Santa Rosa grower shares creative ways people can eat more mushrooms

It’s nearly impossible not to be drawn into Amanda Janney’s mesmerizing mushroom displays.

Fuzzy lion’s mane, frilly comb tooth and oyster mushrooms in muted golds, pinks and the blue-grey of an overcast autumn sky fill cardboard cartons in front of her.

“People say they look like art, they look like flowers, they look like coral,” Janney said. “A lot of people ask, ‘They’re so pretty. Would I eat them?’”

Her answer? Most definitely.

To make sure more people get a taste of her carefully cultivated mushrooms, she’s giving away 200 pounds of them.

Janney will have a pop-up mushroom stand Thursday afternoon, Nov. 2, in front of Breathe Diversity Pilates in Santa Rosa where the first 800 customers will take away 4 ounces each, enough for one serving.

So why is she giving away her mushrooms, which normally sell for $24 to $32 a pound? It equates to a few thousand dollars’ worth of product, which seems like a lot for the owner of a new small business.

“It’s about me being really excited to be in Santa Rosa,” said Janney, who moved to Sonoma County a little over a year ago.

The beautiful specimens she sells, coupled with her cheerful exuberance and passion for them, has helped her build a following at farmers markets in San Francisco, Marin County and Calistoga. She wants to build that same success where she lives.

“I hatched this idea kind of as a joke,” she said. It came to her while walking around Spring Lake with a friend.

Before the walk was over, she was serious about it.

“I was like, ‘I think I just need to stand on a corner and give them away to people for free and meet them and talk to them.’ ‘Hi, I'm Amanda. This is what I'm doing. I think you should eat more mushrooms.’”

Setting up shop

You’d never guess that Janney’s home, just a short walk from Montgomery Village, is a thriving urban mushroom farm.

She answered the door along with her small three-legged wonder dog, Ken$ie Maria, the namesake of Janney’s business, KM Mushrooms.

The back patio, garage and backyard with a large shed and greenhouse are all given over to growing mushrooms. She just finished an overhaul of her system to add enough space to accommodate the 13 varieties she grows.

On the patio is a sterilizing machine where Janney pasteurizes the growing medium — mainly sawdust and soy hulls — for the mushrooms. There’s a refrigerator where she stores mycelium, which is what the mushrooms sprout from. The garage is full of racks lined with numbered bags of incubating mycelium.

In the shed, humidifiers create a hospitable environment for full-grown lion’s mane, comb tooth, chestnut and blue oyster mushrooms. Pink and golden oyster mushrooms, which thrive in warm, tropical settings, inhabit the greenhouse.

She uses solar energy to help minimize the costs of electricity used to power the operation.

Janney began foraging mushrooms and growing them in buckets and laundry baskets as a hobby several years ago. She was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time and volunteering at food-focused nonprofits, building gardens in people’s backyards and teaching cooking classes at the local food bank.

After moving to the Bay Area in 2019, she had a light-bulb moment.

“I can grow mushrooms as a contribution to the food system and have that be a viable way to sustain myself,” she recalled thinking.

The idea of a home-based urban farm led her to Santa Rosa.

In her kitchen, a dehydrator hummed, filling the room with an earthy aroma of mushrooms. Bags of already-dried mushrooms were stacked on the dining-room table as she discussed people’s reluctance to try mushrooms they haven’t seen before.

“We skew towards being mycophobic,”she said. Other cultures more easily embrace mushrooms both foraged and cultivated. “Combating that fear (of mushrooms) or reassuring people that these are cultivated and therefore, safe, is a big part of the job.”

Many ways with mushrooms

The plastic-wrapped packages of white button, cremini and portobello that consumers are used to belong to a different species than what Janney grows.

She said her mushrooms offer more variety in texture and flavor than typical grocery-store mushrooms.

Janney understands the intimidation factor when it comes to cooking with a new ingredient.

“I didn’t know how to cook when I moved out on my own,” she said. “I’ve been through the spectrum of overwhelm and intimidation to complete nerdiness in learning culinary techniques.”

She said cooking any of the mushrooms she grows simply with butter and garlic is a great place to start.

“My spiel is ‘use them in anything,’ just to get people into trying them,” she said.

She uses mushrooms in burritos, vegetable hash or as a toast topper. They figure into her weekly meal preparation, which includes making a batch each of grains, greens, beans and mushrooms so she can use them to build easy, nutritious lunches.

One of her favorite dinners to make is pasta tossed with pioppinos, which she said are “super earthy” and pair well with fresh herbs and lighter flavors.

This time of year, as the weather changes, she enjoys making mushroom and wild rice soup in the crockpot using chestnut mushrooms.

“They have the most divergent flavor out of the bunch that I grow,” she said. “They have a nutty, buttery quality to their flavor. It’s really deep and complex.”

When Janney entertains and wants to make mushrooms the star of the show, she marinates oyster caps, stacks them on a skewer, roasts them, then slices them like shawarma.

Another mushroom that has a wow factor is the shaggy lion’s mane mushroom.

“Lion’s Mane has a faint seafood quality to it, almost like a crab-like flavor. So I lean into that and make crab cakes,” she said. They also work well as steaks or seasoned for tacos.

Janney plans to dole out recipe ideas along with the free mushrooms Thursday. She said she has no idea what to expect or whether people will even take her up on her offer. If they don’t, she hopes to donate leftovers.

“I really, really, really want to feel that community give and take here at home in Santa Rosa,” she said.

For those looking for her mushrooms after Thursday’s giveaway, the nearest locations are at Tenfold Farmstand in Petaluma and the Calistoga Farmer’s market. Her mushrooms also will be an add-on to CSA boxes at Deep Roots Farm in Penngrove, and she hopes to find a home at one of Sonoma County’s farmers markets before long.

To make sure customers in her new community have easy access, Janney takes orders for delivery on her Instagram page (instagram.com/p/Cyv1l_9xQup).

“I’ll hop on my bike and pedal mushrooms to anyone,” she said. “I know there will be a day when my mushrooms will be available in Santa Rosa to a wider variety of people. I’m just going to keep growing them and keep selling them, and we’ll see what comes of this.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @JenInOz.