In cooking, the term mushroom usually refers to cultivated mushrooms.

Almost all the mushrooms you take from the market for use in the kitchen are grown indoors under controlled conditions. The mushroom is a fungus and to keep the strain clean, mushroom growers work hard to keep all other fungi and bacteria out of the grow room.

The first cultivated mushrooms were cultivated by the ancient Greeks and Romans. The commercial cultivation of mushrooms began in France during the reign of King Louis XIV in the seventeenth century. There are over 35,000 species of mushrooms, but only a few hundred of them are commonly cultivated.