This has been bugging me through the entire thread here. It could be that american chefs have managed to change the spelling we use to shittake, but the Japanese word is definatly shiitake, which is pronounced quite differently from shittake, now depending upon the way you want to romanize the word, shitake could be acceptable. I'm not personally familiar with all of the different romanization systems, but most of them romanize the japanese "‚µ‚¢‚½‚¯" as shiitake. As I said, I come at this as someone with a very basic understanding of the Japanese language, not as a chef. I'll stop rambiling now. -Ted