Love at First Taste

My friend displays chanterelle mushrooms, which she just picked.

Wild mushrooms have long intrigued me -- but also scared me. On the one hand, I love mushrooms, and the variety of wild mushrooms, most of which are unavailable commercially, excites me beyond description. To say that mushrooms are all more or less the same, or that if you've tried one mushroom and disliked it you'll probably dislike all mushrooms, would be like saying that just because you don't care for turkey, you needn't bother trying goose or duck or that if you don't like rabbit, you should stay away from steak and pork. It would be like saying that anyone who doesn't like cod doesn't like fish. But if you, like me, do enjoy commercially available button mushrooms, shiitakes, and portobellos, then just think about all the mushrooms we've never even tasted, about all the free gourmet food growing abundantly in our woods! It would be like discovering that there were scores of different types of delicious meat you'd never even heard of.

On the other hand, correctly identifying edible mushrooms is a lot trickier than identifying edible wild plants. For one thing, there aren't a lot of really poisonous wild plants around here (although there are some), and anything that is going to seriously harm you is also going to taste seriously bad. That's not the case with mushrooms. Apparently, there are some tasty mushrooms that can actually kill you. And then there's the fact that there are some mushrooms that even mushroom experts have difficulty telling apart from their poisonous look-alikes.

The cap of a chanterelle mushroom is indented in the center
and curls under at the edges.

So although I'm interested -- really interested -- in the prospect of hunting for wild mushrooms, although my elder son and I went on a mushroom walk once, and although I've purchased a couple of mushroom books, I've stayed away from serious attempts to identify any mushrooms, and I certainly haven't tried eating any. That is, until this past weekend. A friend invited a group of women to her vacation house in Maine, where she had previously identified two types of edible wild mushrooms: chanterelles and chicken-of-the-woods. As we were driving along the dirt road to her house after a trip to the local store (Jimbob's Place; this is true Maine backwoods) and scanning the roadside for mushrooms (my friend has become a true menace on the road since becoming a forager; her eyes are rarely where they should be, and her speed seldom exceeds 15 mph), we spotted some golden-yellow specimens that my friend announced were chanterelles.

The folds on the underside of a chanterelle fork at the edges of the cap.
They also extend part way down the stem.

Back at the house, we took a basket and some digging tools and walked down the road to collect our find. In the meantime, I'd read up on chanterelles in one of my mushroom books (Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms of New England and Eastern Canada by David L. Spahr, which purports to describe mushrooms that are relatively safe for beginner foragers to identify; you can find this book in the "recommended products" section on my homepage). Further contributing to my comfort level about this mushroom, my friend had eaten chanterelles from around her Maine property previously. When we got to where the mushrooms were growing, I could see that they were indeed chanterelles. The ridges on the underside of the mushroom cap were forked at the tips (they split into two near the outer edge of the cap), whereas those of false chanterelles do not fork. The golden color was uniform, whereas look-alikes are often different shades of yellow. The mushroom cap was indented in the center and curled under around the edges, and the ridges extended partially down the stem. We picked the larger specimens and dropped them in our basket.

A friend digs for hopniss
(ground nut). One is in her
shovel.

We kept walking, for my friend had also found ground nuts (also called hopniss; see my August 5 post) on her road. We showed the other two ladies how to identify the vines and follow the root through the ground to gather a string of tubers. Our friends became quite proficient, and together we soon had a sizeable ground-nut collection next to the chanterelles. Most of the ground nuts were no bigger than a small olive, but some were the size of a cherry tomato. A cry of "whoa!" could be heard from anyone who dug up one of that size.

Here I'm digging up an Indian cucumber. I'm wearing my
foraging belt, which keeps my tools close at hand.

We found a few other edible plants along our walk, although we didn't collect most of them. They would have made a fine addition to our dinner salad, but I guess we weren't thinking of that. I just pointed them out to the others as we found them: wood sorrel, lady's thumb, wintergreen, jewelweed. Indian cucumbers dotted the woods here and there, and I stopped to dig one up. We broke the tiny root into pieces and let everyone have a taste.

A chaga mushroom growing on a birch tree.

We'd seen another interesting mushroom from the car, so we sought out the birch on which it was growing. As luck would have it, one of the others had just read about this type of mushroom, called a chaga, earlier that morning. She knows someone who has been diagnosed with cancer, and she was intrigued by the chaga's supposed cancer-fighting properties (incidentally, we later looked up some chaga-related research on PubMed, an online catalog maintained by the National Institutes of Health, and there does seem to be something to this claim). I have actually seen chaga, which always grows on birch, many times, but I never dreamed it was a mushroom. It looks exactly like a charred piece of wood. So much so, in fact, that even after having seen pictures in one of my mushroom books, I was skeptical of its identity as such when I was faced with the live specimen. It did flake off and reveal a non-woody interior, though. Interestingly, chaga fetches not-too-shabby prices on eBay (I just found a 2 lb fresh mushroom listed for $19.99).

This chicken-of-the-woods
mushroom is past its prime.
It would be a distinctive
yellowish orange when ripe.

My friend had previously found a sizeable chicken-of-the-woods mushroom she wanted to show me. Chicken-of-the-woods has a distinctive look and always grows on trees. It's a relatively easy mushroom for beginners to identify and is featured in several of my plant and mushroom guidebooks. The mushroom was across the cove from her house, so we each climbed in a kayak and pushed off for the opposite bank. Alas, when we arrived, the mushroom had become old and woody -- in just a week's time. I'll have to wait until next year to taste this variety (it should grow back in the same place; think of mushrooms as the "fruit" of the underground or in-the-tree fungus, which like a blueberry bush remains in the same place and puts out its fruit during the appropriate season each year).

Chokeberries, not to be confused with chokecherries.

Next to the chiicken-of-the-woods, I noticed some reddish-purple berries that my friend told me were chokeberries. I'd read about chokeberries but had not found any previously. We picked a few, and my friend tried making a little jam out of them, but they were dry and not nearly as tasty as those she'd tried before. Chokeberries, also known as aronia, are little known but are actually under extensive cultivation (in fact, I planted some bushes in my garden, but they haven't fruited yet). Many red-colored Old Orchard brand juices include aronia juice, for example. (I didn't have my camera with me on that trip, so I later took the kayak back out so I could get the photograph here; I also got a chance to play around with the new macro lenses I mentioned in my previous post! See the photo gallery for a close-up of the chokeberries.)

Our bowl of ground nuts, washed and ready to be sliced.

Although we didn't return with the chicken-of-the-woods or any tasty chokeberries, we did have a sizeable collection of ground nuts and a handful of chanterelles from our previous efforts. Despite the fact that we hadn't discussed food before leaving for Maine, the four of us seemed to have coordinated remarkably well. One of us had prepared a vegetable soup in a pressure cooker. Another had brought some pork butt, which we broiled and added to the soup. Another person had brought a beautiful salad. Someone whipped up a vinaigrette, a couple of us sliced the ground nuts, and someone sauteed the chanterelles in a little butter. Peeling the ground nuts turned out to be quite a chore, especially for the smaller ones, and we figured the skins probably had a lot of nutrients, anyway. We decided to run a little experiment and prepare one batch of peeled ground nuts and one batch of unpeeled. We sprinkled them generously with salt and sauteed them in a bit of olive oil until they were browned and crispy.

Peeled, sliced ground nuts in the center; unpeeled, sliced ground
nuts on the right; and yet-to-be-sliced ground nuts on the left.

Everyone thought both peeled and unpeeled ground nuts were tasty. Two of us preferred those with skins on, and two preferred them with skins off. I had tasted ground nuts before, but in case you missed my previous post, the taste is somewhat like a dry, nutty potato. As for the chanterelles, when I put the first one in my mouth, I think I made several various professions of pure tastebud ecstasy. All I can say beyond that is this: I have never tasted such a buttery, melt-in-your-mouth mushroom. And I'm hooked on mushroom hunting.

The rest of the meal was almost equally spectacular. We felt like we were dining in a five-star restaurant, and none of us had done a great deal of work to get the food to the dinner table. The foraging had been fun teamwork, and the meal itself had come together in no time.

I took one of the kayaks out onto the lake played around with  the new macro
 lenses my husband gave me for my birthday. I specifically wanted to take
  pictures of the chokeberries we'd found across the cove  the day before.

The next morning, after a breakfast of sourdough pancakes (a recipe I've used often on camping trips and that turned out to be almost as tasty when not cooked over a campfire) topped with my beach-plum, sumac jam, I went exploring to see what other edible plants I could find. As mentioned above, I took the kayak across the lake to photograph the chokeberries. On the way, I saw an egret take flight over the water and disappear beyond a recently felled tree (a beaver has taken up residence, at least until the homeowners get him moved elsewhere).

The trail under the powerlines was lined with bunchberries.

Next, I took a hike through the woods and ended up under some power lines. Along the way I found lots of jewelweed and was able to use my new camera lenses to take better pictures of the seedpods than I posted previously (see the photo gallery). Some of the seeds were even turning blue (I'd heard that underneath the seed coating was a bright robin's-egg blue, but any seeds I'd found thus far had been white). When the trail opened up into the sunny expanse under the power lines, I found fields of bunchberries, unfortunately without any berries left (then again, bunchberries are not that flavorful and so not suited for jellies or pies; I don't know what I'd actually do with that many bunchberries after I'd had a few trailside nibbles). Blueberry bushes also abounded, but the berries had long since disappeared.

Vines of the hog peanut

There were interesting plants closer to the house, too. Right in the yard, my friend showed me some hog-peanut vines. I'm sure this is one of those plants that, now that I've seen the real thing, I'll start finding in other places. The vines are as thin as sewing thread, and the leaves are grouped in threes. Although in some climates and locations (sunny ones) the plant makes aerial beans, in Maine we're unlikely to find anything but the underground beans. We dug up a couple of whitish beans about the size of lentils, but I don't think they were ripe. They didn't completely resemble the pictures in my book, and they didn't seem large enough to warrant any effort. My book says harvesting time is late fall, so I think we were a bit early.

Pickerelweed.

Of course, wintergreen was abundant in the woods and at the edges of the yard. And once, my friend thought she'd found wapato (whose tubers and young shoots are edible), but it turned out to be the inedible arrow arrum (see photo gallery). I found yet another wapato look-alike across the lake, but in that case it was pickerelweed (see photo at left). Pickerelweed is also edible (in the spring, when the leaves are young), but the hunt for wapato is still on (I did find wapato closer to home; see my August 5 post for pictures). There is certainly abundant wild food within wakling or paddling distance of the house, though. Perhaps next year we will be able to create an entirely foraged dinner!

My two youngest sons picking autumnberries.

Back at home, I checked on the autumnberry bushes at a particular parking lot where I'd noticed that bushes were ripening at different rates. Most of the autumnberries have ripened early this year, and what's more, the birds have beat me to most of the fruit. I was thus thrilled to discover several bushes still bent with the weight of their red, silver-speckled berries. I tasted one berry from each laden bush I found. Unfortunately, the quality of autumnberries (and many other wild fruits) can vary considerably from bush to bush, and most were too bitter to enjoy. I did find two bushes with tasty fruit, though. The further good news is that autumnberry bushes fruit prolifically, and it is easy to pick great quantities in a small amount of time by stripping the berries off the branches with one hand while you hold your bucket beneath the branch with the other hand. I took my two youngest boys to pick berries while my older son was in school one morning. My two-year-old's method consisted of picking a berry, putting it in his cup, and then transferring the just-picked berry from his cup to his mouth. My four-year-old, on the other hand, picked nearly as many berries as I did, and between the two of us, we brought home enough berries to make several sheets of fruit leather.

My middle son cranking the food mill.

This gave me the opportunity to try out the food mill my mother-in-law had given me (this was another birthday present). I cooked the berries briefly over the stove until their juices came out and the seeds began to separate. Then I dumped the whole potful into the food mill and cranked away. It was fast going at first, but then things seemed to get clogged. That's when I decided to read the remainder of the instructions and discovered that after the part about turning the crank clockwise, the directions advised reversing direction frequently to prevent clogging. We met with more success after that. I cranked a little, and my son cranked a little, and in no time we had a bowl full of seedless autumnberry puree. This was so much more efficent than my previous method of mashing stewed fruit through a strainer by hand! I wish I'd gotten a food mill years ago.

I spread the puree thinly on plastic sheets and placed them in my food dehydrator. Many hours later, out came autumnberry fruit leather that tasted just as good as the samples I'd gotten from expert forager Russ Cohen on a couple of recent guided walks. And it was definitely tastier than my first attempt, when I'd used sub-prime berries (I know, I know; I should have known better). I'm hoping to return to my collecting grounds tomorrow and get more berries for jam. Last year I made some delicious autumnberry jelly by using my steam juicer to get the juice; this year I think I'll try the food mill so I can get a puree and try a more substantial jam.

Photo Gallery

Ripe autumnberries, covered with silver speckles.

My two-year-old picking autumnberries.

Autumnberry seeds left over in the food mill after most of the pulp has fallen into the bowl below.

The tree the beaver felled is lying straight across the outlet where the cove joins the rest of the lake. If allowed to continue doing his work, this beaver is going to create a pond at this end of the lake and possibly flood some of the residents out of their homes.

Bunchberry plant, without berries. These were all over under the power lines.

Close-up of the cancer-fighting chaga mushroom, which looks exactly like a charred piece of wood.

Chokeberries (also known as aronia). Fresh chokeberries are astringent, but they are good when juiced. However, like many wild fruits, the flavor varies considerably from bush to bush, so it's essential to taste test. The fruit on this bush was dry and not enjoyable.

Cooked, peeled ground nuts (hopniss). Yum!

Hopniss (ground nut) tubers on the ground after collection.

I'm digging up ground nuts.

We found several of these interesting mushrooms near my friend's house. We figured out that they are some type of coral mushroom, many of which are edible and some of which are supposedly tasty. Some are not worth bothering about. One of my mushroom guides said that "none are dangerously poisonous." Because my friend's comfort level is a little higher than mine, she went ahead and tasted a small piece (raw) and thought it was good. From what I had read, I didn't think the promised taste was worth the risk of eating something I couldn't confidently identify (I was sure it was a coral mushroom, but there are many types of coral mushrooms). My friend stopped at one small bite and plans to get further information before consuming large quantiites or performing culinary experimentation.

Coral mushrooms are a chore to clean.

Hog-peanut vines covering a portion of my friend's yard near the woods.

Hog-peanut leaves in hand. Note the thread-like vine (the horiznontal stem; the others are blades of grass).

Jewelweed flower. I took this picture with one of my macro lenses. Jewelweed leaves are edible when they are young (well before the plant has produced flowers). The seeds, which burst out of an oblong seedpod when ripe, taste like walnuts.

Jewelweed comes in yellow and orange varieties, which I often find growing side by side. Jewelweed is known by a variety of other names, including touch-me-not and snapdragon.

Jewelweed seedpods. To harvest the seeds, you need to close your hand around the seedpod before touching it. That way, the pod will burst in your hand and deposit its seeds there instead of shooting them through the air.

As they ripen, jewelweed seeds turn a bright blue. These aren't that bright yet. I've peeled off the seed coat to reveal the blue color. This is merely interesting; it isn't necessary or worth your time to take off the seed coat before consuming the seeds.

Arrow arrum, which is not edible. Compare the venation of this leaf with that of wapato (which I found in some wetlands near my home; see next photo). There is a prominent midvein on arrow arrum, and smaller veins radiate off of this midvein (I'm not sure the smaller veins are visible in this photo, which I took from the kayak).

Wapato leaf. Notice how the veins all originate from a central point at the base of the leaf. The flowers are those of the wapato plant. Later, a small green ball will form in the place of the flowers.

Pickerelweed, unlike wapato or arrow arrum, has rounded lobes and concave leaves. The venation is also slightly different (the veins are not as prominent).

Pokeberries (the purplish-black ones are ripe). I promised to post a picture of ripe berries previously, so here they are. One of the women on my Maine trip said she had these growing at the end of her driveway, and she wanted to know whether she could eat them. The answer is no. They are DEADLY POISONOUS! They will make everything on the inside of your body try to get to the outside as quickly as possible through every available means. However, because the berries are so distinctive, now is a good time to locate the plants if you want to harvest the shoots, which are delicious, in the spring. (Please exercise extreme caution and consult a good guide book and/or experienced forager before attempting to eat the shoots, however; also see my April 27 post for more information.)

Wintergreen. I made a tea from the leaves in Maine but only got a few sips before I carelessly left my mug on the kitchen counter during the end-of-trip cleanup, and my tea got tossed down the drain by mistake. Oh well!