Saturday Farmers’ Market Vendor Feature: Oyster & King

Customers looking through the mushroom variety at Market.

This week we are featuring Oyster & King, which was incorporated in the fall season of 2016. O&K is responsible for direct sale and delivery of all specialty organic mushrooms from Coast Mushroomtech. You can find their lovely organic mushrooms at our market every week- check out the expansive variety, you’re likely to find mushrooms you’ve never seen in a grocery store! Last Saturday we were able to chat with Mika, who is the market manager for O&K, and she answered these questions for us:

How do you grow or source your mushrooms?

So there are two broad categories of mushrooms: cultivated and wildcrafted. Those that we cultivate are grown in farms on alder wood chips or on logs, and then you inoculate them with spores and they grow out from there, so you just cut them off. Wildcrafted mushrooms, such as morels, are collected seasonally, by a local forager.

How did the business, or farming of mushrooms, begin?

David (the owner’s) dad was a mycology professor at UBC, so he started to grow them, and that is what got this started in their family. So it all started from a love of mushrooms.

What is your favorite way to eat your mushrooms?

If it is a portobello or a morel I like to grill them and put them with pasta, or you can pan fry them with butter and garlic.

What is your favorite mushroom, and why?

The shiitake mushroom is my favorite because it has the richest flavor, in my opinion, of all the mushrooms. It isn’t like an oyster mushroom or cremini which is blander and will soak up flavors you cook it with, but shiitake provides umami by helping pull out and enhancing other flavors in a dish. I grew up eating a lot of Japanese cuisine being half Asian so I am most familiar with this mushroom and fond of the different ways in which it can be incorporated into a dish.

Where else can you be found other than the UBC Farmers’ market?

You can find us at most local farmers’ markets- New West, Mount Pleasant, Riley Park, and Trout Lake. Otherwise, you can enjoy our mushrooms in dishes at the restaurants that we sell to. Heirloom and Acorn are two restaurants that incorporate our mushrooms in their dishes.

What would you like customers to know about Oyster and King?

We are a small business run by a family, so what you see is a lot of hard work on the side of the growers and the sales team. Try some new mushrooms! If you are always buying shiitake, it is exciting to give something new a try, plus when you do this you will be able to find out new ways to cook them.

Do you have any suggestions on where you find some recipes featuring mushrooms?

I find that there are really cool cookbooks (especially vegetarian/vegan) ones that really incorporate mushrooms in a variety of ways to provide either meat-like replacements or flavors and textures. I also have a cookbook called “shroom” which provides a LOT of information on each mushroom, how to cook it, what to pair it with etc. And finally, I find that various internet websites can provide tons of useful recipe information these days.

Oyster & King can be found at the UBC Farm Saturday Farmers’ Market every week until September 28th. For more information check out their