Sqirl is a restaurant in Los Angeles that is better known as a place where the beautiful people of California and the tourists of Brooklyn have lunch. Bowls of pesto brown rice are sorrel. They make a lot of different toasts. They make small batch jam.
Before opening Sqirl, in fact, chef and owner Jessica Koslow spent a year as a jam, selling small-batch preserves at farmers markets. Now, there is a subscription to Sqirl jam. Very soon, there will be a Sqirl jam cookbook. By all accounts, it is very tasty jam.
There’s only one problem with Sqirl jam: This weekend, self-described scientist and “food antagonist” Joe Rosenthal posted a deep Instagram story (“The Fungal”) in which “two former Sqirl LA employees are saying that the homemade jam would regularly mold. “
The accusations continued: the jam did not cool properly; it was stored in uncovered cubes in an illegal secret kitchen. “We are talking about some cubes that have like 1/4 inch of mold covering the entire top,” an unnamed source told Rosenthal. Employees were told to scrape off the mold layer and use the jam anyway. Like the mold, the story grew. According to Rosenthal’s sources, the mold came from the walk-in, which itself was moldy. The unsealed jam was just an opportunity, a cozy breeding ground for spores.
(Employees also contacted Rosenthal to allege other forms of toxicity within the Sqirl kitchen: failing to get proper credit for his work, hiding from health inspectors, etc.)
Sqirl denies all this, more or less. In Sqirl’s Instagram rebuttal (“Jam”), Koslow explains that mold only forms because the restaurant’s preserves contain too little added sugar. All molds that develop, he wrote, are “the same types of molds that develop in some cheeses, deli meats, dried beef and many other preserved foods,” and were properly managed “with the guidance of mentors and conservation experts. ” including a mycologist named Dr. Patrick Hickey. (The Washington SendHowever, he reports that Hickey “does not recall meeting or speaking to” Koslow).
Either way, it looks gross. For reference, here is a photo an employee sent Rosenthal of the moldy jam, which he may or may not examine at will. But is it? The famous Noma in Copenhagen offered their guests tart cakes for a time. Foods like salumi tend to mold, even on purpose!
So, to help us make sense of this fungal crisis, Grub Street turned to Dr. John Gibbons, an assistant professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an expert on beneficial and harmful molds. This is what he had to say.
I realized I don’t know what mold is. What is mold?
It is a microscopic fungus. And there are thousands and thousands of mold species and they make a living by digesting things externally: we digest things in our stomach; they digest things externally. So they produce all these digestive enzymes that break down proteins, sugars and fats, export them out of the cell, those enzymes break down food, and then mold absorbs all the nutrients once they’re in good shape so they can metabolize
They really are having a picnic in that jam bucket.
But the problem with that lifestyle is that molds don’t exist in a vacuum. In the natural environment, all of these competitors exist: bacteria, other fungi, and other microscopic organisms in the soil. And so they have developed this arsenal of metabolites called mycotoxins. And its entire function is to keep bacteria and other fungi away from the food source. Unfortunately, many of these mycotoxins can also make humans sick. That’s really the big problem with mold growing on food – there could be these really harmful toxic chemicals.
But some molds are good, right? We like some molds, whatever the mold aged steak, for example. The mold in blue cheese. What differentiates good mold from toxic mold?
That’s the scary part, because some of them are so closely related that you really can’t tell them apart without looking at their genetics.
There is an organism that we study called Aspergillus oryzae. That is koji. It is used to make sake and soy sauce. And now there are all these cool experimental chefs who are using it to make koji fried chicken or to age meat faster. It’s really safe
But its closest related species is called Aspergillus flavus. We believe that in the same way that dogs were tamed by wolves, Aspergillus oryzae was tamed of Aspergillus flavus, so they look almost identical at the genome level. But Aspergillus flavus produces many of these toxic chemicals. If you looked at them, you may not be able to tell them apart, even if you’ve studied them for years.
How do people who make soy sauce know what they get?
Thought is, oryzae It is like a startup culture. If you do things safely in a food production facility and everything is processed correctly, and you’re getting your koji from a good supplier, there shouldn’t be a problem because you can hardly find it in nature. The wild is the producer of toxins.
So when the mold it is desirable, what is he doing? What is your contribution?
Most of the time we use them, we use them to digest some of the food, be it a protein, a fat or a carbohydrate. The way you make sake, which is rice wine: you have the cooked rice and add the koji spores to it. When mold is growing, it produces this carbohydrate metabolizing enzyme called alpha-amylase that breaks down all starches, and rice is mainly starch, into sugars. Then the yeast eats the sugar, which produces alcohol.
And when it’s not on purpose, how does mold in food end up?
Mold spores are incredibly floating. They are incredibly light in most species. There is an estimate that we inhale from 50 to 100 Aspergillus spores per day, just walking, are everywhere. And they just wait until conditions are right to start growing.
So you can imagine that when the spores reach a jelly or a jam that is not well stored, they are really happy. You’re in a warm condition, where most molds grow best, and then you have this excellent high-energy, high-sugar substrate to grow.
Were they lurking in midair, waiting for this moment?
Probably yes. Exactly. Most spores can pass the time for years before they lose their potency. It is a waiting game.
In the 90s, I think, there was an outbreak of a certain fungal infection in a hospital because there was mold growing on a potted plant, only a decorative potted plant had some mold growing and that spread through the air. conditioning system and traveled to all these people.
From what I’ve read, it seems like that’s what happened in Sqirl: the spores entered a cooling system and then exploded everywhere.
I think that may be quite common. And it only takes one spore landing in the right place.
Well then, are there different types of mold that grow on different types of food? Like bread it is prone to one type of mold, but cheese is prone to another type of mold.
There are definitely certain foods that are more contaminated by certain species. When there is mold on bread or citrus, it is most likely some species of Penicillium mold. With corn, it is often Aspergillus flavus. So there is a bias in terms of what grows into what.
Given all that: What’s going on with this jam?
If we had a sample of it, we could identify it really quickly by looking at its genetics. I’ve seen that kind of mold before, it grows in this really thick layer, but I’m really bad at the mushroom taxonomy.
And the food underneath is safe if you just … scratch it?
That was a little worrisome to me. I don’t think I’ll ever scratch the jam mold. They grow in this vegetative state; they look like roots or branches. They are called hyphae. And sometimes those are microscopic. The entire network is called mycelium. You can’t see it, but those hyphae might still be producing toxins. So if you scrape off the top layer, that’s removing a lot of those things, but the fungus could still be present lower than that. Even by scraping off the top layer, toxins can penetrate through the jam. And some mycotoxins can maintain boiling temperatures. Boiling would kill the body, to be sure, but not the toxins.
But there are foods where you can cut mold, right? You hear that about some cheeses: you just give them a cut and they are ready.
Yes, they say that with hard cheeses for some reason. And to be honest, I’m not sure why. But they say that if you cut about an inch around the perimeter of a moldy piece of cheese, it’s usually fine. The USDA has a complete list of foods and what to do if you find mold in them. For jellies and jams, they just say to discard them.
You are a mold scientist. When you open the fridge and something is a little blurry, what do you do?
Because I study these things and have seen some of the really bad effects of different toxins, I really don’t risk it. That said, mushroom fermented foods are some of my favorite foods, I just don’t trust them to happen spontaneously.
