I attended a Fungus Fair recently and got interested in finding my own mushrooms. Today I went for a hike and found these golden chanterelles. I called a local restaurant to ask if they would be interested in buying some. They jumped at it and gave me $50 for the ones pictured here. I think I just found a way to supplement my income!
Where are you? Can I come?
Cool! You’ve got me wondering if they exist around here.
Ha ha, all I’ll tell you is I’m in northern California.
I love chanterelles. When I was young, I went out every fall with my Mother to collect buckets and buckets of them. This was before they become “gourment” here in the states.
As an adult, I’d go out with my mother, but by God, it’s hard work looking for them now. Everybody wants them, and for awhile, the commercial pickers completely ravaged the microfields because they were raking them out, instead of cutting them individually with knives.
I haven’t gone hunting for them in the last couple of years. I’d like to go again, because paying ten to fifteen dollars for a pound of sad, tiny, dried out little specimens in the grocery store is definitely painful.
Alas!
I’m almost in Canada, so two states away! I’m pretty sure there are chanterelles up here, but I’ve no idea how to find them. There’s a restaurant on the scenic Chuckanut Rd that is known for its chanterelle dish. I’ve been meaning to get there for almost a year.
**Johnny, **I will tell you this. Yes, they grow up here in Washington. However, they grow in old-growth forest areas. Additionally, there is a very poisonous mushroom that looks just like a chanterelle. That mushroom can and has killed people.
The only differences between the poisonous and chanterelle mushrooms are this: the poisonous one feels almost slimy and the stem is hollow. The chanterelle will not feel slimy, perhaps slightly tacky due to moisture, and the stem is not hollow.
Unless you really know what you’re looking for, you should not attempt to pick these unless an experienced picker is with you to check them for you.
Up here, fall is chanterelle season. Oh, you may run across some during other times of the year, especially since this winter has been so mild, but fall is when they really come into being; generally after a few good rains.
That’s good to know, Taters. How does one find mushroom hunters willing to share? Also, what’s a good gun for hunting the elusive fungus?
A lot of times local mycologicial societies will help people out and sponsor outings. You may want to check into one of those.
I will also tell you that most serious lovers of chanterelles will not share their hunting grounds or speak of them. Again, this is due to the fact that it is damn hard work looking for these mushrooms now. You’re lucky to come home with one five gallon bucket after getting up at dawn and mucking about in the woods until it’s too dark to see.
Commercial ventures will hire people to literally live out in the woods to hunt for these mushrooms. It’s very sad and frustrating for those of us who just want a few pounds to clean, slice up, sautee in butter and stick in the freezer for future use.
My information is that false chanterelles are not poisonous but not not tasty either. It’s true you should have some instruction before eating any mushroom you pick, but the false chanterelles are really not that close looking to the real thing. Do you have a link to the info regarding them causing death? Philip Carpenter of the The Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz disagrees with you that they can be fatal.
I used my son-of-a-gun!
My ex MIL once found a larger than a quart canning jar in, of all places, Missouri. I didn’t even know they grew there. I don’t care for mushrooms, so I didn’t try it but everyone else who tasted it thought it was wonderful. No one died, so I guess it was the real thing.
I’d have to hunt up the links. To be honest, the last time I read about someone dying from these was two or three years ago. A family had gone near Mt. Rainier looking for chanterelles, but had picked these too. They cooked up a good amount of them and become very ill. One of them died.
I’ll try to hunt up the article, but I’m getting ready to go out to dinner with some friends. It may be tomorrow before I can post it.
Of course, the biggest danger in any kind of wild mushroom hunting is getting lost or going out alone and getting hurt due to a fall down a ravine or hill. There are always articles about this in the fall. It’s why I won’t go out on my own. My husband would have a cow if I did.
I tend to stick to areas I’m familiar with.
Definitely check your local, state and federal laws regarding helping yourself to public groceries, too. You don’t want to get caught by a ranger/copper doing something you’re not supposed to be doing.
Absolutely, jinglmassiv.
It’s been a couple of years for me, but when I last went, you had to have a permit to hunt for the mushrooms, even if you were just picking for yourself. The permit was only good for one day.
Oh, and in hunting for the articles I was talking about, this thread showed in my google search results. Too funny. STill hunting for the articles, but my friends are on their way here. Will post them as soon as I find them.
Several years ago, I cared for a child whose family had all eaten poison mushrooms. IIRC, they ate Amanitas, death caps. The clild lived after several days in ICU, but more than one member of the family died at another hospital.
I wish I could remember the name of the mushroom book and author in an episode of Gilligan’s Island.
I’ve done a decent amount of mushroom hunting and as far as I know, there is no poisonous chanterelle mimic on the West Coast. Just the false chanterelle, which is a) very easy to distinguish from a real chanterelle and b) not poisonous, just yucky.
What? No there is not; this is totally untrue. You may be confusing chanterelles with another Pacific Northwest delicacy, the white matsutake, which looks very similar to Smith’s Amanita and other amanitas. [edit: I just checked, and I remembered the info incorrectly: immigrants confuse the amanita phalloides for the paddy-straw mushroom]
The false chanterelle has true gills, which make it very easy to distinguish from the weird veiny protogills of true chanterelles.
And I’m not seeing any reports of deaths by poisoning from false chanterelles. When I took a mycology course in college, I learned that the vast bulk of mushroom poisonings in the US come from one of three sources:
-Asian immigrants who mistake amanitas for matsutakes;
-Trippers who mistake deadly galerinas for psilocybes; and
-Trippers who think they’re Jesus and eat handfuls of any damn mushroom they come across.
There are other rare poisonings (people who eat bishop’s mitres without boiling them first, for example), but most of the fatalities are these three causes.
Also, when I lived in Olympia, I found chanterelles by the grocery-bag-full out in normal coniferous forests; I didn’t have to venture into the old-growth.
Chanterelles are pretty easy to identify - amongst other features, the gills are ridge-like, run down the stem and (quite unlike the mimics) they form a pattern that branches and rejoins (others just branch).