“Pholiota nameko”, one of edible mushrooms, are valuably produced by industrially artificial cultivations in numerous places in Japan. However, the price of those products has been gradually reduced owing to mainly overproduction, and the producers of P. nameko have being hard to keep their cultivating firms nowadays. To break through these issues, we attempted to establish newly expansive methodologies for valuable products with a preservation of currently efficient cultivations. We aimed quantitative visualizations for detailed tastes of P. nameko and screened superior strains harboring fine flavors.
At first, preliminary quantifications of several tastes in P. nameko in order to visualize contained useful flavors by the taste recognition device (Intelligent Sensor Technology, Inc.) were resulted in the findings, that “umami” (namely, fifth category of taste in food), “richness umami” (a kind of “umami”) and “zatsumi” (unfavorable taste in food) were effective to the whole tastes in P. nameko. Secondly, the analyses of the corrected fruiting bodies of P. nameko grown wildly in nature, which are commonly preferable for almost people, were found to contain lots of “umami” and “richness umami” with few “zatsumi” using by the taste recognition device. Finally, we compared the whole tastes between artificially cultured strains and wildly corrected strains. As a result, it was succeeded in the identification of five useful strains harboring lots of “umami” and few “zatsumi”.
In conclusion, to deliver good brewed mushrooms including P. nameko to all of consuming public, three terms of strains, productive methods and storage technologies are essentially required. Our results shown in this study contribute for screening and development of efficient strains of culturable P. nameko, using by the apparatus of taste recognition device.
Acknowledgement: This work was partly supported by a grant of the Grant-Aid for Scientific Research (No. 21K05721) given by Ministry of education, culture, sprots, science and technology in Japan.