Treatise on Trehalose - or - Gano moves to the suburbs

The Ganoderma has moved out of its cramped quarters, to the pristine and expansive landscape of pelletized wood fuel, "Good Mews" kitty litter and hydrogen peroxide. Will it thrive there? I have been hauling it around to the warmest spots - indoors or out - to help it get a grip on life in a jar.

Here are the worried parents.

One of the many neat things about mushrooms is their inventiveness in their day to day needs. Take energy needs, for example. A human would settle for plain old sugar. Dextrose. Sucrose. You know, the stuff you like to eat because your body doesn't have to do a THING with it - it is already broken down and ready to go. Now, a mushroom doesn't store its sugar that way. It has something sneakier in mind, which is to store sugar in a form that it thinks other creatures won't recognize, or want. Well, it has made a mistake there, because this sugar is becoming popular.

It is called trehalose. Kazuhiko Maruta discovered a slick approach to manufacturing trehalose.  Of course, once Cargill caught word, their R&D people went straight to town. And like so many other facets of our American lives, trehalose is now really about C O R N. 

Cargill's slogan ought to be "Trehalose, the sugar you can't buy here in the US!" Trehalose can be bought and used in all sorts of recipes around most of the globe. The resulting food can be imported to the US. You can buy this imported food and eat it in the US. You just can't buy trehalose sugar in your local grocery store, go home and bake a cake with it in the US. On the other hand, if you would like to buy some trehalose, pop a teaspoon of the stuff in your mouth for what ails you, that is perfectly alright. By mail-order as a health supplement, it can be yours for only $10 or more per lb.

Now, some people still like to call trehalose the fungus sugar. And why would you want to eat it anyway? You could also call it the bug sugar, since bugs make it as well as mushrooms. As a sugar, it has some amazing properties. You may decide you want some after you check out Eric Drexler's blog HERE

He forgot one important quality of the stuff. Mess around with trehalose in the kitchen, if you ever get your hands on some. Baked foods sweetened with trehalose don't "brown" in the oven. They just stay the color they were when you put them in, even though they get cooked. I have yet to figure out why I would like to do that to my baked goods, but I know I want to.

OK, lastly, dinner yesterday. Pork grilled with rosemary and garlic, goat cheese turnovers, beets and spinach with a raspberry glacé and walnuts on top. For our anniversary, and enjoyed in the backyard to the sound of one billion cicadas, crickets, and other trehalose-producing bugs. Proprietary recipe, until it wins the Pillsbury bake-off.