On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Folks,
Here are some pics from years past. Because of tech issues, I’m not on my main machine and can’t get to all my photos to easily search for what I’d hoped for, so this is a bit more of a whimper than bang.
I’ll see if I can sort that out for next week for one final mushroom post showing some of the really neat lifeforms living in our forests. I have seen some crazy weird fungi and slime molds, let me tell you, and I’d like to share.
note – these are from a 2013 expedition in Colorado, likely 11,000 feet
This is a LARGE mushroom!
Also impressive, but nothing like #1.
Zoom into to find the Amanita Muscarias and one bolete.
My haul – close to 35 pounds across two bags. I was less choosy then so I took many more marginal mushrooms and ended up throwing most or all of them away, so that haul isn’t quite as impressive as it could be. But still, yes, lots and lots and lots of mushrooms to cook and preserve. I’ll discuss drying mushrooms next week, but that’s how I handle them. I use my dehydrator and whatever else I can to to dry them out before they spoil. Once dried, they last indefinitely. I mean I’ve got some dried morels from probably 20 years ago that I still throw into soups and such and I know I’ve got 10 year old dried boletes in a jar or two. When there’s a boom, I dry lots and when it’s a normal year, I just eat and share. In a bad year, I eat.
I sliced up that 1.5 pound beauty, sauteing 1/3 in butter, olive oil, garlic, and onion, and used the rest of the slices to stuff a nice rainbow trout I’d caught on the way home. Fresh-caught trout with some freshly-harvested mushrooms is an amazing meal, though I also include some bacon, onion, and homemade whole-wheat breadcrumbs in the stuffing. It’s been 6 years and I still remember that meal!
Have a great day and weekend, everybody. Fall is here and that is good.
Sab
I am glad you know what you are doing. I worry about you eating strange mushrooms.
Mary G
Sounds delicious!
WereBear
Your passion comes through, shroom-man :)
While I am not one of them, I live in an area which is full of happy mushroom pickers who share sometimes. The differences between mushrooms might be subtle, but once learned, I’ve seen people reliably call the species from down the path, or even known where to look.
All of this added together means you don’t eat “strange mushrooms” but only the ones you know.
mvr
Can you tell us something about the process by which a bolete comes out of the ground? And also whether the. really large ones in the first photo are older/have been up longer than the smaller ones, or whether they just come up bigger? And are there times of day they are most likely to come up? Because of the worms you mentioned in your last post I tend to pick small ones when I find them rather than wait to see if they get bigger. So I’ve not been able to figure out the process by which they come up. Thanks!
StringOnAStick
I’m remembering the quart jars of pickled mushrooms my mom used to make. That’s a recipe I wish I had but I bet the internet can help me
J R in WV
I think the size of the fruiting body (that’s the part of a mushroom we want to eat) depends upon the age and strength of the “Mycelium is the vegetative body for fungi that produce mushrooms and, in some cases, species of fungi that never produce a mushroom. When compared to a plant, mycelium is the root system and the mushroom is the flower.”
Here locally we have grown Shitaki mushrooms by ordering a block of living mycelium filled with wooden dowels, which we place into holes drilled into freshly cut oak logs. After some wet weeks those logs will begin to sprout mushrooms, from tiny little brown buttons to saucer sized ledges of goodness. The block is of firm white mushroom-like flesh around the oak dowels, how the blocks are made is a closely held business secret.
You can also order morel kits which you plant in the ground in an environment like that in which you might come across morels growing naturally in the woods. They are believed to be growing on the dying roots of particular trees, apple, elm for a couple of .popular suspects, old apple orchards into the woods seem to be likely spot0s for morels. So a shady damp spot under soNme trees (not walnuts, their roots appear to be hostile to other species of plants) would be a place you could try a morel kit.
Nice pics Alain! Thanks for filling in for us! Nice ‘shrooms, also too, lots of work at 11,000 feet. I was up over 13,000 feet rock hounding with a buddy once. When we came back down to a reasonable altitude on the Arkansas River, only then did we realize how stupid we had been as 13K feet from lack of oxygen to run out brains.
This is why pilots must use supplemental oxygen at altitudes above 10K feet. Or fly in a pressurized cabin like the trusty 737-Max! haha.
J R in WV
Oh, me again. Someone asked about spore printing a mushroom. This is done by putting a dry mushroom cap on a sheet of paper and tapping the cap to cause the spores to fall onto the paper. The pattern and color of the spores are a couple of the several attributes that a field biologist can use to help determine the exact species of mushroom being examined. They also inspect the gills on the bottom of the mushroom cap. Otherwise nearly identical shrooms have differences in those gills, which is where the spores are produced, and is how spore printing works.
I AM NOT a field biologist, have never seen this done, and am only providing vague memories from an online article about mushrooms that I read long ago when we were plugging live dowels of Shitaki mushrooms into oak logs. So learn more from a real shroom expert before you try this.
MoxieM
Dearest Alain–Please be careful! Here’s my warning– my great aunt (for whom I am named, IRL), her daughter, her daughter in law, her son in law, all but one of her grandchildren, and the maid, all died from mushroom poisoning. They were central Europeans, and very used to going mushroom picking, but, somebody picked a bad one and it got missed when they made soup. Needless to say, it must have been horrific. It took up to four days for the last of them to die–the son in law who was also the village doctor… So this is always my warning to folk who enjoy wild mushrooms. double check! and check again… please.
Zinsky
There is a fungus among us!
Yum! However, I am surprised when you say that the large mushroom was more tasty than a smaller one. Usually it’s the other way around….
mvr
@J R in WV: I’m not sure about tapping the mushroom to spore print. I’ve done it by just laying the cap gills down on a piece of paper of the right color for a period of time. Light colored spores are most visible on dark paper and dark spores work best with light paper. Unfortunately I don’t know enough more to actually read my spore prints.
mvr
@MoxieM:I have a friend who is deeply into mushroom hunting and my original response was I’m never going to risk my life doing that. But then we got the cabin at 9,000 foot elevation complete with a knowledgable neighbor who showed us some boletes and Chanterelles. And mushrooms kept popping up around us. We got a book called “Mushrooming Without Fear” that was very helpful for identifying mushrooms that don’t have very dangerous look a likes. Their rule of thumb was to stay away from mushrooms with gills (which that book contrasted with ridges of the sort Chanterelles have. Boletes have tubes where other mushrooms have gills so it is hard to mistake a bolete for a non-bolete (though not as hard to mistake different boletes for one another).
MoxieM
@mvr: I’m glad you can be safe…but please, I love all Jackals, and Jackal-affiliates, and unsurprisingly I have a reflexive need to tell people to check twice! Enjoy your bounty.
mvr
@MoxieM: Thanks! I’m careful.