This is somewhat confusing even for me to think about, so I'll try to explain as thourougly as possible. Supposedly cold shocking a cake produces more pins, and of course dunking makes the mushrooms grow larger...but if the cold shocking is not done, would the cake simply produce,say, 5 VERY large mushrooms on each flush instead of 10-15 large mushrooms... in turn having more flushes because it takes the cake longer to "run out of gas" since fewer mushrooms are growing on each flush? I guess the overall question is: does a cake, whether cold shocked or not, produce the same gross weight of mushrooms in any condition before it is exhausted?
If any of that is confusing just tell me and I'll make it more clear.
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well first off cold shocking doesn't produce more pins, it just (supposedly) helps trigger pins to start. cold shocking is needed for certain species of mushrooms, but its usefulness is kind of questionable with cubensis in the first place. dropping from incubating temp to room temp is plenty of temp change to signal the mycelium that its time to pin. think of growth out in the "real world" - when colonizing a big pile of cow shit, the internal temp is warm... its a closed up environment, the myc produce a bit of heat, and bacteria in the poo produces heat as well. when the myc reaches the surface, the air is going to be a little cooler, thus being one of the triggers for pinning. fresh air and light are two others we know, and this also happens when the myc reaches the surface out in the wild. that's why we replicate these conditions artificially.
ok though to address the real question... a cake has a finite amount of resources. there's a thing called bioefficiency. its a ratio of how much nutrients go in to how much growth comes out. i've heard lots of different figures and don't know what it is for a cake, but the actual number is irrelevant... just understand that concept. dry weight will never exceed the dry weight of the nutrients you started with, that's simply impossible.
so there is always a maximum that can be produced from the finite amount of resources. by providing optimal conditions at every stage, you're trying to get as realistically close to that maximum as possible. so yes, it evens out. if you get a couple of really big mushrooms, its usually roughly equal to what a bunch of smaller ones would have weighed in the end. if kept optimal all throughout, you'll get the most you can given the nutrients there. size and quantity of the mushrooms vary but it will roughly level out the weight on a whole.
unfortunately there's not a lot of things you can tweak successfully to purposely induce few bigger mushrooms, or many smaller ones... mother nature has her say in it first and foremost, and its all related to all sorts of minute variances all throughout the process. cold shocking either way isn't going to effect much in the end. at best, if we make the assumption that it is actually beneficial to cubes, it speeds the transition from vegetative mycelium growth to fruiting mode. where your pins end up and in what quantities depends way more on the surface of where you're growing... a good case will get a best pinset. on a cake, its the luck of the draw... they'll sprout up where the conditions and surface texture are best for them to do so and that's something that can't be controlled a whole lot on a cake. (rolling in verm helps even it out though, ever notice cakes not covered in verm seem to pin from the bottom where the original verm layer was in the jar?)
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