Originally published at: Button, cremini, and portobello mushrooms are all the same mushroom, just at different stages of growth | Boing Boing
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At least they’re not all the same species of mustard plant, like everything else:
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The forgot selection for leaves/tuber=turnips
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Uncle Kale O’Leracea grew up bitter and twisted.
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Similarly, red peppercorns, green peppercorns, white pepper and black pepper are from the same plant at different stages or prepared differently.
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When I see this graphic I think: “Maybe someday they will create a version that people will actually want to eat.”
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Portobello’s wreck my stomach. This made me a sad vegetarian as everyone always wanted to prepare those for me. The cremini’s I think are my favorite.
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those are all the same species? so if you grow them side by side in you garden and collect seeds are you looking at a total crapshoot?
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No, they have a lot of diversity within the species, like domestic dogs. If you grow kohlrabi near cauliflower and collect the seeds you could be in for an interesting hybrid though.
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I only just learned this the other day. Can’t remember what rabbit hole I was exploring at the time, but that info was presented to me 
They’re so cool.
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Please insert the head exploding emoji. Thanks.
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I humbly accept my failure in this matter.
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it’s wild how portobellos are just older creminis, and one doesn’t hurt your stomach but the other days. IT IS OBVIOUSLY MAGIC.
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Magic mushrooms are something entirely different 
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Okay, damn!
I’ve had stomach issues with the standard button mushrooms (gut doesn’t want), and a mushroom grower told me I’d probably be fine with portobellos, ‘because they’re different’. Guess I’m NOT taking any advice from that person!
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There are loads of actually different funghi out there, give some a go, in small quantities.
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All the marketing bullshit around button mushrooms is really something. There used to only be the (brown) Agaricus bisporus button mushrooms, but then in the 1920s, a mutation spawned the white variety that took over in US retail mid-20th century because refined, white foods were all the rage. (Contrary to the article, what I’ve read is that the different colors are not the same mushroom at a different stage - it’s a different colored variety of the same species. Marketing bullshit seems to have caused some confusion though, so it may be true that white buttons darken with age, which would mean brown button mushrooms could be either the different variety or an older stage of the same variety. Given the mushrooms grow with age, I suspect different colored mushrooms of the same size are different varieties, though.)
Fairly recently they started selling the mushrooms that they allowed to grow more under the nonsense name of “portobello” (or “portabello,” or “portabella”) that some marketing genius invented out of thin air, and then reintroduced the (small) brown variety as “cremini” or “baby bellas” for more money. Which I find ridiculous as they’re literally all the same species, and the brown variety was only absent from shelves because marketing reduced demand in the first place.
That’s true of green/white/black peppercorns, but red peppercorns aren’t a real peppercorn, they’re a completely unrelated species, more closely related to the cashew than the peppercorn. (Red “pepercorns” are also totally different from the point of view of allergies.)
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