Shiitake Mushrooms: Turning Wood Into Food

Updated November 24, 2025

For years now, publications have been touting mushrooms as “ingredient of the year” and as an essential food for a move to plant-based eating. The woodsy “umami” or savory flavor of mushrooms make them a natural and satisfying substitute for red meat, and demand has been growing. Most commercial mushrooms are grown indoors, but those being grown in operations outside in woods and forests are being hailed as both nutritionally superior and with even fewer impacts on the environment.

Truman French and Tucker Pforzheimer founded MVM on Martha’s Vineyard 10 years ago (thus the “MV” in their name, which originally was MV Mycological), after meeting in a mycology class at Harvard. Both were studying something different and had no idea their futures would involve a farm of stockpiled wood and deliveries of mushrooms to dozens of chefs and markets. A couple years ago, they relocated to Amenia in New York’s Hudson Valley. 

MVM grows shiitake mushrooms — a prized Japanese mushroom known for its medicinal qualities and flavor — on thousands of four-foot oak boughs. They don’t require irrigation or soil, fertilizer, or feed — making these mushrooms significantly less environmentally impactful than animal proteins, and among the most efficient forms of protein in terms of land and water use. 

Shiitake, meaning “oak mushrooms” in Japanese, is the second-most produced mushroom in the world, following the common button mushroom. Truman and Tucker draw on the authentic Japanese growing methods on natural oak logs, where the mushrooms feed on the minerals and complex sugars in the oak itself, increasing nutrients, fiber, protein — and the flavor as well.

Shiitakes have been grown this way in Japan for generations and command a good price on the market, says Dr. Ken Mudge, a professor emeritus of horticulture at Cornell University, who researches and teaches courses on forest farming and mushrooms. A few years back, he led a project in conjunction with the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Vermont to train forest owners in shiitake production that drew nearly 100 participants. Other specialty mushrooms, such as lion’s mane, oyster, and wine cap can be grown successfully outdoors, says Mudge, but only log-grown shiitakes can be grown consistently enough to supply the market. This is due to the unique ability shiitake logs have to be soaked, or “forced” to fruit by being immersed in water for 12 to 24 hours, which stimulates fruit production. 

Mudge wrote the groundbreaking guide Farming the Woods about growing food and medicinals in forests with Steve Gabriel, a mushroom educator at the Cornell Small Farms Program and a mushroom grower himself at Wellspring Forest Farm in New York. Gabriel grows lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms at his farm in a solar-powered greenhouse and shiitakes outside on logs, and offers a mushroom CSA. “Mushrooms are absolutely the protein source with the lightest ecological footprint,” Gabriel says. He has taught thousands about the ways farming and forestry can be combined to benefit both the ecology and economies of small farms. The pair has helped establish a mushroom resource center at Cornell to provide research, training, support, and online training for both mushroom enthusiasts and those who are considering a business. Cornell also maintains a food forest farm on campus. 

“The trends are skyrocketing; there’s a ton of interest in it,” Gabriel says. Fifteen years ago, there were no mushroom farmers in the area, he says, and now he knows of about 100 other mushroom farms in the state of New York, where he lives, and a good number in Vermont. Most have 1,000 to 2,000 logs in production. “I think it’s still an emerging field,” he says. “People are still learning how to do it well.” 

Mudge says it’s important to him that mushroom log production allows forest landowners an additional way to make money off their forest and thereby sustain the land. But this type of farming is labor intensive, he notes. “It’s a superior product and an opportunity for people to put a wood lot to good use, but it’s a lot of work, a lot of lifting. You have to be very serious.” 

On Martha’s Vineyard, MVM had 45,000 logs in production, producing about 200 pounds of mushrooms each day. They worked with local businesses and construction companies to salvage island oak and cut limbs into specified four to five-foot lengths. 

“We always try to think ahead, like everyone in agriculture does,” Tucker told Bluedot recently about MVM’s move to New York. “The building boom that was supplying us lots of logs [to inoculate with our mushrooms] through land clearing on the Vineyard was going to dry up soon — we knew it was inevitable.” 

Tucker says they didn’t want to incentivize unnecessary tree cutting, and knew that to ensure the long-term viability of their eco-forward operation, the farm would need to be attached to a sustainable forestry operation. “Like mushrooms, we are opportunists, and we noticed this untapped potential in other areas,” Tucker says.

After a search around the Northeast for another place, they found a pine farm with mature trees in Amenia that had been abandoned 40 years ago. The farm offered ideal conditions for building a traditional shiitake operation, Tucker says. “We learned when we went to Japan to visit our spawn and equipment suppliers a few years back that the traditional shiitake operations are established using mature stands of pine trees.” 

This past season in Amenia, MVM had 35,000 logs in production, producing about 115 pounds daily. The crew — which includes Tucker’s brothers Jack and Ross — hand-inoculates each log in multiple spots with one of several strains of heirloom mycelium, propagated specifically for log cultivation. The inoculated logs sit stockpiled for at least a year while the strain colonizes the wood. When they are ready to go, the crew removes a section of logs, soaks them overnight in water to stimulate the fruit production, and sets them out in the shade tents, leaning upright. 

In six days, mushrooms begin bursting through the bark of the oak, ready for harvesting. The crew hand-cuts the mushrooms, then rotates out those logs to maintain a continuous production May through November. After being used multiple times, the spent logs are left to fully decay back into topsoil. “This constant rotation is significantly more labor intensive than leaving the logs in stacks to fruit on their own,” Tucker says, “but allows for the consistent production that restaurants and consumers need to plan out their dishes and shopping trips.” 

This contrasts with today’s commercial mushrooms being grown indoors in vast rooms on sterilized manure, sawdust, or a composted mix of ingredients like corn cobs or cottonseed hulls. Commercial shiitake growers specifically pack sterilized oak sawdust into plastic hulled manmade “logs” placed in climate-controlled rooms that produce shiitakes in about four months compared to two to four years.

Even still, the Mushroom Council, which represents commercial growers, points to energy savings in growing mushrooms, especially when compared with raising cattle. In The Mushroom Sustainability Story, the Council calculated one acre of land can produce one million pounds of mushrooms. Mushroom beds stacked vertically in growing facilities allow a high volume of mushrooms to be grown in relatively small spaces, while using a limited amount of water and a “soil” made of composted materials.

According to Professor Mudge, independent blind taste tests have found forest- or log-grown shiitakes to be superior in flavor, freshness, and nutrition compared to the sawdust-grown shiitake mushrooms commonly found in supermarkets.

MVM mushrooms contain double the fiber than those commercially produced and a significant 1/2 gram of protein per cap. That may be less than the concentrated 45 to 50 grams of protein found in an eight-ounce steak (with 10 to 16 grams of fat), but Tucker finds “gram for gram, shiitakes are a healthier, more sustainable source.” Shiitakes are also rich in lentinan, a substance (shown in studies to bolster the immune system and aid in fighting cancer) that gives the shiitake that woodsy umami — like wild mushrooms — with a hint of garlic. 

Chefs love MVM mushrooms. One told me they’re “the best mushroom product in the country” and another, a top chef in Boston, said, “They are the best shiitake mushrooms I’ve ever had.” As a chef myself, I couldn’t agree more. It’s tough to go back to the commercial store versions; the flavor is bland. There’s a meaty denseness the MVM mushrooms get from feeding on real wood, along with a creamy smoothness characteristic of shiitakes.

Tucker says restaurants from the Hudson Valley, New York City, and Boston had their mushrooms on the menu. One Martha’s Vineyard chef combined fresh and dried MVM mushrooms for a very popular mushroom Bolognese, and another created a delicious mushroom taco. 

He says it was extremely gratifying for him to see his mushrooms as the center-of-plate protein option. “Our goal is to help people move away from animal protein without feeling they need to compromise on enjoyment.”

Find dried wild harvest shiitakes available to ship anywhere in the U.S. on the MVM website. 

Read more: The Mushroom Council’s Mushroom Sustainability Story, and Farming the Woods about growing food and medicinals in forests, by Dr. Ken Mudge and Steve Gabriel. 

Lucas Thors contributed reporting to this story. 

Recipes:

Mushroom and Vegetable Stir Fry

Shiitake and Cherry Tomato Pasta

Ramen Noodle Soup with Shiitakes