Tune into your favorite TV or YouTube chef, or browse leading restaurant menus, and it’s highly likely you’ll see mushrooms there. But these favored fungi aren’t your standard white buttons. These are specialty mushrooms, also known as exotics, with shapes, colors, tastes and textures that spur culinary minds and palates to new heights.
For many years, the only fresh mushrooms found on market shelves were common mushrooms: white buttons, cremini and portabellas — all versions of Agaricus bisporus. (Ask a mushroom grower the difference between cremini and portabella, and their answer is “about three days.”)
But advances in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) have changed everything. Specialty mushrooms, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as everything outside the Agaricus genus, have gone from seasonal outdoor crop
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