Mushrooms are one of the ingredients that is eaten all over the world. The biggest consumption is mushroom, it is edible raw.

There are a plenty of varieties of mushrooms in Japan like enokitake, shiitake, nameko, maitake, eringi, shimeji and matsutake mushroom, the word “take” means mushroom in Japanese.

We don’t usually eat them raw, a pot dish called “Nabe” is traditional and popular way to eat it. We are looking for autumn of mushroom season.

One of the mushrooms that the Japanese don’t know much is abalone mushroom, or AWABITAKE in Japanese which is only cultivated by five suppliers.

It is characterized by a firm and crunchy texture like aquatic shellfish abalone.

This abalone mushroom is cultivated by mushroom bed cultivation as well as other mushrooms, but it needs much more work.

The inoculum is incubated in the bacteria bed medium at first, generating a strain-shaped fruiting bodies require another environmental condition. Of course other species need it, but abalone mushroom is very sensitive to the humidity, temperature, and light condition.

The shade of abalone mushroom has a texture of abalone shellfish. To make it bigger, thinning is needed. The machine may change the environmental settings, but most of parts of cultivation depends on human eyes and senses to check the growth every day, the techniques of professionals, especially to make the shade bigger and wider with a good round shape.

As mentioned above, the Japanese don’t eat mushrooms raw, Abalone mushroom is recommended to be fried like a steak in a cookbook.

But the cultivators in Nagano prefectures dare to recommend eating it raw and sell it with the name of “SASHIMI KINOKO” that is good with wasabi, the Japanese horseradish.

You will feel the texture of soy sauce marinated abalone mushroom with wasabi similar to real abalone of aquatic shell fish.

They also produce it in the shelf stable package.

This is the perfect souvenir for vegetarians as well as non-vegetarians… it has value to taste it!