I actually have successfully grown mushrooms with the Uncle Bens method, several times before I moved to using grain jars in a pressure cooker. The problem people have with it is that it’s portrayed as a foolproof beginner technique that’s impossible to screw up, and then when people don’t take their sterile technique seriously and get contaminated bags, they get discouraged from the hobby when really they should’ve just done a little more research beforehand.

The idea behind using Uncle Bens bags, or microwaveable bags of rice in general, is that the rice inside is pre-sterilized, meaning it’s free from contaminants and ideal for making mushroom substrate. You can still sterilize your own substrate, other people in this thread have mentioned PF cakes, which are made from brown rice flower, vermiculite, and water, and can be sterilized using steam and a pan on your stove. Another method is using a pressure cooker, which is what I currently use. The process is pretty much identical to using a pressure cooker to can food in jars, fill your jars with grain, bring your pressure cooker to sterilization temperature and keep it there long enough until your substrate is sterile.

Following whatever substrate preparation method you choose to use, you need to inoculate it with your spores. You can purchase them online in the US, except for CA, ID and GA no problem. This is where people’s problem with uncle bens comes in. Inoculation is usually the most contaminant prone part of the entire process, and compared to other methods uncle bens can be more troublesome if you’re not prepared for it. Cutting open the bag and taping it back up after you inoculate takes longer and is dirtier than just opening up a jar and dropping in some spore solution, or whatever else your method is (look into agar if you really want to get into things).

In my experience, Uncle Bens can be perfectly as viable as any other substrate preparation method. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to grow mushrooms. You can have better success rates with other methods, but if not having to sterilize your own substrate appeals to you because it’s cheaper and less time intensive, more power to you. You’ll still grow mushrooms if you get the fundamentals right. Where people compromise is with their sterile technique, and that’s what makes grows fail. I’ve seen pictures of mushrooms growing on books, cardboard, old towels, whatever on Shroomery, at the end of the day it’s still a fungus and it will try to eat pretty much anything. If you’re careful about contaminants, clean your workspace well enough, and use a Still Air Box, you’ll get mycelium in about a good six weeks if you’re patient. There are a few methods of producing mushrooms from said mycelium, such as using a fruiting chamber or spawning to bulk. A fruiting chamber can be faster, you’re just sticking the cake in a clean enough semi-closed air environment to introduce fruiting conditions and you have mushrooms pretty soon. The problem is that the yield is relatively low, you could get more mushrooms out of the same amount of nutritional substance if it had a greater surface area. To spawn to bulk, you mix your rice-mycelium with something like coco coir, which you generally let colonize a bit before fruiting. Compared to a fruiting chamber, greater yield because of the surface area, but a longer time because of the extra colonization. Personally, I spawn to bulk, but I would encourage finding the best method for you in each step of the process. This can change as you learn too, don’t feel bad if you get a few contaminants here and there, it’s all part of the process to having a cleaner process. Or you can just wing it and still most likely get mushrooms, just be mindful of the trade offs you’re taking and don’t be mad if you lose a good bit of substrate along the way to contaminants.

If you want to read more, there are a ton of great resources on the internet, you just need to know where to look, I just tried to lay out a general overview of the whole process here. The Uncle Bens subreddit is a great place to start, the guide I linked to has a great comprehensive write up of the whole process. The Shroomery.org forums have a ton of great knowledge resources, the link I posted is an aggregate of beginner resources, but there are literally twenty plus years of old forum posts for nearly any question you could think of, plus a still active community of mushroom growers. But like I said, there are a bunch of good websites out there, it’s always good to learn more.

If you’re on the fence about growing mushrooms, if you want some guy on the internet’s advice I’d say go for it. In my own anecdotal experience, psilocybin has done more for my mental health than antidepressants ever have. Psychedelics are a tool like anything else, for just allowing us to sit down and think. In my own opinion, visuals can be fun but are secondary to the overall idea of using psychedelics for their medicinal value, to allow us to better understand how we think about and understand ourselves, which is integral to the experience of bettering ones self and becoming a better person, and by extension working towards the goals of a communist society. The trick is learning how to use that tool effectively, and making it widely accepted by society at large, which is a tall ask. Anyway sorry for the wall, fell free to reach out to me with any questions and I’d be more than happy to answer everything I can.