Keith Duncan and His Magic Mushrooms
story by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder
Mushrooms are strange little creatures – neither plant nor animal, protozoa or bacteria. Their kingdom includes molds and yeasts and toadstools, all of which have chitin in their cells, feed off other living things, and multiply through spores. Culinarily, mushrooms are a rich source of the prized and elusive umami. Like the old saying about porn, umami is hard to describe but you know it when you taste it.
To learn more about these umami bombs, we drove out to Narrow Gate Farm to meet our Holly Hill mushroom supplier, Keith Duncan.
Tall and lanky, dark brown hair slicked back into a sleek ponytail, Keith is part mad scientist, part MacGyver, and all in on mushrooms. Even as a little kid, he said he was so fascinated with growing things that his father would often find him glued to the TV at 5:00 am, watching the morning farm report.
After years spent working in restaurants and getting to know the food business, Keith has pared his business plan down to three criteria – what do chefs want? And what has the most ease of growing and the best quality? These days he grows three varieties, down from the five or six that he started with a couple of years ago.
We walked in the door of the building that houses his grow operation and were immediately smacked in the face by the pungent smell of almost a hundred blocks of substrate cooking off. Keith makes his own substrate out of soy hulls and wood pellets and cooks it at 220℉ for 18 hours, which creates a sterile growth environment.
These blocks of substrate are the literal building blocks for the mushrooms that find their way into our kitchens and onto our customers’ plates. Like mushroom condos, they’re quickly populated by colonies of spores that grow into lion’s mane, blue oyster, and black trumpet mushrooms.
Keith inoculates his own spawn using wheat grains, which he says are inexpensive and readily available. Unlike growers who purchase spawn and might only inject a few ounces in each 10# block of substrate, Keith can afford to increase that to around 8 oz. per block.
The spores for the inoculation come from his own liquid cultures, housed in mason jars and looking more than a little like the mother in a vinegar bottle. Which is not surprising, given the mushroom family connection with yeasts.
Once the grains are inoculated and injected into the substrate blocks, Keith tumbles them in an old gas dryer that he’s taken the door off of and padded for protection. This helps distribute the spores more evenly throughout the block.
Then it’s off to the grow room, encapsulated in a tent with zippered windows and entrances, with a constant temperature of 65℉, 85-92% humidity, and full-spectrum lighting that’s on 12 hours a day. After being told (very politely) that humans are the #1 cause of contamination, we hung back, content to peek through the unzipped door while Keith retrieved a few samples to show us.
Those gorgeous specimens had taken about a month to materialize from spores in an agar plate to full-grown mushrooms ready to be harvested, which Keith does himself. He also hand delivers them to about eight or nine Lexington-area restaurants, including three of ours.
Smithtown Seafood batters up Keith’s blue oysters for a mushroom po’boy or to top its Singapore Salad. Honeywood braises them for a savory side and to go into chicken fricassée, and Holly Hill Inn is filling a mezzaluna with lion’s mane.
It’s a nice full circle back to the 1990s when Keith used to hawk his homegrown herbs and lettuces at Debbie Long’s Dudley’s Restaurant, where Chef Ouita was working as sous chef.
With several of her own restaurants now, Chef Ouita and our Holly Hill culinary director and executive chef Tyler McNabb were thrilled to welcome Keith back as a supplier when he knocked on the back door at Holly Hill Inn a few years ago.
And since Chef Tyler was able to give Keith enough advance notice, we hope to have his mushrooms available to the chefs coming to town soon for the 2025 FEAST with FoodChain, held in partnership with UK’s Local Food Summit for the first time this year.
Because local mushrooms and local food systems are both beautiful examples of how tiny beginnings can quickly colonize into big results, with their own powerful burst of umami.
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Earth Apples & Shrooms
The beauty of this dish is that you can make it with whatever is fresh and in season locally; this is what we recently found at the Lexington Farmers Market. Measure with your heart and based on your audience. Cooking for yourself? Maybe two potatoes, a handful of mushrooms and a fried local egg on top for a great meal. Cooking for a group? Go for a couple pounds of potatoes, more mushrooms and serve it as a side!
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