Has anybody here ever collected and eaten wild mushrooms? Are they as delectable as some people make them out to be? What do they taste like? When and where do you find them? Are they easy to locate and identify? How do you cook them?
Googling “wild edible mushrooms” yields 10+ pages of links. You should buy a book on the topic.
In my experience they are not easy to find.
I once found a white puffball which I had to break in half in order to fit one half of it into my backpack. Yummy!
And just the standard warning: unless you know exactly what you’re doing, hunting for wild mushrooms is a bad idea. There are poisonous mushrooms that look almost exactly like edible ones: go with an expert until you know what you’re doing.
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I’ve hunted for chanterelles, morels, and porcini. They are incredibly delicious, really hard to find, and a really rewarding hobby overall.
On the West Coast, morels in the spring, chanterelles and porcini in the fall. A great book is: ‘All the Rain Promisesa and More’ by David Arora.
Go with someone who know what they are doing. There may even be a mycological society near you. But as far as chanterelles and morels are concerned, at least on the West Coast, there are no poisonous mimics, none that will kill you.
There is a kind of mimic for chanterelles called jack o’ lantern, but it grows on wood instead of in duff, and it doesn’t really look like a chanterelle at all, and it won’t kill you even if you are foolish enough to think it’s a chanterelle.
Chanterelles taste of apricots, and morels taste like the woods. Porcini are the king, but I’ve only had one big one. I shaved the raw stem and made a salad with mint and Pecarino. The cap I grilled, sliced, and served with a big ol ribeye. Unforgettable.
I have often (in Switzerland) collected and eaten wild mushrooms with my father. we stuck to a few kinds of mushrooms that were common and easily recognizable:
bolets, chanterelles, corne d’abondance (those three can be seen here), morille = morel in english (can be seen here).
Stick with easily recognizable ones. Also learn to recognize the most poisonous ones, such as the amanite phalloïde = death cap in english (can be seen here) and don’t pick anything that remotely resembles a poisonous one. People dry every year in Europe from eating death cap mushrooms.
You should be able to find them in any forest in a rainy area. I have found morels in the mountains in California.
Cooking: several methods.
One is to sautee them in oil with onions and garlic; include them in an omelet; cook them in a cream sauce and serve over steak. If you pick too many to eat at once, dry them (similarly to the principle of sun-dried tomatoes) and then use them in dishes the same way as the fresh mushroom, remembering that in the dry mushroom the taste is concentrated.
Arnold- check your first link please.
Mushroom hunter here…
My advice is to specialize in a few species only, 2 or 3. Mushrooms grow in very specific environments and the more you know about a certain kind, the easier it will be to find some. By sticking to mushrooms you know well, you won’t risk killing yourself eating the wrong kind.
Have respect for nature and fellow pickers! Mushroom patches can be very fragile and you can totally ruin one by not picking them properly. Buy yourself a guide book and if possible have an experienced picker teach you.
Oh man, I had forgotten about boletus (aka porcini, steinpilz)mushrooms! Last year I was in Germany and we found ourselves in Wurzburg right at the beginning of the boletus mushroom season. I had mushroom overload, at one meal I had mushroom appetizer, soup, with the roasted lamb shank, it was incredible ::drool::
Learning about and collecting wild mushrooms is on my list of cool things to do. There are mycological groups in the Chicago area, I have just not found the time.
Since I’ve been brought up in the countryside and in a wooded region, I was collecting mushrooms as far as I remember, and probably even before. I wouldn’t recommand learning which mushrooms are edible and which aren’t from a book, though. For pretty much any edible mushroom, there’s a not-that-edible or poisonous look-alike. The differences are often (but not always) strikingly obvious for people who are accustomed to collect them, but not necessarilly so for people who have only looked at pictures. So, like another poster, I would recommand joining a mycologycal club if you’re clueless. Plus, you’re unlikely to find much mushrooms if you’re going on your own. Finding them is also a learned talent. People in a mycological club would you too for this.
Finally, not only mushrooms grow in specific environments, as already pointed out, but also, people in a given area usually stick with a limited number of species they know well. Most of the time, it’s a local tradition, and I often saw people from other regions collecting mushroms that nobody would consider edible in my village. It can even be a matter of family tradition. My folks collect a mushroom, which according to our next door neighbors could be mistaken for a particular specie of amanite (no way! They must be stupid!), and they collect a specie which is dangerously similar to another poisonous specie, pretending that it’s safe to eat them (no way! They must be crazy!).
If you really want to collect mushrooms, and don’t want to join a mycological society, definitely stick to a couple of species easy to recognize and which grow in your area, and ask someone who’s used to them for advice (possibly show him/her your mushrooms once you’ve collected them). As someone said, learn to recognize the most dangerous mushrooms (a lot of mushrooms, though not edible, aren’t really dangerous…they can taste bad, or have all the taste and consistence of rubber, or give you a diarrhoa, etc…) and avoid anything which remotely looks like them as long as you don’t have learnt to easily sort them out with someone aknowledgeable. Even boletus, which are quite easy to recognize can be mistaken for poisonous mushrooms which look somewhat like them if you’re really clueless.
By the way, since several posters mentionned it, morels are indeed very tasty mushrooms, but they’re toxic when eaten raw. They MUST be cooked.
Also, avoid collecting very little “baby” mushrooms. It’s like fishing. Let them grow for someone else.
Morels sauteed in butter and a touch of garlic–thats all. MMMMMM.
There is actually a “False Chanterelle”, Hygrophorus auriantiaca, but it is still an amateur’s mistake to confuse the two as one has true gills and the other doesn’t.
Since someone mentioned one of David Arora’s book, I’ll mention his more authoritative field guide, Mushrooms Demytified. It is the only halfway decent field guide ( with numerous rough keys ) out there. However even it is far, far from being authoritative. I have keys to most of the genera in the western hemisphere and even they are mostly incomplete ( and require a compound microscope for most anyways ).
With experience field ID’ing of common edibles is not terribly difficult, but like everyone else I recommend going out with an expert at first and heeding their advice.
I will point out that really only a relative handful of species are out and out deadly ( as opposed to just giving you a tummyache ). However even to this day I won’t eat the much-prized Coccoli, Amanita calyptrata, even though I can identify it in the field and in a lab, because it is just too close to the deadly Amanita phalloides and hybridizations are technically possible with uncertain results.
Flavors are all over the map and often quite different from your stereotypical store-bought button mushroom ( Agaricus bisporus ). I will disagree with essvee, though - Chanterelles smell a little apricoty when cooking, but don’t taste at all like apricots - I find them pretty “earthy”. Actually I think they smell better than they taste, but that’s just me :).
- Tamerlane