The most common question that I get about growing oyster mushrooms is “what kind of rice should I use for growing oyster mushrooms?” Hopefully, this will help demystify things a bit!
So… What kind of rice should I use for growing oyster mushrooms?
If you are using precooked “ready” rice – this is a great way to get your oyster mushrooms growing with zero prep work and minimal risk of contamination, I recommend it for beginning mushroom growers because it makes things a bit easier. When I say precooked rice, I mean the packs of whole grain brown rice that is already cooked and vacuum sealed into a plastic envelope with the intent that the end user microwaves the bag and eats the rice out of the bag during what I would assume is a fairly mundane lunch break. I love brown rice, plain rice out of a bag for lunch isn’t my forte. BUT it’s dynamite for growing mushrooms on. You’ll want to look for Ben’s Original Wholegrain Brown Ready Rice – here’s a picture of the bag you’re after, it’s usually $2 to $3. Store brand is fine as long as there isn’t a bunch of extra sodium added (Ben’s Original has about 7g, you don’t want more than that as sodium will inhibit fungal growth.)
How to prepare your own bags of brown rice for growing oyster mushrooms!
If you’d like to use regular brown rice and cook it yourself, congratulations! You’ll save a bunch of money and be able to grow a whole lot of mushrooms. You’ll want to cook the rice per the instructions on the bag, using about 25% less of the recommended amount of water, and cook for a few minutes less. You want it mostly cooked but still firm and dry-ish. While it’s still hot (just cool enough not to melt the bag) put it in a freezer zip bag, squeeze out the excess air and zip it shut. Once it’s cool, you can proceed per the instructions to inoculate your rice with the oyster mushroom liquid culture from your kit. You can do bags up to a gallon in size this way quite successfully, and you can grow directly from the colonized bag or use it as grain spawn for straw buckets, bags, or outdoor mushroom growing beds.
Can I use white rice for growing oyster mushrooms or making grain spawn?
You could technically use white rice to grow your oyster mushrooms on, but the trouble is that mycelium is white, and therefore it’s really hard to see if white mycelium has grown on white rice. Brown rice gives your mycelium a tiny bit more nutrition, and it’s way easier to see mycelium growing, so that’s why we recommend it. You can also use a bunch of other interesting grains like popcorn, birdseed and rye berries. For getting started though, you really can’t beat wholegrain brown rice.
Let us know how it goes:)
So I don ‘t cook the pre-cooked uncle ben’s rice, just use it as it comes from the store in the packet ?
Hey Pete! Correct – if you’re using pre-cooked Ben’s rice, you don’t need to cook it (and it should be room temp, don’t heat it up at all!) but you can also cook a pot of brown rice and put it in a zip-loc bag while it’s still hot, squeeze the air out and let it cool and that works just as well:)
When it spawns can I grow from that base or put in a bigger sterile bag
You can do either! Growing directly out of the bag of rice is going to give you a fairly small harvest, but it’s great if you just want to see how they grow and get a feel for it – we have students do that a lot for science projects. If you want to grow a larger amount, we recommend transferring your colonized grain spawn to a bucket of straw or coffee grounds (our kits include instructions that walk through both processes) you can also do an outdoor straw bed for oyster mushroom varieties. It technically works to do outdoor beds for lions mane too, but lions mane gets dried out easier and you have more control over humidity if you grow them in a bucket or some other container indoors.