We asked a mold expert to help us make sense of Sqirl's fungal crisis
Yum? Photo: Getty Images Sqirl is a restaurant in Los Angeles that is best known as a place where beautiful California people and tourists from Brooklyn have brunch. They do sorrel pesto brown rice bowls. They do a lot of different toasts. They do small-batch jam.
The allegations went on: The jam wasn’t cooled properly; it was stored in uncovered buckets in an illegal secret kitchen. “We’re talking about some buckets having like 1/4 inch of mold covering the entire tops,” one anonymous source told Rosenthal. Employees were told to scrape off the layer of mold and use the jam anyway. Like the mold, the story grew. According to Rosenthal’s sources, the mold was coming from the walk-in, which itself was moldy.
So, to help us make sense of this fungal crisis, Grub Street turned to Dr. John Gibbons, an assistant professor of food science at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an expert on beneficial and detrimental molds. Here’s what he had to say.It’s a microscopic fungi. And there are thousands and thousands of species of molds and they kind of make their living by digesting things externally — we digest things in our stomach; they digest things externally.
There’s an organism we study called Aspergillus oryzae. That’s koji. It’s used to make sake and soy sauce. And now there are all these cool experimental chefs that are using it to make koji fried chicken or to age meat faster. It’s really safe. In the ’90s, I think, there was an outbreak of a certain fungal infection at a hospital because there was a mold growing on a potted plant — just a decorative potted plant had some mold growing on it — and that spread throughout the air-conditioning system and traveled to all these people.
But there are foods where you can just cut off the moldy bit, right? You hear that about some cheeses — you just give them a trim and they’re good to go.
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