Master's story
Tiit Purika
master
I am a senior schoolmaster who likes to be in nature and hike a lot. I started to create my own company in 2019 and at first the plan was catering. In addition to my main job, I educated myself in the field of cooking and was ready to start catering in 2020. Unfortunately, Covid-19 came and catering plans had to be dropped.
It was necessary to find a plan B, which soon turned out to be products made of valuable mushrooms.
I got to this wonderful mushroom a year ago when my father ended up in the hospital. I had heard of chaga before as a wonderful medicinal mushroom and went to see the forest, maybe I find one. I had been walking in the woods for almost three hours, when I finally noticed a black formation on the stem of the birch. It was a great pleasure when it turned out to be a chaga.
After extensive internet surfing, I found many ancestral wisdom and recipes for using this wonderful mushroom to bring out all the power and preserve valuable substances. The first one turned out to be 5 kilos, from which I got wonderful tonics for father and friends. And there was already a demand from there, because friends of friends wanted it too. Since we have grown herbs in the past and my partner has studied to be a herbalist (graduated from Irje Karjus Herbatic School), it seemed to be just the right thing to make valuable medicinal mushroom products. In a year, we have built production facilities in the country house, where our wonderful extract is made. In addition to the extract, we also make chaga powder. As a product development, special flavored chaga teas are also available, combined with valuable herbs.
How do I do that?
The chaga tonic is made in the home kitchen of Tiidu Farm and in specially built production facilities. The whole production is a long chain of processes that begins with a pleasant hike in the forest. A ten-hour forest trip can be a catch of tens of kilos of chaga, or just a forest trip in the fresh nature. Both options are good because hiking has been and continues to be my biggest hobby. So we collect all the raw materials ourselves to make sure that the harvest is still made from live birch and not from dead wood.
After walking in the woods, the mushrooms are cleaned, chopped and then finely crushed. The crumb is then left to stand in water for 24 hours, after which the whole mass is transferred to a large boiler, where it is boiled at 90 degrees for 4-6 hours. After cooking, the whole thing is drainde and honey, cinnamon and ginger are added to improve the taste. The extract is bottled into 0.5 and 0.25 liter bottles, cool and then the tonic is ready to use.