Hen of the Woods mushrooms are members of the "superior" class of wild edible mushrooms. Crunchy even when cooked, rich in flavor, autumnal in color, they are a beloved THC Edibles mushroom to people who know them. Cultivated hens are referred to as "Maitake" (pronounced my-tahk-ee), but they are very tricky to grow indoors consistently.
If you are lucky to find them in the wild, you will find them growing in late summer and early fall, often at the base of isolated oak stumps or growing out of radiating buried roots. You can revisit that stump, often for years, and find a hens roosting there every fall. It will likely take many acres of searching to find a hen, but when you do, it can be a prime photographic moment before harvest and hitting the pan!
Fortunately, if you have access to oak logs, you can grow them outdoors yourself. Inoculated logs will fruit for years every fall, but usually need 16-18 months after inoculation for fruiting to commence.
Maitake is a weak competitor. Like growing Shiitake or Buy Edibles Canada Oyster mushrooms on wood logs, you will inoculate the logs with spawn, but we highly recommended that you pre-treat the log first, then bury the log outdoors and let the fall weather bring on the fruiting. A prep/planting schedule looks like this.
What is "pre-treatment"?
Wood logs come with their own protective bark sleeve which is sufficient to hold in moisture and prevent invasion of other fungi, allowing for fast colonization of whichever spawn you plant into the log. With Maitake, however, spawn run is unreliable but we can help it along by pre-treating the log in one of three ways: sterilizing it in a pressure cooker, boiling it for 1 hour or steaming it for 6 hours.
Wood logs come with their own protective bark sleeve which is sufficient to hold in moisture and prevent invasion of other fungi, allowing for fast colonization of whichever spawn you plant into the log. With Maitake, however, spawn run is unreliable but we can help it along by pre-treating the log in one of three ways: sterilizing it in a pressure cooker, boiling it for 1 hour or steaming it for 6 hours.
Which method is best?
Pressure cooking gives us the highest rate of colonization, but it requires a big enough cooker to hold a 2 lb. log, which we believe is the minimum size for good sized clusters and long term fruiting. Your pressure canner should be a minimum size of 12 qts, and you can process a bigger log if you have a 23 qt size canner.
Not comfortable with (or don't have) a pressure canner? The next best choice would be to steam or boil the log prior to inoculation. These each can result in a higher contamination rate in the finished log, but if carefully done and inoculated in a quiet, clean area of your house, can be very successful.
You will need a large stock pot for either method. Boiling is a little more uncomfortable to work with, as the log must be boiled for one hour and taken out of hot water when time is up. Steaming (just as you would vegetables, rack on the bottom, a few inches of water and lid on) takes 6 hours, but the log can cool in the clean pot awaiting inoculation.
We recommend using large autoclavable bags Edible Cola Bottles that will hold up to the heat with all three methods, but these are essential for the pressure cook method. If you have a large cooker you can pre-treat lots of logs, just like we did in the new FFP sterilizer.