, upwards of 85 percent of food has been imported. But mushrooms are now grown widely enough that anyone, from a Costco shopper to a fine dining-seeking tourist, is likely to come face-to-face with local funghi.
Mushroom farmer Fung Yang grows wide-brimmed “Tūtū” portobello and their younger incarnation “keiki” mushrooms in five temperature-controlled shipping containers. Micro mushroom operations came and went throughout the years, but inconsistency and prohibitive costs made it difficult to integrate them into a menu. “At one point we were buying mushrooms from a guy who was growing them in his apartment in Waikīkī,” says Caldiero of the years before more established funghi farms sprung up.
Straw, the dried stalks of grain crops, is virtually nonexistent in Hawaiʻi because the climate and the amount of resources required to grow grain run contrary to the sky-high costs of land and labor in the state. Maui farmer Michael Marchand, co-owner of Lapaʻau Farm, says he’d have to grow 40 acres of rice to make enough straw substrate for his mushroom operation.
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