Mycelium Leather

The dutch company Ecovative grows Reishi mycelium into the air, separates it from the substrate and compresses it to make leather. I try to recreate this procedure.

My own experiments

First test in a monotub

First I made grain spawn out of bird seeds. Then I sterilized a box with rubbing alcohol, lined the bottom with a clean plastic film and spread sterilized substrate made of 0.75l hardwood pellets, 0.2l wheat bran and 0.75l water onto the film. I distributed some grain spawn on top of it, closed the box and waited.

After one day, the mycelium already comes out of the grain spawn.

The mycelium has almost colonized the whole surface, but probably got crushed by water droplets

The mycelium colonized the surface and grew about 1.5 cm thick as in the pictures. After four days I sprayed water on it to keep it humid, but the droplets crushed the fluffy mycelium and it stopped growing.

My first try to do mycelium leather

I let it dry and peeled it off the substrate. It was fused with the chunks of grain spawn, so I didn't get one big tissue but many small pieces, the biggest one shown in the picture. Depending on how much it was crushed it feels like paper (but more fragile) or like a very soft, light and flexible tissue. It is very thin and rips apart easily.

Experimenting with substrates in petri dishes

I filled petri dishes with Agar, malt extract, maizena, yeast extract and gypsum according to the following table.

Nutrient tests on petri dishes

Ingredient	Substrate	Malt	Maizena	Yeast	Gypsum
1	Agar
2	Agar	0.5 g
3	Agar			0.05 g
4	Agar	0.5 g		0.05 g
5	Agar	0.5 g		0.05 g	0.025g
6	Agar		0.5 g
7	Agar		0.5 g	0.05 g
8	Agar		0.5 g		0.025g
9
10	Pellets & Bran
11	Pellets & Bran		0.5 g
12	Pellets & Bran			0.05 g
13	Pellets & Bran				0.025g

To accurately measure those values I dissolved the nutrients in water solutions and used a pipetter. However gypsum is not soluble so the quantities may be inaccurate, and Maizena clumped together, so I put clumps of it into the petri dishes.