When we meet Chef Doris Choi at Silvia, the clean linens have arrived to prepare for service and the team is busily moving about, slicing bread and making notes.
A leader in the vegan and plant-based food movement, Choi was born in Seoul, Korea, and her family immigrated to New York City when she was three years old. She worked in Brooklyn for nearly 20 years before moving to Woodstock and opened Silvia in 2017 alongside her sister and their husbands. In 2024, she was one of five chefs in the Hudson Valley to be nominated as a James Beard Award semi-finalist for New York State, a remarkable achievement and a testament to what’s happening in the region’s culinary scene as a whole.
On her menu, Choi highlights the partnerships with local farmers and purveyors. When asked where she sources her mushrooms for the dishes she’s about to create, the answer is undoubtedly: Flowering Sun Ecology Center in Ellenville.
Winds and Wisdom
The farm is just an acre, and every square inch is packed. Today is community harvest day and kids joyfully zip between us, their toes in the soil, hands filled with green beans, squash, and the last of summer peaches.
A young man and one of the owners of Flowering Sun, Daniel Kanda, greets us with a warm drink made from ceremonial cacao, honey, and homemade raw cashew milk and a basket of sweet, jammy figs. After working at meditation centers around the world, Kanda met Alexander “Z” Hackney and Sara Philkill, fellow owners and founders, at the Golden Drum in Brooklyn, an educational program dedicated to serving the community by focusing on sharing Amerikua wisdom, a Mayan word meaning “land of the winds.”
When Hackney and Philkill first stumbled upon this plot of land, it was nothing more than a flat lawn. But after years of turning and amending soil, the lawn has since transformed into an oasis of sustainably grown organic food. They started Flowering Sun as a CSA in 2017 and the following year began selling wholesale greens and vegetables locally and in New York City.
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In 2022, they became a cooperative business with a mission to grow food and create a place where people of all ages can come together to reconnect with the wisdom of the Earth. The business is made up mostly of fellow Golden Drum students, some of whom have purchased neighboring plots of land, like owner Chris Dean, an integral member of the building of the farm whose commute is just across the property’s wooded border. Together, they are committed to preserving sacred traditions and biodiversity to benefit future generations.
From Foraging to Fruiting
After harvest, Hackney and Kanda lead us to a converted barn that houses their mushroom lab. Though they first had shiitake growing on logs outdoors, the lab allows them to produce their organic mushrooms commercially and in a greater volume. Here, they can also control the environment—temperature, airflow, and humidity—for the entire sterilization, inoculation, and incubation process.
Kanda first started as a farm intern five years ago and grew up with parents who came from the Soviet Union, where foraging was a big pastime. As a kid, he spent a lot of time in the woods with mushrooms, fascinated by their shapes and colors.
“I became obsessed with foraging and finding mushrooms,” Kanda says with a laugh, “I love them so much. I wanted to have them all the time and I couldn’t find any in the supermarkets or grocery stores, so the only way was to grow them.”
The growing process begins with a substrate of organic pellets, a mix of hardwood and soy hulls, which provide nutrients for the mycelium to colonize and form. The pellets are placed in a grow block and put in special bags that can withstand high temperatures. They’re sterilized and “cooked” for 18 hours to get rid of bacteria before being moved to a secondary sterilization room where the spawn is added to the substrate for inoculation and the process of fruiting begins.
Spreading the Fungus
After the lab, we move to the grow room, which is now in its third iteration, as Kanda and Hackney have outgrown the first and second. A cosmic space, it houses varieties like lion’s mane, oyster, and coral, all at different stages of growth. Red lights enable fruiting, blue lights provide vegetative growth, and a full spectrum light provides both, which is ideal.
“The mushrooms are all breathing oxygen,” explains Kanda, “and they need a lot of it.”
Mushrooms aren’t plants and don’t perform photosynthesis. Instead, they breathe just like us, and the air they breathe must be clean. They are an essential part of our ecosystem. After breaking down dead plants and animals, they release nutrients, which enable our soil and plant life to continue growing.
Dan nods in the direction of a stunning specimen, blue-gray in hue and nearly iridescent. It’s the blue oyster, known for its mildly sweet flavor, delicate texture, and slightly curved cap that looks like an oyster shell.
Mushroom cultivation is a low-impact and low-resource form of food production compared to other types of agriculture and farming. But culinary mushroom farming is still relatively new and there’s not a ton of information out there about how to do it, Kanda and Hackney say. A lot of the mushroom farming industry at this point is trial and error and to learn they had to visit other farms and comb through private mushroom Facebook groups for information.
When their mushrooms first started growing, Kanda and Hackney had an overabundance, so they packed them up and drove them around the Hudson Valley.
“I’d never sold anything in my life,” Dan recounts, “But people started falling in love with them, and we started figuring it out.”
Eventually, they made their way into Woodstock and stumbled upon Silvia. Choi became one of their first supporters and today, four years later, Flowering Sun’s partnership with Choi is their biggest, longest, and most consistent. To keep up with the volume that her restaurants put out, she purchases over 150 pounds of mushrooms every single week—100 pounds of blue oysters for Silvia, 30 for Goodnight, and 20 to 30 pounds of shiitake as well (in comparison, most of Flowering Sun’s customers are getting 15 pounds per week).
“For a small business like us having that relationship,” remarks Kanda, “it’s life-changing. It allows what you see here to flourish and thrive. When you’re eating local and buying local, it really is such a transformative action that you can take.”
Make Room for Mushrooms
At Silvia, Chef Doris begins by preparing her Local Mushroom and Pasta Rags. First, she makes black garlic, fermented in-house for 10 days until it’s soft and almost caramelized, which is then used to create black garlic oil and whipped black garlic butter with espresso. After braising the farm’s blue oyster mushrooms in the oil with thyme and chili flakes, she sautés them and adds a spoonful of the butter.
“The mushrooms and coffee have a great affinity,” Choi says.
She takes fresh pasta sheets, cut haphazardly like rags, and tosses them with the mushrooms, asparagus, peas, cream, white wine, a pinch of chili flakes, and a little bit of pasta water, all mixed with a generous amount of Parmigiano-Reggiano.
“It’s nothing fancy,” Choi mentions as she plates the dish. “Our food is more rustic, and I like big portions.”
We follow Choi down the street to her second restaurant, Goodnight, where she uses the blue oysters and shiitake for her Local Mushroom and Crispy Egg Noodle dish. She lightly sautés the mushrooms in sunflower oil before mixing them with sugar snap peas and a vegan “barbecue beef sauce,” a housemade brown garlic ginger marinade crafted with tamari, sesame oil, apple, and scallion. She places it all atop the nest of noodles, quickly fried in sunflower oil, and finishes it with Woodstock microgreens and gochugaru, a Korean chili flake.
“I love the comfort of this dish,” she shares. “The crispy noodles against the texture of the mushrooms. It’s reminiscent of the Cantonese-style beef and crispy noodles. But it’s vegan.”
Mushrooms are a great vessel, Choi explains, because they absorb the marinade so well, and also bring umami to the dish. From a nutritional standpoint, they contain essential amino acids and provide nutrients not only found in produce but in meats and grains as well.
The Future of Fungi
Edible mushrooms have been consumed and used as medicine throughout history, and today, as the demand for plant-based food grows, so too does the mushroom market.
“It’s one of the foods of the future,” Kanda says, “able to feed so many people from such a small space, which is something that can be done in countries where they don’t have as much access to food or resources.”
From oyster to lion’s mane, coral to shiitake, the future is fungi, which means that perhaps the most vital partnership we can nurture is the partnership with fungi—this agreement between the farmer and the chef and the mysterious synergy they share.
To highlight this culinary pact, less than two hours from one of the most acclaimed food cities in the world, a humble, hardworking, accomplished chef works in tandem with a co-op run by devoted friends-turned-commercial-mushroom farmers who met at a center for sacred traditions.
“I like the idea that one day we’ll stop saying it,” Choi reflects, “farm-to-table, and instead, that’s just the way it is. It’s the future food.”
What if this multidimensional mycelium that is neither plant nor animal represents rebirth, renewal, and the cyclical nature of transformation, holds within it the power to help save our planet?
This article appears in November 2024.
