How to Forage for Mushrooms and Not Die (Persephone Days)
It’s easy enough that a four-year-old can do it
Even if you’re not a fan of the texture of mushrooms as food, the fungal kingdom is important in the permaculture/gardening world. Fungi help plants communicate and often provide their very lifeline to minerals, water, and other important pieces of forest life. It’s really an incredible bonus that they also provide high-protein food, high-quality medicine, and all for very little work (and if you’re a reader of this column, you know I’m a pretty lazy gardener.)
Shiitakes, outdoors on logs, are one of the best mushrooms to grow in our region — we have abundant trees to use as growing material, they survive our winters, they store beautifully, they taste delicious, and they even make their own vitamin D if you put them gills-up in the sun for a few hours! It’s a solid, practical mushroom perfect for solid, practical New Englanders. It’s time for you to go for it. Start that log you’ve always thought about tucking into the shady part of your yard.
But if you want to feel like a monarch, consuming your meals with the most delightful touches of decadence, at least for a few months of the year, you’ve got to go beyond the garden. You’ve got to go into what Permaculture people refer to as zones 4 and 5 — the untended lands within our domain but beyond our direct cultivation. I’m talking about foraging for the wild edibles that are only so expensive at Whole Foods because they are impossible to cultivate.
Foraging tends to scare a lot of people off, especially once you start leaving the world of the green and leafy and start dabbling in fungi. I myself once lost my shit at an ex who told me he had found some oyster mushrooms while thruhiking the Appalachian Trail and fried them up with his dinner. What if he had poisoned himself in the wilderness? How on earth could he possibly be sure?
A decade later, I find myself explaining how very easy it is to be sure with certain mushrooms — so easy that I regularly take my children foraging (sorry, ex, my heart was in the right place). People seem shocked by the fact that I would so casually gamble with Death, so I thought I’d present a few very simple rules that should enable you to enjoy a delicious summer full of all the gourmet mushrooms you can stand to eat. This is field-tested as easy enough for a four-year-old to remember — no spore prints, field guides, or microscopy required.
(NOTE: Monadnock Underground and the author take no responsibility for anyone’s death or serious illness from attempting to follow the advice in this article. If you are unsure about mushroom identification just leave it and go to the fancy grocery store, your life is worth more than $15 if you really feel the need for some chanterelles or something. If you eat a mushroom based on this advice and you start to feel sick, chances are it’s in your head, but call 911 anyway! Or poison control, that’s a thing, right? If you’re in the woods don’t google it, just call 911. Unless you have poison control on speed dial or something, in which case we are REALLY not responsible for your death, what are you even doing.)
How not to die from eating a wild mushroom in New Hampshire*:
Don’t eat anything that isn’t growing on a tree.
It’s really that simple. Not everything you find on a tree will be particularly delicious, but none of it will be deadly. You might just find yourself with a nice cluster of lions’ mane, chicken-of-the-woods, oyster mushrooms, or the medicinal chaga or birch polypore if you’re foraging in New Hampshire.
What about morels, though? Chanterelles? The scrumptious black trumpets? It’s true, these all grow on the ground.
Another way to not die from eating a wild mushroom in New Hampshire:
Don’t eat any mature mushroom** with gills.
Does the mushroom in question have a spongy surface? Honeycomb pattern on the cap? Small holes on the underside? Just smooth skin? Congratulations, you’re not going to die! You might get an upset stomach from some mushrooms described here, and some are going to be among the bitterest substances you’ve ever touched to your tongue***, but no death.
I say “mature mushroom” here because there’s a very important caveat to this guideline. If you are not sure what the sporulating surface is, which is to say, if your mushroom looks like a round ball on the ground, cut it open. If there are immature gills forming inside DO NOT EAT. If you THINK there are immature gills, don’t chance it. You might miss out on a puffball or two, but the immature gill-grower in question here is one of the very few actually deadly fungi in our region, the Destroying Angel.
This would be the one to take home and research, which you should totally do! No mushroom will kill you just from touching it, so when in doubt, set it aside for more study.
Chanterelles are a special case here, and while I personally think chanterelles are totally foolproof and I absolutely let my kids pick them, their pseudo-gill situation can confuse novices. So double-check any orange mushrooms with those lines on the underside that you’ve convinced yourself are probably gills until you are sure you can tell the difference. (Hint: chanterelles smell like apricots, too!)
Most of the really great edibles either grow on trees as well as not having gills, making them double foolproof (chicken-of-the-woods, maitake/hen-of-the-woods, lion’s mane) or have no gills and also no lookalikes to scare you away (black trumpets, lobster mushroom). This is enough for a summer of luxurious meals as well as delightful hikes to find them — happy death-free foraging!
*I won’t speak to other regions, so please do not use this advice outside of the Eastern US!
**Seriously, go back up and read the caveat. If your mushroom isn’t mature (if it looks like a white button mushroom from the store), take EXTRA care.
***It kinda goes without saying that you shouldn’t eat the bitter ones — no death, but c’mon.