Travel Secrets Nov-Dec 2015 | Page 54

#343 #344 The Art of Offbeat Travel Best Mushrooms in India “Whenever I travel to a major city, I never spend the night there. I find a suburb or a small village nearby and stay there to understand the culture and food in a better way by connecting with the locals. If I am visiting Frankfurt in Germany, for exampIe, I’ll stay put in Mainz or Wiesbaden instead, which are beautiful towns just half an hour away from Frankfurt.” Team TS adds: Mainz is located at the confluence of the Rhine and Main Rivers. Strolling along the Rhine and sampling local wines India is the biggest cultivator of mushrooms, whether it is shiitake, oyster or porcini and Himachal Pradesh is the best place to source them. Mushroom cultivation in India was initiated for the first time at Solan in the mid-sixties. Its popularity is growing and mushroom cultivation has been taken up by Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan etc. while earlier it was confined to J&K, Himachal Pradesh and other hilly areas. The mushroom industry is still largely export-based. From Masterchef Manjit Singh Gill of ITC Hotels in a half-timbered Altstadt tavern are as much a part of any Mainz visit as viewing the fabulous Dom, Chagall’s ethereal windows in StStephan-Kirche, or the first printed Bible in the bibliophile paradise of the Gutenberg Museum. Wiesbaden lies at the eastern edge of the Rheingau wine-growing region, which stretches along the right (northern) bank of the Rhine, west of the Rüdesheim area of the Romantic Rhine and is lined with magnificent neoclassical buildings that were rebuilt after WWII. 54  Travel Secrets November-December 2015 From Piyush Jain, Corporate Chef, Mia Bella, New Delhi Most of the produce from big commercial farms is canned in brine and exported to destinations outside India, especially USA and the quality of the mushrooms exported is excellent. The mushrooms are in raw form and exported cheaply. They are processed and packaged in USA and Japan and sold back to India at much higher prices. That is why I suggest we stop importing mushrooms from the international market and source them from India instead.