Best eats of 2024: Best ingredient – lion’s mane mushrooms

Braised, stir-fried, deep-fried and coated with sweet and sour sauce, served with pasta, made into rendang – lion’s mane mushrooms, which look like snow-white pom-poms, have been appearing on restaurant menus.

An online search for information on the fungi will throw up lists of health benefits. But the most compelling reasons to eat them are these: Their dense texture is satisfying to bite into; their mild flavour makes them adaptable to dishes from every cuisine; and they are grown in Singapore, so the farm-to-table journey is very short.

Before home cooks could get a hold of fresh lion’s mane mushrooms, they had to contend with the dried version. Those needed painstaking processing – repeated soaking, combing the fuzz for unwanted critters. That put me off cooking with them.

Now that I can buy trays of fresh lion’s mane, I have made many satisfying meals with them in 2024. These include sauteing them with butter and shoyu to eat with rice, searing them in a pan with garlic butter as a topping for risotto, roasting with other Singapore-grown mushrooms to make mushroom adobo, and cooking them with rendang sauce out of a packet that I pep up with bruised stalks of lemongrass and torn-up makrut lime leaves.

There are several ways to buy these mushrooms. Local purveyor Mushroom Buddies (

mushroom-buddies.com

), which provides gainful employment for people with special needs, grows the fungi in refrigerated containers and sells them online at mushroom-buddies.com at $9.90 for a 150g pack.

Another local fungi farm, Bewilder (

bewildersg.com

), sells lion’s mane mushroom grow kits at $37 each, for people who want to try growing them at home.

People can also sign up for mushroom boxes on its website. Prices start at $160 for two boxes, delivered a fortnight apart. Each box comes with about 2kg of assorted mushrooms that the farm in Bukit Merah grows.