Maitake

Grifola frondosa

Japan's “dancing mushroom”: a prized food, and a fixture of immune research since the 1980s.

Overview

Find one maitake and you know where the next one will be.

Maitake grows in great ruffled rosettes at the foot of old oaks: dozens of overlapping grey-brown fronds rising from one branched base, sometimes half a metre wide. English speakers call it hen of the woods, for its likeness to a hen with her feathers fluffed out on the nest. It grows wild in Britain too, though finding one is a rare piece of luck.

The fungus lives in the tree's roots and lower trunk, slowly breaking down the heartwood, and fruits from the same spot year after year. In the kitchen it is rich, savoury and faintly sweet, with a firm, almost meaty bite. In the laboratory it has been a fixture of immune research since Japanese chemists isolated its signature beta-glucans in the 1980s.

In figures

• 20 kg+ for the biggest wild rosettes, heavy enough to need two hands and a strong back.
• 2 weeks the window in which maitake often reappears on the same tree, autumn after autumn. Foragers guard those trees closely.
• 56,000 tonnes grown in Japan every year. By value, only shiitake and buna-shimeji outsell it among the country's cultivated mushrooms.
• 40 years of laboratory and clinical research since Japanese chemists first isolated its signature beta-glucan.

Other names

Maitake is Japanese for “dancing mushroom”, said to capture a forager's joy at the find. Its Latin name, Grifola, comes from an old Italian name for it meaning “griffin”.

• Kumotake — Cloud mushroom (Japan)
• Huī shù huā — Grey tree flower (China)
• Pied de griffon — Griffin's foot (France)

What it's studied for

• Raises the activity of natural killer cells, the immune system's first line against infected cells (Human trial)
• Restored ovulation in women with polycystic ovary syndrome (Human trial)
• Improved cognitive test scores in healthy older adults (Human trial)
• Cut the number of days with fever and a runny nose (Human trial)
• Improves insulin sensitivity and lowers blood sugar (Animal)
• Lowers cholesterol and blood pressure (Animal)

History of use

For most of its history, maitake was a forager's prize, found only in the wild and sold at a high price.

around 1100 · Kyoto

A collection of tales from the late Heian period tells of woodcutters, lost in the hills, who meet Buddhist nuns singing and dancing after a meal of wild mushrooms. The story gave Japan its “dancing mushrooms”. Scholars think the nuns had eaten a hallucinogenic species, and the name has since settled on Grifola frondosa.

Feudal Japan

Every maitake was a wild find. Folklore has it that a good specimen was worth its weight in silver, and families kept the locations of their maitake trees to themselves.

1785 · Scotland

The Scottish botanist James Dickson gave it its first scientific description. In 1821 Samuel Frederick Gray moved it into a new genus, Grifola, where it remains.

1981 · Japan

After a long resistance to cultivation, maitake reached commercial farms in 1981, with 325 tonnes in the first year.

1987 · Kobe

Hiroaki Nanba and colleagues at Kobe Pharmaceutical University published the structure of a large, branched beta-glucan from maitake, the basis of the D-fraction that most clinical work has since used.

2009 · New York

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center published a clinical trial of a maitake extract, measuring its effects on the immune system in people.

2026 · Japan

Two double-blind trials had volunteers eat 50 g of maitake a day, baked into bread, for up to 18 weeks, and tracked their immunity, cold symptoms and memory.

What's inside the mushroom

D-fraction and its relatives

Polysaccharides

Maitake's best-known compounds are its beta-glucans, long chains of sugar that immune cells recognise. Its signature is the D-fraction: a protein-bound beta-glucan with an unusually elaborate structure, its sugar chains linked in two different ways at once, and a molecular weight of around a million daltons.

Size matters here. When researchers heated a maitake beta-glucan until its molecules broke apart, its immune activity faded with them. In mice, the purified MD-fraction taken by mouth is picked up by immune tissue in the wall of the small intestine, which then signals to the rest of the immune system.

SX-fraction and MT-α-glucan

Glycoproteins and alpha-glucans

A beta-glucan count misses some of maitake's most active compounds. The SX-fraction, a glycoprotein, switched insulin signalling back on in muscle cells exposed to high glucose, and it is the extract behind the polycystic ovary syndrome trial. MT-α-glucan, an alpha-glucan from the fruiting body, lowered blood sugar and insulin in diabetic mice.

Glutathione and ergothioneine

Antioxidants

In a Penn State analysis of 13 kinds of mushroom, maitake carried the most glutathione, the body's main antioxidant inside cells, at nearly four times the level in white button mushrooms. It also carries ergothioneine, an antioxidant amino acid that only fungi and some bacteria can make.

Ergosterol and vitamin D

Sterols

Maitake is one of the richest mushroom sources of ergosterol, the fungal sterol that sunlight turns into vitamin D2. Fresh maitake can carry up to 28 µg of vitamin D per 100 g, nearly three times the UK's daily recommendation, and drying it in the sun raises the level further.

3.8× glutathione

The glutathione in maitake, against white button mushrooms, in a Penn State analysis of 13 kinds of mushroom.

Glutathione, relative to white button mushrooms

Maitake	3.8×
White button mushroom	1×

Kalaras et al., Food Chemistry, 2017.

Why hot water

Maitake's prized polysaccharides dissolve in hot water. The D-fraction itself is made that way: the mushroom is boiled and the polysaccharide drawn out of the broth. Heat has a limit, though. Pushed to 150 °C, a maitake beta-glucan broke down into small fragments and lost most of its immune activity.

At the table

Maitake is one of Japan's great culinary mushrooms. Its savoury depth comes from natural glutamate, and its sweetness from trehalose, a sugar it stores in quantity. Slice the dense base, tear the fronds, and roast or fry it hard until the edges crisp.

The research

Maitake has one of the deepest research records of any culinary mushroom: Japanese clinical reports from the 1990s, trials at Memorial Sloan Kettering from 2009, and in 2026 two double-blind trials of whole maitake eaten every day.

Effects of a water-soluble extract of maitake mushroom on circulating glucose/insulin concentrations in KK mice

Manohar et al. · 2002 · Animal

Gave diabetic mice a single dose of a water-soluble maitake fraction.

Blood glucose fell by about a quarter.

Read study

A phase I/II trial of a polysaccharide extract from Grifola frondosa (maitake mushroom) in breast cancer patients: immunological effects

Deng et al., Memorial Sloan Kettering · 2009 · Human, dose-finding

34 women who had completed breast cancer treatment took a maitake polysaccharide extract for three weeks.

Clear changes in immune function, raising some measures and lowering others depending on dose; no serious side effects.

Read study

Maitake mushroom (Grifola frondosa) extract induces ovulation in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome

Chen et al. · 2010 · Human, partly randomised

80 women with polycystic ovary syndrome took a maitake extract, the fertility drug clomiphene, or both.

20 of 26 ovulated on maitake alone, against 29 of 31 on clomiphene, a difference that was not statistically significant. 13 of 15 women who had not responded to one treatment ovulated on the two together.

Read study

Oral administration of soluble β-glucans extracted from Grifola frondosa induces systemic antitumor immune response and decreases immunosuppression in tumor-bearing mice

Masuda et al. · 2013 · Animal

Gave mice the purified MD-fraction by mouth.

Immune tissue in the gut took it up and set off a body-wide immune response.

Read study

Maitake mushroom (Grifola frondosa) enhances cognitive function in healthy older Japanese: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Jogi et al. · 2026 · Human, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled

47 healthy adults over 60 ate bread containing 50 g of maitake a day for 18 weeks.

Better scores on a widely used cognitive test, and higher natural killer cell activity, with one of the two maitake strains tested.

Read study

Maitake mushroom supplementation modulates upper respiratory symptoms and immune responses in healthy adults: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Masuda et al. · 2026 · Human, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled

Younger and older adults ate maitake bread for 11 to 18 weeks.

Fewer days of fever and runny nose with one strain; no difference in how often people caught a respiratory infection.

Read study

The polycystic ovary syndrome trial was open-label and used one specific maitake fraction, and the 2026 bread trials found their effects with one of the two strains tested.

Good to know

Maitake is a common food, and in clinical trials side effects were mild and uncommon. Because it can lower blood sugar, check with your doctor first if you take diabetes medication, and do the same if you take warfarin or another blood thinner. Avoid it if you are pregnant or breastfeeding or have a mushroom allergy, and if you are having cancer treatment, talk to your medical team before taking it.

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The Mushroom Index

• Lion’s Mane
• Reishi
• Cordyceps
• Chaga
• Shiitake
• Maitake

References

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4. Japan Forestry Agency. Mushroom production briefing: maitake 56,763 t (2022); 56,609 t (2024).
5. Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Forestry White Paper FY2023, chapter 2-2-1 (2022 production values).
6. Penn State Extension. Specialty mushrooms: production technology (citing Takama et al. 1981).
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12. Adachi Y, Ohno N, Ohsawa M, Oikawa S, Yadomae T. Change of biological activities of (1→3)-beta-D-glucan from Grifola frondosa upon molecular weight reduction by heat treatment. Chem Pharm Bull 1990;38(2):477–81. DOI
13. Masuda Y, Inoue H, Ohta H, Miyake A, Konishi M, Nanba H. Oral administration of soluble β-glucans extracted from Grifola frondosa induces systemic antitumor immune response and decreases immunosuppression in tumor-bearing mice. Int J Cancer 2013;133(1):108–19. DOI
14. Konno S, Alexander B, Zade J, Choudhury M. Possible hypoglycemic action of SX-fraction targeting insulin signal transduction pathway. Int J Gen Med 2013;6:181–187. DOI
15. Hong L, Xun M, Wutong W. Anti-diabetic effect of an alpha-glucan from fruit body of maitake (Grifola frondosa) on KK-Ay mice. J Pharm Pharmacol 2007;59(4):575–82. DOI
16. Manohar V, Talpur NA, Echard BW, Lieberman S, Preuss HG. Effects of a water-soluble extract of maitake mushroom on circulating glucose/insulin concentrations in KK mice. Diabetes Obes Metab 2002;4(1):43–8. DOI
17. Kubo K, Nanba H. Anti-hyperliposis effect of maitake fruit body (Grifola frondosa). I. Biol Pharm Bull 1997;20(7):781–5. DOI
18. Talpur NA, Echard BW, Fan AY, Jaffari O, Bagchi D, Preuss HG. Antihypertensive and metabolic effects of whole maitake mushroom powder and its fractions in two rat strains. Mol Cell Biochem 2002;237(1–2):129–36. DOI
19. Kalaras MD, Richie JP, Calcagnotto A, Beelman RB. Mushrooms: a rich source of the antioxidants ergothioneine and glutathione. Food Chem 2017;233:429–433. DOI
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21. USDA FoodData Central. Mushrooms, maitake, raw (FDC ID 169403).
22. NHS. Vitamin D: how much you need (10 micrograms a day for adults).
23. Deng G, Lin H, Seidman A et al. A phase I/II trial of a polysaccharide extract from Grifola frondosa (maitake mushroom) in breast cancer patients: immunological effects. J Cancer Res Clin Oncol 2009;135(9):1215–21. DOI
24. Chen JT, Tominaga K, Sato Y, Anzai H, Matsuoka R. Maitake mushroom (Grifola frondosa) extract induces ovulation in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome. J Altern Complement Med 2010;16(12):1295–9. DOI
25. Jogi EM, Kato MC, Masuda Y et al. Maitake mushroom (Grifola frondosa) enhances cognitive function in healthy older Japanese: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. J Nutr Sci Vitaminol 2026;72(2):163–175. DOI
26. Masuda Y, Nakayama Y, Shimizu R et al. Maitake mushroom supplementation modulates upper respiratory symptoms and immune responses in healthy adults: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Food Funct 2026;17(18):8114–8126. DOI
27. Hanselin MR, Vande Griend JP, Linnebur SA. INR elevation with maitake extract in combination with warfarin. Ann Pharmacother 2010;44(1):223–4. DOI