I mean food safety I guess.
Yeah lobsters are dry, the base russula mushrooms are too. But I basically cook them all for food safety reasons. You never know what has been on, or in, them before. Little bugs are always an issue.
Yeah, that for sure- always wash and perhaps scrub the shrooms! But they’re like little sponges, so in restaurants you learn to do it quick so they don’t absorb a lot of water, and then dry them out if they aren’t needed for service that night- usually spreading them out on towels or a wire rack on a sheet pan in the walk-in is fine.
Went out today. Getting late in the season so have to work harder sometimes. But a nice easy hike, and this was about half the haul.
Chanterelles of course, and some boletes and oysters.
Oysters are my favorite. The first mushroom I actually liked!
Because believe it or not I hated mushrooms until about 2 years ago.
It stuns me that you don’t like bollettes. I mean sauteed in butter and a lil bit of salt and cracked pepper, oh mama.
So I want a better gathering bag. What have you all used and what do you recommend?
I do like boletes.
But before I came here and started collecting, I’d only ever had the standard white mushrooms (which I hate) and canned mushrooms (which I really hate).
So I do like boletes, and that king bolete I found last week? Well there is a reason they are one of the most sought after. If you like those red cracked boletes, wait until you find a true king (porcini) bolete.
But oyster mushrooms have a real pleasant taste that are my favorites.
Nice. I read too much into your previous posts where I think you said you get to hike and your family ate the mushrooms. Lol.
Ok what do you use as a bag to gather?
Here’s my kit
I got them for Christmas last year so provenance unknown. I believe the knife was someone on Etsy.
But a simple, very sharp (as I found on accident once) knife with a brush integrated in the handle.
Bag is just a durable mesh bag with a nylon bottom panel to protect shrooms
I hated mushrooms as a kid. And onions. My grandpa used to cook them both, all the time, sauteed in butter, and I loved the way they smelled while cooking that way. But I hated the taste. Then I moved back to Seattle as an adult, and started cooking for a living, and discovered there were other mushrooms besides shitty white buttons. I love them so much now. I do have some forager contacts that I get stuff from, but mostly there’s a local grower at the farmers markets that I trade with a bunch- I bring them donuts, they give me shrooms. Blue and King oysters, Lion’s Manes, Shiitake, Cinnamon Caps- they grow amazing stuff.
So I was out here in Oregon for a year before my family joined me. And it was a question of if, not when, they would move west.
Ow my wife and kids love mushrooms, and I love hiking. In that year I was always up on some mountain on the weekends. One of my coworkers at the time was a big mushroom hunter. And he was talking about it at work one day, which gave me an idea. So I read up and researched mushrooms, and went and collected some to bring back to Chicago. I got up at 5am to go before work the day I flew back for the weekend (I was flying to Chicago and back about once a month). The idea being one of the things to sell my wife on moving the family out there, since all of both our families lived within 40 minutes. So I was showing her the types of things we could enjoy.
So I started foraging and bringing mushrooms home when I came, in that spring and summer bringing home berries instead. While showing them the outdoor wonders we have.
I didn’t care for mushrooms at that point, but it was something I was doing for them. I would even gamely eat some.
Eventually I found there were some types I did actually like. So what had been initially something I did for them, to show ‘even though we are moving 2000 miles, I will do anything to help make this something you are happy with’ became something I enjoyed for it’s own sake.
Besides, even if I come home empty handed I still had a great day in the woods.
I hope @CraigM doesn’t get mad because we we’re supposed to go out together but my son and his partner came out today and boy did we hit the motherload. Lots of candy caps, shrimp and bollettes.
All within 200yds of our house. Hardly had to walk.
It’s weird. There are two threads that I just don’t understand. The bug thread and the mushroom thread. All I can think is that there are aliens here.
Wait. I said too muc
Very nice!
Judging by the yellow pores, those are looking to be sullius variety boletes, aka slippery Jack/ slippery Jill. We like them, but some people don’t tolerate them in large amounts. One tip, peel off the cuticle, the slippery sticky top. That improves flavor and reduces any potential for indigestion.
But they are very prolific locally, and I never hesitate to collect a bunch. They’re not oysters or chanterelles, and not the king bolete, but a very solid mushroom.
Thanks for the tips. Yes, we ID’d them as slippery Jacks.
It’s weird how last time we got chantrelles and a lot of bollettes and saw a ton of deer mushrooms, but this time so many of the candy cups, shrimps and jacks. Didn’t get a single Chantrelle.
We did ID a few poisonous ones and left more than a few on the trail that we weren’t 100% certain of.
Can’t wait to try the candy cups, but the book we have recommends drying them & using them to make cookies. Interesting.
It’s magic.
Huh, interesting indeed.
I haven’t collected any milk caps, the broader genus of candy caps, before. I’ve found some, but have avoided so far.
And yeah it is starting to get later. Last weekend I definitely had to work for the chanterelles I got, though I did find a rather nice flush 100’ off the trail uphill, 6 large chanterelles in one cluster.
We ate the candy caps + the Slippery Jacks tonight. I wasn’t that fond of the Slipper Jacks. A bit slimy and slightly bitter. The candy caps OTOH are good. Firm and taste was pleasant, if a bit different than I’m used to.
In other news, this hour long video is phenomenal. Any one even remotely interested in Mushroom hunting, particularly in the NW, should watch this.
From what I’ve read it’s very important that the mulch you use is completely sterilized before you seed it with spores. Most people use high temperature steam or buy the kits where this has already been done.
Here’s a great overview by a commercial grower.
So these beauties come up in my mulch every year. Look, but don’t eat! They’re one of the most important mushrooms to learn though, the amanitas. In this case the gemmed amanita. They are a very pretty mushroom, but they are one of the most deadly. The gemmed is less lethal than its cousins, the destroying angel and death cap mushrooms. But you are, at best, in for a very bad day. And enough will kill you.
There are several telltale signs, and the amanita family is generally one of the easiest to identify.
First, if you see those white flecks that are easily removed on the cap? Probably amanita. But the real tell tale is the volva on the bottom, looks like the egg from Alien. So this is why it is important to dug to the bulb at the bottom of the mushroom, it helps identify. The volva is often just underground, so I always clear away the duff before collecting.
Fortunately once you identify a few it is pretty easy to tell at a glance most common ones. They’re really easy to identify the family! They also have some of the larger and more attractive looking ones. Your stereotypical toadstool mushroom 🍄 is a Panther amanita. Very similar to the gemmed, but a brilliant red instead of the orange.
Worms are a fact of mushrooms as far as I’ve seen @Raniyah. When I pick mushrooms, it is pretty common for me to cut one and then discard it because the flesh is worm ridden.
Speaking of mushrooms of the cascades, here is one I found in the neighborhood this week.
This one perplexed me. A tan cap with a lavender purple stalk. Notched attached gills, and pinkish cream colored spores. I ran through my identification guides to no luck at first.
I simply could not positively confirm it initially, so wound up tossing them. The shape and color had me thinking a purple cortinarus. But the spore color was wrong, far too light. But there aren’t a lot of purple mushrooms.
But I did pin it down. It’s a blewit. clitocybe nuda. Just one with a darker tan cap than my guide had pictures of. Turns out these have highly variable colorations and taste depending on the wood they grow with.
I’ve ‘planted’ the mushrooms in hopes maybe it causes them to grow.