Can you grow porcini yourself?
No. Porcini or penny bun (Boletus edulis) is a mycorrhizal fungus: it lives together with the roots of living trees and produces no mushrooms without such a host tree. A bag of substrate, a block or a log does not replace that relationship.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew · BS-56Mycological Society of Japan / PMC · BS-52Researchers can create the root symbiosis in the lab, but a reliable growing method that yields mushrooms does not exist. That work takes years, host saplings and lab techniques.
Mycological Society of Japan / PMC · BS-52What is mycorrhiza?
In mycorrhiza, tree and fungus exchange food: the tree provides sugars, the fungus supplies water and nutrients.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew · BS-56What does research say?
A recent review lists porcini among the species harvested in forests or tree plantations. There is no reliable growing method that yields mushrooms. Whether lab studies ever produced mushrooms in pot culture, we have not checked.
Mycological Society of Japan / PMC · BS-52Beware of 'spores' or 'spawn' for sale
If you buy porcini spores or spawn online and expect a harvest in a bag or in your garden, there is no source for that. We found none.
Mycological Society of Japan / PMC · BS-52What can you grow instead?
If you are looking for a firm, meaty mushroom, look at king oyster mushroom, shiitake or pioppino. That choice is about texture; we have no source on similarity in taste.
Source
- Cultivation studies of edible ectomycorrhizal mushrooms (Yamada 2022, Mycoscience) — Mycological Society of Japan / PMC
- Mycorrhizal ecology — Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
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