The perfect way to cook mushrooms

This short video gives no-nonsense guidance as to how cook perfect sautéed mushrooms. With white wine! The use of tarragon took me by surprise as I previously thought that it only combines with fish, but I'm definitely going to try it out.

Which reminds me - it's Friday, and nearly time for dinner!

Take care everyone, do not eat any strange mushrooms, and I'll see you next week for more stories and hunting reports!

Magic mushrooms in hospital

A better kind of magic mushroom

I try to avoid, as much as I can, writing about hallucinogenic mushrooms. Partly because I disapprove of taking drugs in general: it is difficult enough to understand this complicated world even without confusing your brain with foreign substances. But also because fungal drug abuse is a cliche similar to lethal mushroom poisoning.

This blog aims to promote fungi as a valuable natural resource with great constructive potential, and the fact that some representatives of this kingdom can be toxic or hallucinogenic does not support the concept. So I try to pretend that these topics do not exist. Ignore them, and maybe they'll go away.

However, in cases when humour value of a news story is such as this one, I just have to write about it.

In a nutshell: a mental patient was kicked out of a hospital for consuming magic mushrooms that he found growing in the smoking area. Given the £5m cost of the facility, you have to wonder how it happened that the patch wasn't concreted over. I've heard that funny mushrooms can be used for treating certain mental conditions, but somehow I doubt that the medical facility in question is that advanced...

Image credit:
Magic mushrooms

Orange!

Got to love them

Saffron milk caps are one of my long-time favourites. Their Latin name is most appropriate: Lactarius deliciosus. Some mushroom hunters believe that there is no finer mushroom on this planet, and I tend to agree. The combination of strong taste, firm texture and vivid orange colour of both raw and cooked mushrooms is second to none.

Ceps, the universally recognised mushroom royalty, have just one advantage over saffron milk caps: the former are equally good fresh, frozen and dried, and keep in the fridge for at least a week, whereas the latter start turning into greenish goo after just a few hours. The only possibility of preservation is to pickle them. There are some fans of this method, but to me the result looks (and tastes!) like brown slugs.

A word of warning: there is one lookalike poisonous species in temperate forests. Its distinction from the true saffron milk cap is that it grows under birch and has white milky sap (the original's is bright orange) and wooly edge under its cap.

Russian field guides maintain that wooly milk cap is edible if pickled, but even they admit that if one makes its way into a frying pan, the result would be a massive culinary disaster.

The two mushroom species do look very similar though, and this must be the reason why all saffron milk caps in Scottish forests are mine. As long as I get to them before the maggots...

Image credit:
Lactarius deliciosus

Mushroom medley

These will make a great risotto...
in three month's time!

This post is not so much a recipe, but rather cooking thoughts. Once the mushrooms are in your basket, what do you do with them?

For instance, yesterday I brought home a couple of kilograms of fungi. Clearly, cooking them all at once does not make much sense unless you have a big hungry family (I don't).

The answer is, segregate.

Ceps preserve really well, in dried and frozen state, so they were cleaned, wiped with with damp kitchen towel,  cut into chunks and placed into a freezer bag.

Stage 1: note the bright orange
of the saffron milk caps.

And, that's almost half of the weight gone. Next, chanterelles. They have no trouble keeping in the fridge for a week or so. Stick them in a container, and leave for laters.

Thus, we are just left with two kinds of birch boletes, slippery jacks, saffron milk caps and amethyst deceivers. All rather perishable, but the quantity is already manageable. After cutting away the maggot-infested parts, it's only about 500-600g left. Perfect for a classic mushroom medley: fry some onion in olive oil, add mushrooms, splash over a bit of white wine, add salt/pepper, then single cream, reduce the heat, stew for 10-15 minutes.

Profit!

Last day of summer

The hunting trip on Saturday was possibly the most rewarding and at the same time frustrating in the entire season.

Rewarding, because -

Two beautiful (almost) maggot-free specimens

The two ceps were right at the forest entrance, and together weighed about a kilogram. Now, after such a find any mushroom hunt is automatically declared a definite success. However, a hunt is not a hunt if it only lasts a few minutes, so the two beauties went in to the basket and the hunter pressed on.

After THREE HOURS of checking a hundred possible mushroom spots along a roughly 6 mile stretch of forest path, there was finally another find. Two amethyst deceivers. If you know what they are, you'll be laughing your sides off. Because, they are very nice edible mushrooms, no doubt about that, but it takes several hundred of them to fill a very small pot. Coincidentally, that's the numbers in which they normally grow, but I found TWO. Right, going on...

Using the convenient shortcut I found last time, which was then full with bay boletes, I only managed to spot these. And I can tell you, when I bother to take out my camera to snap non-edible mushrooms, things are not going well.

They looked so promising from a hundred feet away... disappoint

Sulphur tufts! Rather pretty and abundant, but bitter, inedible and even toxic according to some reference guides. The hunt was quite clearly over. Tired and frustrated, I planned the shortest route to the bus stop. However, two minutes later I stumbled on a faint path, at the entrance of which there were these:

Twins! (Actually, half-brothers)

Unusually, they were growing only a couple of feet apart, under the same birch tree. This hinted that the path beyond could hold more pleasant surprises, so on I went, even though it was only just going in the right direction.

After two more minutes, another most welcome find. A saffron milk cap! I almost gave up on them this season, but they were not gone, just a couple of weeks late.

Saffron milk cap. Long overdue for species highlight!

After that, many more saffron milk caps and brown birch boletes, as well as a few slippery jacks, and, for the finishing touch, a great chanterelle spot.

Chanterelle surprise!

In the end, the basket was almost full, so initial frustration was more than compensated by the last hour or so. The complete spoils are below. And what did I do with this haul? Come back tomorrow to find out!

Left: brown birch boletes (there really were a lot); top left: one bay bolete, badly eaten by slugs but still edible, next to it - an orange birch bolete; top: three ceps; top right: saffron milk caps, mostly maggot-ridden but still got enough flesh from them to be worthwhile; bottom right: slippery jacks; centre: chanterelles;
bottom left: a couple of wooly milk caps and cracked boletes, just for spore prints;
the two purple "worms" at right centre bottom are the two amethyst deceivers.