Martha Stewart's Tastemaker award honors Oakland DIY mushroom growers

Nikhil Arora, left, and Alejandro Velez, from Oakland's Back to the Roots company, were just named one of nine of the country's most innovative and creative entrepreneurs in Martha Stewart's second annual "American Made" awards. They were singled out for their Grow-Your-Own Mushroom kits. ( Back to the Roots )

Martha Stewart's big American Made awards ceremony last week honored Oakland entrepreneurs Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, whose DIY mushroom kits have turned dark French roast into fragrant fungi fodder. Velez -- whose face may be familiar to fans of TV's "The Bachelorette" during Emily Maynard's season -- and Arora launched their company, Back to the Roots, after growing oyster mushrooms in a bucket of coffee grounds in Velez's UC Berkeley frat house. 

The two Cal students waltzed into Chez Panisse one day in 2009, trying to sell their first experimental crop -- and not quite grasping the importance of whose kitchen that was. The next thing they knew, their mushrooms were on the stove, Alice Waters was smiling and they were off and running, with support from Waters, an order from Whole Foods and a UC Berkeley chancellor's grant. These days they work out of an old artist studio in Jack London Square, and the coffee grounds in their grow-your-own-mushroom kits have been augmented with hops from Linden Street Brewery and soy castings from Hodo Soy. Find the kits at Whole Foods and www.backtotheroots.com.

The Back to the Roots duo was one of the nine creative innovators to earn top honors during Stewart's American Made competition, now in its second year. The 2012 honorees included Lena Kwak, who created Cup4Cup, a gluten-free flour, while working for Thomas Keller at The French Laundry, and Flora Grubb of San Francisco's Flora Grubb Gardens. 



Article written by Jackie Burell
Article sourced from San Jose MercuryNews:
http://www.mercurynews.com/food-wine/ci_24341759/martha-stewarts-tastemaker-award-honors-oakland-diy-mushroom?source=rss