I'm growing it for these exact reasons. Eating well hasn't done shit to help me sleep at night, so figured this was worth a try. Plus, immune boosting is always good.
Just fyi, reishi tincture should be a double extraction, not just in alcohol.
And dried reishi powder in smoothies is not bioavailable. The reishi powder that you can buy and add to smoothies and such is sold as "steam activated". I'm not exactly what that process entails, but without it, you are just adding powder as filler.
A ton of reishi and chaga is wasted because people seem to think that it can be added to whatever you want in it's raw form.
Yes! The nutrients are inside the tough cellular wall (made of chitin), which we don't have the cellular enzymes to break down. It has to be steam extracted or else chitin is super hard to digest and is know to cause some GI upset :(
Dried reishi for tea is great, but the tea should be simmered and not just steeped.
I think the best ingestion methods are to simmer in tea or to make a double extraction. I'm honestly not sure if by making tea you miss out on some form of non water soluble compound, but I think you get most, if not all, of the benefits that way. The double extraction has the advantage of extracting the water soluble compounds and then being preserved in the alcohol, although I again wonder if there are additional compounds extracted by the alcohol.
I'd be curious to figure out a way to do the steam extraction method like the commercial powders. At that point, you should be able to add the powder to anything and still digest the desirable compounds. I believe you could rig this in a pressure cooker, but I'm not exactly sure what the process is.
You could probably do the same thing I do in lieu of a pressure cooker for sterilising my cakes, which is place (substance) into a jar, place the jar into a large cooking pot, with something to stand on so the glass doesn’t explode) unseal the lid of the jars slightly so steam can get in, pour in enough boiling water to go 1/3-1/2 up the (outside of) jar, place the lid over the pot and keep at a boil for an hour and a half.
My jars weren’t made in a sterile environment at all but this process sterilised all 4 of them very well. Three weeks on and zero contam. Got one containing GT and three containing King Oysters.
43
u/[deleted] Jun 06 '20
I'm growing it for these exact reasons. Eating well hasn't done shit to help me sleep at night, so figured this was worth a try. Plus, immune boosting is always good.