Stephen Montoya
Texas Fungus founder Jordan Jent holds a brick of mushrooms that matured over the course of several weeks. These mushrooms could soon be on a plate in one of DFW's high-end restaurants.
It's with a deep sense of irony that local business owner and Texas Fungus founder Jordan Jent's business has flourished. After all, Jent and his team of fungi enthusiasts aren't growing anything particularly new.
This crew of toadstool enthusiasts are successfully selling one the earth's most prominent living and oldest organisms — mushrooms. And, according to Jent, business is good. And just like many great ideas, Jent scratches his head in disbelief that more people haven't jumped on the mushroom bandwagon.
A self-proclaimed early riser, Jent and his team of two employees usually get up around 6 a.m. to get started on growing delectable fungi that, in only a short period of time, could be served on a plate in any of DFWs swankiest restaurants. Jent's business, at 3201 E Pioneer Parkway in Arlington, is "perfectly" centered between Fort Worth and Dallas. If needed, and it often is, he can supply high-end establishments in both cities with his fresh shrooms quickly.
Stephen Montoya
Pictured are a strain of mushrooms that have matured over several weeks at Texas Fungus in Arlington.
This business is unique because it's one of only a relative handful nationwide that grows and sells fresh mushrooms, according to Cornell University Small Farms Program.
With the current trend rising for farm-to-table ingredients, Jent and his team are in high demand in the DFW culinary scene.
"The [mushroom] industry here in the U.S. hasn't been necessarily commercialized on the specialty side," Jent says as he does a walkthrough in one of three climate-controlled rooms, he monitors for growth activity. "Currently, we grow about a thousand pounds of specialty mushrooms a week between the three us. It's very labor intensive, plus here in the U.S., mushroom farming is a budding industry."
“The Best Damn Mushrooms in Texas” is the slogan Jent has coined for his product.
According to Jent, mushroom farming found him. Flashback a few years when Jent, a budding chef at a high-end restaurant in the DFW area, decided to make a career change.
"I started working for Fidelity Investments, and the moment I arrived, I knew that corporate arena wasn't a match for my personality," he says. "As I was looking for a different path, I knew I wanted to stay connected to food in some way."
Jent then had the idea to try to grow and offer premium food to restaurants in the DFW area. "I thought, 'What if I helped elevate the local food system,'" he explained.
A small townhouse garage doubled as Jent's laboratory, where he tried his hand at growing almost anything a restaurant would be interested in ingredients-wise. His first several outings were a bust after he had no luck growing tomatoes, zucchini, herbs, and even cacti.
"I did that for about a year and a half, just kind of beating my head against the wall trying to make it work," he says.
His "aha" moment came when he remembered a cook he used to work with telling him it only took a day to grow mushrooms after they had run out during a dinner service. "That kind of always stuck with me, so, I thought I would explore it."
Stephen Montoya
Jordan Jent holds a bag of substrate in one of three climate controlled rooms at Texas Fungus.
The first thing Jent quickly found out is that mushrooms don't grow overnight. Instead, he says he went to "YouTube university" to get tips from other mushroom enthusiasts to see if he could grow his own fungi. From there, Jent used some sawdust spawn on a log to grow Shiitake mushrooms, which took him nearly two years. "I started doing Shiitake logs in the Texas summer, waking up at five in the morning to get things going," he says.
Soon, Jent switched his mushroom growing technique to a bag and sawdust system, accelerating the time to create a batch to six weeks instead of two years. With his new method in place, Jent says he had the added headache of having to find a different place to grow after his landlord found out he was selling his products out of his garage. That apparently was a property no-no.
The garage would give way to a climate-controlled gooseneck trailer in Arlington, which would eventually give way to his latest spot inside a 2,000-square-foot building equipped with three climate-controlled areas that facilitate various stages of mushroom production.
"You learn as time goes on," he says. "You may contaminate a batch and have to start all over again, but that is just part of the learning process."
Most people don't realize that mushrooms are a lot like plants; they lack chlorophyll and have to take nutrients from other materials. Mushrooms are neither plants nor animals. They constitute their very own kingdom: the Fungi. These include the familiar mushroom-forming species that include yeasts, molds, smuts, and rusts.
Jent's current growth process starts with a specific mushroom he wants to produce. The foundational substrate, the nutritional base that the heart and lung mycelium can grow into, gets inoculated with the chosen species, then incubated and nurtured until it fruits over a few weeks. The new shrooms take a brief downcycle inside a walk-in cooler to let out any sponged-up moisture. Finally, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, box shipments go to restaurants, farmers' markets, community-supported gardens, and a few stores.
"Although we have a system in place, we are constantly in a state of improvement," Jent says. "We are always trying to get better."