Dixon farm offers specialty mushrooms
The process repeats itself every week for Ron Selfors and his son, Eric Robinson. It’s part chemistry project, part farming operation and part hard work. But one thing is for sure: The earthy final product is 100% delicious.
For more than three years Ron, Eric and the rest of their team at Cold Creek Mushrooms have been raising, harvesting and delivering both Italian and pink oyster mushrooms at their farm outside of Dixon. The mushrooms are grown year-round and are served in restaurants from Rolla to St. Louis.
“The Italians are a good general purpose mushroom,” says Ron. “They’ve got a nice mild flavor and keep their body. Some restaurants serve them raw in salad and others bake them. They like that mellow taste.”
When the father-and-son team set out to start their mushroom venture, they sought advice from mentors who had been in the business of growing and marketing and took in all the information they could find.
“We probably consumed 200 or 300 YouTube videos getting ready for this,” Ron says.
The process to grow the mushrooms — which they exclusively wholesale to restaurants — starts with a pneumatically controlled bagger that Eric designed. It drops preset amounts of both hardwood and soybean hull pellets and water into a specialty bag.
The sealed bags then spend 24 hours in a sanitizer set to just over 200 degrees to kill off any bacteria. “This part of the process is so important,” Ron says. “If the sanitizers fail, it might not just kill off that batch, but it could get the whole chain and set us back weeks.”
“When we started this, we were only filling 32 bags per week and using one sanitizer,” Eric says. “Now we’re at about 400 per week with five sanitizers.”
The cool bags are individually opened in the clean room — where they wear masks and gloves to protect the process — and inoculated with organic mushroom spawn they buy from northern Wisconsin. The bags are moved to a warm, dark incubation room for two weeks allowing the spawn to take over the bag. They’re moved to a temperature- and climate-controlled harvesting room for one week.
“That’s when we go in with our baskets and harvest the mushrooms,” Ron says. “We bring them out and try and clean them up as best we can so everything we sell to a restaurant is eaten. Very little goes into the stockpot.”
The mushrooms are boxed and stored in a refrigerated room until they’re delivered the following day. While Eric is the brains of the growing and harvesting operation in Dixon, Ron, who claims to be retired, takes care of marketing and sales to restaurants primarily in cities along Interstate 44, including St. Louis.
“We get these mushrooms into restaurants within a day of harvest; our delivery days are long,” Ron says. “But, we’ll pick out three or four restaurants we’ve either touched before or are new to us and talk to them about our mushrooms when we’re out.”
The best days for Ron are when he meets with chefs or owners who have an affinity for mushrooms. “We’ve stopped at restaurants and just nibbled on raw mushrooms for 30 minutes with them before,” Ron says. “We were at Roberto’s Trattoria once and brought our mushrooms in and they got taken into the kitchen for the chef to prepare a dish for us to share together on the spot.”
Cold Creek — which is served by Gascosage Electric Cooperative — sells mushrooms to five-star hotels, top-end steakhouses and Italian eateries in St. Louis. They also supply more rural restaurants such as NaCl+H20 in Rolla, Missouri Hick in Cuba and Sybill’s in St. James.
Public House Brewing Co., in St. James and Rolla, uses Cold Creek’s mushrooms in pizzas, calzones and sandwiches. Executive chef Liz Cotterell says their mushroom-swiss burger has been so popular it will find a home on their everyday menu. “We believe in serving our customers the best local and high-quality ingredients we can get,” the chef says. “Cold Creek Mushrooms does exactly that: high quality and local.”
Eric also grows and sells pink oyster mushrooms, which are bitter and not meant to be eaten raw. Ron says as they cook, the bright pink mushrooms lose their color. “You cook them almost to the point of burning and they have a taste very similar to bacon,” he says.
They see the pink mushrooms fitting a niche for not only vegans and vegetarians, but the growing number of people with alpha-gal syndrome, which prevents them from eating meat.
Master gardener Stacy Amick Kramer, who has worked with Cold Creek on sustainable agriculture grants, lauds the team at Cold Creek for their advancements in rural farming. “There are both challenges and opportunities,” she says. “This is about as rural as it gets and you’re making products people love. Starting with the bagger Eric made. He researched, engineered, designed and built it.”
Cold Creek is working with Stacy on ways to fund projects diverting their spent mushroom substrate from landfills to gardens as a soil alternative or worm farms. “We want to research the spent mushroom substrate in gardening,” Stacy says. “Then figure out what’s the maximum amount we can utilize for a productive garden and to keep it out of the landfill.”
Ron and Eric are in the process of building more capacity to grow their mushroom operation further. Ron sees his rural location in Dixon as the perfect spot to expand in Springfield, Jefferson City and Columbia.
“This is a tremendous spot to be and we can connect with people from all over the world online and on YouTube,” Ron says. “We always keep our eyes open and we’ve played with other mushrooms. But right now we’re putting all our efforts into maximizing our production levels and the number of restaurants we serve.”
To learn more, visit www.coldcreekmushrooms.com or call 573-855-8312. It is one of 600 companies in the Buy Missouri initiative overseen by Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe. To find more Missouri-made products, visit www.BuyMissouri.net.