Photo courtesy Flush With Mush
Chip Foote of Flush With Mush
Chip Foote of Flush With Mush holds up a Lion's Mane mushroom
The wonderful world of fungi is brought to the table with Flush with Mush, a Milwaukee business that collects, cultivates and sells various types of mushrooms. Owners Chip Foote and Noelle Perry aim to promote healthy lifestyles and culinary delights with their emporium. They can be found at the West Allis Farmers Market every Tuesday and Thursday, the Riverwest Farmers Market every Sunday, and occasional pop-up events around town.
Chip Foote grew up an outdoorsman and always wanted his livelihood to involve nature. His love of foraging in the woods became the impetus for Flush with Mush. “Right before the pandemic, I started messing around with growing mushrooms,” Foote recalls. “I had a lot of time (laughs) so it just kind of snowballed. Then we had a whole portion of the house dedicated to it.”
“He started growing them in a bucket that we would bring up north back and forth,” Noelle Perry adds. “He was actually the first person to ever take me foraging,”
Vending at Markets, Selling to Restaurants
Photo by Barb Foote
Chip Foote and Noelle Perry of Flush With Mush
Chip Foote and Noelle Perry of Flush With Mush
Foote’s operation eventually expanded to three large growing rooms, and he began sharing a warehouse space with James Zajakowski of Dimension Seven Coffee. Foote and Perry also got state certified as identifiers by the Wisconsin Mycological Society, which allowed them to start vending at markets and selling to restaurants.
“I would say to get a good guidebook, walk around with some experts and never trust apps on your phone,” Perry says about foraging basics. “Always be 110% sure about what you have before cooking and eating it. Any mushroom is safe to touch and even chew and spit, but I wouldn’t recommend that to someone who’s brand new.”
Foote remains in charge of growing the mushrooms while Perry spearheads the marketing and promotion of Flush with Mush. Foote explains the business’ name, “When you grow mushrooms, they all come at once, so you get a “flush” of mushrooms.”
Culinary and Medicinal
The Flush with Mush inventory encompasses both culinary and medicinal mushrooms. “Lion’s mane is one of our most popular,” Perry notes. “That’s a really good beginning mushroom if you’re foraging; it’s delicious and pulls apart like crab meat. It’s also medicinal and has been used in dementia prevention studies.”
Photo courtesy Flush With Mush
Shelf of blue oyster mushrooms at Flush With Mush
Shelf of blue oyster mushrooms at Flush With Mush
They also sell king trumpet, chestnut, shiitake, and several varieties of oyster mushrooms, with foraged mushrooms like morel, chanterelle and chicken of the woods occasionally available as well. Medicinal mushrooms they have include cordyceps, zombie-ant fungus, antler reishi and turkey tail. Flush With Mush does not sell any secondary decomposers like portobellos or psilocybin.
“We’ll sell ramp onions in the spring and grow kits around Christmas time,” Perry mentions about additional products. “We also sell the bags that the mushrooms grow out of; once they’re all done fruiting, those bags are really good for your garden to supplement the soil.”
Everything is grown in a light-controlled, humidity-controlled environment. Foote utilizes hardwood pellets as the base of everything he grows, and he mostly uses liquid cultures on agar plates for the mycelium to fruit.
“I run it all through an atmospheric steam sterilizer, which is essentially like running a long-term pasteurization over 16 to 20 hours around 205 to 210 degrees,” he describes his process. “Then I run grain that I get from a local farm, hydrate it for a day and dry it on a big rack. Then I put everything in an actual pressure sterilizer for about two and a half hours at 250 degrees, put it on the substrate, let it colonize, and then it grows out.”
Restaurants carrying Flush with Mush products include The Original, Tess, Easy Tyger, Pete’s Pub, SAGE and The Milwaukee Club. Foote and Perry are always looking for more to sell to. “We’ve talked about expanding into smaller grocery stores, so that might be something in the future,” Perry contends. “We want to get healthy food to our community. It’s a passion, and it’s fun.”
Foote and Perry offer home delivery if one purchases their products online.
“Cook your mushrooms,” Foote concludes, chuckling. “People always try to eat raw mushrooms and it doesn’t work…you can’t get any of the benefits. Just cook them. A lot of times, if they are going to make you sick, that’ll help.”
Visit the Flush With Mush website at flushwithmushllc.com or follow them on Instagram @flushwithmushllc to get in touch or be added to their email list.
