Milking the Rooster

We’ve been collecting a veritable bounty of wild mushrooms. Check them out, some delicious types you may not be familiar with. Get fungal!

~~

There are old mushroom hunters, and their are brave mushroom hunters, but there are no old and brave mushroom hunters.

– some old wisdom Seb spouted.

You don’t want to get your mushroom identification wrong, not if you’re modern hunter gatherer geek primitivists like us. The Death Cap, Amanita phalloides, doesn’t actually come with a skull and crossbones birthmark. And if you eat one your initial symptoms will be no worse than a moderate case of influenza with the shits. Then, cruely, you’re likely to experience an apparent recovery and so perhaps not seek medical help. But the recovery will be brief. The Death Cap’s toxins are about the most deadly in the natural world. You’ll likely spend several final days in great pain as your liver slowly liquidises. And if you’re one of the lucky 40% who survive ingestion you’ll still never drink Cuban rum again. Not a fate you’d wish on anyone.

While it has been recorded in Melbourne, the Death Cap, introduced to Australia sometime in the 1960s, has not yet been spotted in central Victoria. Of course it’s not the only one to be wary of. Of the estimated 100,000+ species of Australian fungi only around 15% have been even cataloged, and indigenous knowledge about edibility has largely been lost.

And yet fresh mushrooms are delicious, high in vitamin B12 and other nutrients, and a wonderful free food source. With just a little bit of knowledge we can harvest certain easy to identify species safely. The last few weeks we three rooster milkers have picked kilos apon kilos of glorious mushrooms of several varieties, making mushroom-yogurt dips, pasta sauces, breakfast fry ups and delicious soups.

A lot of this has been since Aya and I, along with our friend Sam and m’lady Annie went along to Alison Pouloit’s fungi ecology workshop at the Daylesford Neighborhood Centre. Alison is a fungiphiliac hero, the workshop an inspiration. Her interests are a mix of ecological (she has a background in research ecology), gastronomic and cultural. She’s also a great photographer and we saw some extraordinary organisms up close. Then we took off to the forests to pick mushrooms before a three course cook up.

Before the workshop, I’d been a bit disappointed in my mushroom gathering efforts here in Hepburn Springs. I had been picking hat-load upon hat-load of Field mushrooms down at my friend Di’s ‘permaculture forest‘ in Leongatha. But here in Hepburn Springs there are just so many poisonous Yellow Stainers around, and so few Field mushrooms. The Yellow Stainers (Agaricus xanthodermus) look quite similar, especially as they age. At a young age it’s possible to tell them apart. The Yellow Stainers tend to be bright white, squarer in shape, smell a bit chemically or inky, and stain a bright yellow when bruised. To the right is a picture of classic looking one. But not all of them look so distinctive or stain so brightly.

One thing I wanted to learn from the workshops was what are the subtleties about telling the Yellow Stainers and field mushrooms apart? Well apparently it’s very difficult! Their spore print (a common way of distinguishing mushrooms) is no help. In fact, Alison avoids picking Field mushrooms almost altogether — which is the only species most of us pick! The symptoms of yellow stainer ingestion are not deadly, but very unpleasant apparently — stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhea.

It’s more than compensation though for lack of Field mushrooms to be surrounded by a bounty of pine mushrooms: both Slippery Jacks (Suillus luteus) and Saffron Milk Caps (Lactarius deliciosus) both of which are introduced species, symbotic with pine trees — which is what you’ll find them next to, around late autumn.

Slippery jacks are a bolete — which means that instead of radial gills like a Field mushroom, they have sponge-like gills. Slippery jacks taste rich and delicious. Apparently some people don’t like the texture that much. But I think it’s wonderful melty goodness, especially if you pick the firmer ones.

In wet weather they are covered in a layer of shiny slime. The underside is a pastel yellow in the younger ones, darkening brown a bit with age. Many have darker tops than the ones pictured and they are often the most tasty ones, if you can find big but firm ones.

The other pine variety we’ve been eating is the Lactarius deliciosus or the Saffon milk cap. These guys are a bit less tasty but visually very pretty and have a firm texture which can take a lot of cooking. In fact they’re very complimentary with the Slippery jacks in a fry-up, absorbing some of the flavour and providing some textural juxtaposition. They produce a bright orange milk when squeezed which oxidises a greeny colour after half an hour wherever there is bruising. The stem is hollow and contains some fluffly white flesh.

Both Lactarius deliciosus and Suillus luteus have symbiotic mycorrhizal relationships with conifers. Mushrooms, of course, are just the fruiting body of often vast underground fungus networks. In mychorrihizal relationships, the tree produces simple carbohydrates, sugars and proteins (akin to flour, sugar and eggs — like “cookies or cakes” as Elaine Ingham points out). It excretes these substances out of it’s roots, where they are taken up by the fine filaments of the symbiotic fungus. There’s a complex chemical language which exists between them, and the tree can actually put in a request to the fungus for particular nutrients. The fungus, adept at aquiring such nutrients, goes and gets them, often from places beyond the reach of the plant’s own root system, and gets paid off in cookies. A mutually beneficial exchange. Truly awesome!

There are many more edible mushrooms such as Shaggy ink caps, Parasols, and many other species just worth marveling at. While out picking, Aya and I found this last week — the most enormous mushroom I’ve ever seen. (And we’ll presume poisonous.) It looks a bit like an unusually large Omphalotus nidiformis – a species which glow in the dark! Unfortunately it was growing under a street light so I never found out if it glows.

Before eating wild mushrooms, get a hold of a good Australian field guide, Alison recommended a few including Bruce Fuhrer’s A Field Companion to Australian Fungi.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 9:44 pm and is filed under food, foraging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.