bloodssonnew said:

Pan mutation or contamination fungi? Looks cool tho

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ghiajake said:

So I got to thinking about the best way I can pasteurize substrates without having to buy anything. Then it hit me, I have this bad boy available to me at work! My boss is a dead-head, and constantly asks me if I have anything, so tomorrow at work I'll ask if I can use their Rational iCombi Pro combi-oven to run a test batch. We use it to cook creme brulees, cheesecakes, steamed green beans, and a few other things. I've used it this garden season to steam blanch green beans from my garden so I could freeze them. I plan on running the test batch on the 100% steam mode, at 160F, for 4 hours overnight. If the boss will let me that is...

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I got permission from the big boss and the kitchen boss, so it's on like Donkey Kong!

Bungmurphy said:

@fahtster: Trying to go back through these threads and see your misting schedule for these pan ziploc bags, but it seems you just set and forget? Sometimes water after first flush?

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I always add water after a flush. I’ll just flood the clean surface and let that soak in and rinse and repeat until it doesn’t seem like it’s absorbing anymore.

I have set and forget for most of the time I’ve been growing the bags but recently noticed when it rained for a few days straight that all my trays perked up and realized I haven’t been paying attention to ambient room rh all summer when it’s been hot and dry for months and probably why I haven’t had the best summer for ziplocks.  So, I went ahead and bought a small ultrasonic and run it for an hour and then an hour off and that keeps the rh between 60-70% and I’ve seen a marked improvement in all my trays both tub and ziplocks

Huasteca 2nd flush (tub tray)

maensel said:

had the same.. unclean agar --> unclean spawn the main culprit. very hard to spot contamination with pans on agar

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It definitely is.. especially this kind of bacterial contamination.


That is a potato dextrose gellan gum plate.  It has a very very slight tint and cloudiness due to the potato flakes used (using milkboys French press method to get the potato portion of the broth doesn’t fully filter out the minuscule bits), but is otherwise clear.  There’s a yellow biofilm under the myc radiating out from the center of the colony that’s almost the entire colony except for the very leading edge.

If this were an MEA agar plate, I wouldn’t be able to see that yellowing as it’s the same color as an MEA agar plate.  The only indicator would be that the myc is laying down on top of the biofilm and not entirely aerial from center to edge

Compare that plate pic with these, which I believe to be clean


No discoloration.. the whole plate is aerial myc

With that first pic, even doing aerial myc pulls from the very very leading edge, more often ends up with a plate that’ll be just as infected as the first.  The best way I’ve found to clean up cultures like that is strength in numbers by taking 4-5 aerials from different parts of the edge.  There’s a good chance that one of those plates will have a portion of leading edge that has outgrown the biofilm by a decent amount and that edge can be put through a cabin which is what I did with that culture


Looking for sections that have all aerial myc from center to edge and no discoloration and taking aerials from that section and/or putting the edge through another cabin until I’m satisfied it’s clean enough to put to grain


Then there’s the completely invisible problem where the only indicator is myc stops growing there


I’ll take aerials from the sections that seem to be growing fine and see if the problem persists to the next plate

Gellan gum has been a big advantage over agar.  Just being able to see exactly what’s going on under the colony, saves a lot of head/heart ache (through loss of time and materials) by knowing what not to send to grain.

You can also pour the gellan plates at a lower temp so condensation isn’t an issue at all. I may do a write up on gellan gum plates because, while there’s a lot of recipes for gellan gum, there’s not a ton of pictorials or vids on the process of making them.  There’s a certain process that needs to happen and took me a bunch of trials to get it right

Obligatory fruit pic.  3rd flush bvi