A Few Notes on Mushrooms in Taiwan, China: Starting from Italian Cuisine
Text / Hsu Chung
I mentioned earlier that there were quite a few dinner gatherings in January. Besides the Sicilian food of southern Italy, there was also a dinner featuring traditional northern Italian dishes, but the theme was actually "Taiwan mushrooms," making it an intriguing dinner that used Italian cuisine to explore Taiwan mushrooms.
Why use "mushrooms" as the theme? The answer can be simple or complex. If I tell you that when I read the NewsMarket website's report on Taiwan's mushroom imports and exports (Note 1), when I understood the impact of mushrooms imported from China and Southeast Asia on Taiwan's mushroom industry, and when I learned that only six people across all of Taiwan conduct research and testing on mushroom spawn, and that a mushroom market worth over 5 billion has only 6 million in research funding each year, I could not help but worry about the country, worry about the people, and worry about the dinner table, and I wanted to spend some time understanding our mushroom industry, so I organized a mushroom dinner.
Do you accept this explanation?
Or I could simply admit that, because of the recent mushroom-growing craze in the office, and under the expectant gazes of my friends, I ate quite a few mushrooms of "questionable quality," which made me unable to resist making a statement: no matter which variety of mushroom it is, the only factors to consider when putting it in your mouth are "texture" or "aroma."
Take golden oyster mushrooms, for example. The aroma is best when the cap is just the size of a corn kernel; if it grows as large as a 10-yuan coin, the flavor actually goes off. Take king oyster mushrooms, for example. Small and large fruiting bodies have different textures; the smaller they are, the more chewy they feel, while I particularly prefer a length of about 8 cm. For this reason, the timing of harvesting mushrooms is very important, especially at room temperature, where often just a few hours late means they become overmature and too large, which is purely regrettable.
And as a result, many people criticized me for being too picky, saying I might as well hold a dinner and talk about delicious mushrooms.
In short, this was a dinner held at an Italian restaurant, so naturally I would not put dishes like mushroom meat thick soup or three-cup throat mushrooms on the table. So I chose various northern Italian mushroom dishes and, in the form of a dinner, talked about northern Italy and talked about Taiwan mushrooms.
