It is time for another MycoPunks blog post, so grab yourself a very small cup of tea or perhaps a ristretto if you’re a fancy lad, and let the words permeate your consciousness. Embrace them, until they reveal the secret truth of the universe: If Jaffa Cakes were actually cakes they’d serve them in fancy restaurants but they fucking don’t, do they? Because they’re actually a biscuit, despite all the legal fuckery involved with getting them classed as cakes to avoid tax. They’re (admittedly nice) hybrids, at the most generous definition. A chimera formed from fruit, pod, and cake.

Anyway - dehydrators!

There are a few different bits of kit that you’ll want to pick up for your mycology hobby. Some can come a bit further down the line if needs be, like a flow unit or a stirrer plate, but some items you’ll probably want to pick up sooner rather than later. The good ol’ dehydrator falls into the “get it now” category, and here’s why (there’s a few reasons):

Mushrooms are mostly water, and they usually sit around having a 90-95% moisture content, depending on species. Because of this, they don’t stay edible for the longest amount of time once picked. If you’ve grown a few large flushes of Oysters, and harvested them when they’re ready, you may well have more than you want to eat in one week unless you want to eat mushrooms all day erry day (and maybe you do, in which case ignore this whole article and go and eat some mushrooms because you’re burning daylight). 

You might live in a country where it’s legal to grow your own psychedelic mushrooms. Once you’ve grown and harvested them, you are fairly unlikely to scoff the whole lot in one go. They’ve got just as much water in as the gourmet mushrooms, except this time you also want to keep the psychedelic compounds from degrading, otherwise you’ll turn your magic mushrooms into David Blaine mushrooms, which is to say you'll take all the joy out of the magic and just make them tedious. Zing!

What will fuck your mushrooms up? Light, air, and moisture. You’ll notice we bang on about “cool, dark, and dry” on most of the product listings on the store, and that’s because it’s a great way of keeping products stable for the longest possible time, and this is no exception, but we’ll throw “in an airtight container” into the mix. You can do the “cool, dark, and in an airtight container” pretty easily, but the dry bit you will struggle with if you don’t have a dehydrator. 

Your billy-basic food dehydrator is just the ticket - it won’t get hot enough to start to cook your mushrooms, and they’re designed to allow some airflow through to keep things working as they should be. You may need to prep your mushrooms a bit to fit them into your dehydrator depending on the size of it - this doesn’t really matter, unless you’ve got a couple of amazing looking specimens that you particularly want to keep whole. Remember, the bigger the piece of mushroom, the more time it is going to take to dehydrate! Lay them out in your dehydrator, make sure there’s a bit of space in between them, and if you’ve got any spare room whack some slices of fruit or veg in as well (probably on a different tray if you’re doing the fun mushrooms though).

In order to store your mushrooms, they must be what’s referred to as “cracker dry”: this is one of those very descriptive phrases, because that’s exactly what you’re looking for: your dried mushroom should not bend, it should snap, like a Jacob's cracker. If, after you’ve put them in the dehydrator, they are still bendy, then you need to whack ‘em back in.

Realistically this is going to take about 14 hours, maybe a bit longer, and obviously if you’ve just thrown caution to the wind and thrown a load of chonkers in there then it’ll take a lot longer. You can (and should) cut them up, to try and get the sizes more or less the same: they'll all be ready at a similar time then.

Aim for around 50℃, a bit more or less is fine, but don’t go over 75℃ if you’re dehydrating psychedelic mushrooms or you’ll start to get some potency loss. 

Here’s a brief interlude for some good ol’ fashioned Q&A!

“My mushrooms were cracker dry and now I’ve left them on the side and they’re bendy again” - yup. They’re drier than the air now, so they’ll start to absorb moisture. You didn’t follow the next bit of advice that we haven’t given yet. Keep reading!

“I don’t want to buy a dehydrator, it’s too much/too big/I am aroused by kitchen goods and it will jeopardise my relationship" - totally up to you, but you will be throwing a lot of mushrooms away. Seriously they start at about £30 for a small one, that’s definitely worth buying. Try not to get romantically involved with it.

“I am going to use an open oven/my airfryer/some kitchen paper on a radiator instead” - there are some hacky methods that kinda work, but not really. They’ll take ages and do half a job, poorly. It’s the sort of thing you do when your dehydrator’s broken and your mushrooms are ready to harvest: emergency measures, like whacking a load of Gorilla tape around a puncture on your pushbike.

Once your mushrooms are cracker dry, you now want to store them somewhere airtight and we cannot stress this enough airtight it needs to be airtight. Motherfuckin’ airtight! If you store them somewhere that isn’t airtight, then when you come back they are going to have absorbed moisture from the air, and if you’ve left it long enough they’ll have gone mouldy and started to rot. Airtight’s pretty simple though, you could just get some of those nice kilner jars with the fancy orange seal, or you could go all the way up to buying a vacuum sealer and some sous-vide bags like all the chefs used to use a decade ago. Throw a few silica packets in as in insurance policy and you’re good to go, they’ll keep for years!

If you’ve dried out some gourmets (shiitake is particularly decent for this) then it’s just a matter of rehydrating them when you want to use them in a little hot water and then fishing them out - add the water to your recipe too if it needs some liquid, it’ll be mushroomy, or you could even throw them into a coffee grinder or blender and make a super-umami mushroom powder to add to recipes.

And there you have it - there aren’t many things that you absolutely need from the very start, but really this would be one of the first things you should purchase, along with a still air box and some 70% ISO alcohol!