Jordan Sauter, of Red Oak Food Company, transfers a totem inoculated with oyster mushrooms to his garden in Jay on Tuesday, March 29. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

JAY — Jordan and Sarah Sauter’s mushroom garden was still asleep on Tuesday, March 29, tucked in soundly by frosty spring temperatures. But soon, their backyard will be teeming with oyster, shiitake and wine cap mushrooms.

Mushrooms aren’t everyone’s thing, and the fact that a fair few members of the fungi family could kill you doesn’t help the mushroom reputation. But Jordan thinks they’re awesome.

“That’s where my heart is, is in mushrooms,” Jordan said.

Jordan and Sarah are the husband-and-wife team behind the Red Oak Food Company, based out of their home in Jay, which sells artisan breads, small-batch miso, and mushrooms.

Jordan spent years as a chef in his native city of Philadelphia. He was always fascinated by the mushrooms he worked with in restaurants, though one in particular sparked his foraging interests: the brightly colored chanterelle. The yellow-orange, funnel-shaped mushrooms are sought after in the culinary world, and, as a result, they’re expensive. Jordan said it was typical to pay around $60 for a pound of the fungi when he placed restaurant orders. He said that when he realized that chanterelles are easy to forage — their apricot scent is a “dead giveaway” — he began to understand how many mushrooms he could find in the forest.

Harry Sauter, 2, kisses inoculated logs in his backyard on Tuesday, March 29. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

“It’s just a rabbit hole,” he said.

Now, he has a mushroom garden in his backyard. It might look like a bunch of logs on the ground in winter, but Jordan said the beds will be filled with mushrooms as the warmer temperatures arrive.

Jordan said he went “full bore” into mushrooms and foraging when he moved to the Adirondacks. At first, his mushroom garden was just a few totems of oyster mushrooms and shiitake logs. Now, there are little white flags all over patches of the Sauter property, denoting different kinds of mushrooms that will one day appear there.

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Moving and mushrooms

Jordan Sauter, left, shows off his inoculation station with his son, Jack. Jordan built the contraption to help him inoculate logs while saving himself from back pain. He places the logs on the station, drills holes all over the log, places spawn into the holes and waxes them shut for inoculation. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

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The Sauters moved to the Adirondacks in 2016. It was monumental, Sarah said. They’d been traveling all over, looking for a place to settle. They visited the Adirondacks because Jordan’s dad got a camp here, and it was love at first sight.

“When we came here, we were standing in a field one day and I was like, ‘This is where we’re gonna move,'” Sarah said.

Two months later, Jordan quit his job as an executive chef in Philadelphia to search for a job here. He stayed in his dad’s off-grid camp during the winter months, and by spring Sarah was loading the kids into the car and making the move, too. They bought their Jay home and, a couple of years later, bought the wooded lot behind it. Sarah said the move represented the family’s transition into how they want to live — right next to nature. Now, their backyard is equal parts playground, mushroom garden and forest.

The Sauters are building trails around the garden, and Jordan uses the trees he cuts down for mushroom totems, inoculated logs and wine cap beds. The trunk of the tree is sliced, filled with colonized sawdust and allowed to produce oyster mushrooms; smaller parts of the tree body are turned into inoculated logs for mushrooms like shiitakes; and they put the smaller branches and debris into a chipper to feed to the wine cap bed. Every part of the downed tree is used, Jordan said, and the return is pretty good.

A bunch of totems inoculated with oyster mushrooms sits in a mushroom garden behind the home of Jordan and Sarah Sauter in Jay on March 29. Some oyster mushrooms from last fall can be still seen in between the totems' layers. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

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The pandemic

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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and many restaurants and other small businesses closed, Jordan found himself without work. That’s when Red Oak, and Jordan intensified mushroom operation, was born.

People who want to forage and sell mushrooms have to take a class and get certified, but the class was on summer weekends — in South Carolina. Before the pandemic, a chef wouldn’t have had that kind of availability. But after the pandemic started and the class went virtual, Sarah said she signed Jordan up right away. Now, he can sell a whole list of mushrooms in around 14 states. The Sauters sell their mushrooms to local restaurants like Top of the Park in Lake Placid, Fiddlehead in Saranac Lake and the Ice Jam Inn and Restaurant in Upper Jay.

“I always really enjoyed being given mushrooms as a chef, now I get to give it back,” Jordan said.

Right now, Sarah said Red Oak is still young — their family of six. There’s a lot going on, and a lot to learn. At first the Sauters made heat-and-eat meals for people when pandemic shutdowns left some without accessible food. But Red Oak is ever-changing. Now, the business makes mostly what Jordan calls a “three-headed monster.” That’s bread, miso and mushrooms.

The Sauters also sell other foraged edibles, such as ramps and fiddleheads, and last year they sold inoculated shiitake logs and bags woods chips colonized by wine caps for people to place in their gardens. People were really interested. Mushrooms live in synchronicity with the culture of a garden, and many of them have well-known medicinal properties.

When it comes to foraging, Jordan said sustainability is key. One good example is for ramps, or wild leeks. They’re popular wild edibles, but they can also be easily depleted by over-foraging.

“You have to be a steward of the land,” Jordan said. “People will go in with a shovel and clear the patch out, and they don’t come back. And that sucks.”

There are ways to sustainably forage, though. Jordan cuts wild leeks as close to the ground as he can, leaving the bulb underground, and leaving much of the patch intact. Jordan’s careful step in the woods carries over to his own backyard; he once found a rare umbrella polypore mushroom there and placed a cage over it; he said he wanted the mushroom to reach its full potential before plucking it for food.

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All in the family

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The Sauters’ kids are involved in the foraging process, too. Their oldest son, Jack, has been going into the woods with Jordan since he was 7. He can identify several mushrooms now, at 11, sometimes spotting fungi his dad has overlooked; Jack once spotted a large Lion’s Mane from the passenger seat of his dad’s car and asked him to turn around.

Their youngest, Harry, is already showing a love of foraging fungi, too. Sarah said that, at 2, he already knows how to identify wine caps and pick them. Walking among a row of inoculated logs and totems on March 29, he bent over to kiss a totem. He rose with a look of displeasure on his face, but not because he’d just kissed mycelium — because there was a bit of ice on the top.

“I won’t kiss it anymore,” he said.

Jordan said mushrooms are almost ancestral for him. His grandmother was Polish, and her maiden name was Borowik, which translates to “porcini mushroom” in English. Jordan once found a giant patch of porcini mushrooms, a story that still brings a sparkle to his eye.

“So it’s just in my blood and I can’t escape it,” he said.

People can buy Red Oak products at local retailers like Green Goddess Natural Market in Lake Placid; Cedar Run Bakery in Keene; and Sugar House Creamery in Upper Jay. People can learn more about Red Oak at redoakfoodcompany.com.