Yeah, like everybody else I cut my teeth on boletes and expanded slowly over the years.
What bothers me is that there are more poisonous berries in Alaska (some downright deadly) than there are poisonous mushrooms, but you don’t seem to see the same hysteria around people trying berries. Nobody is saying you should avoid all berries that are yellow, or that come from canes, or that grow on the left side of birch trees.
Don’t know it with 100% certainty, don’t eat it. Heck the amanita family, the source of 95% of mushroom deaths in the planet; the Caesar mushroom (Amanita caesarea) is ridiculously easy to identify with 100% certainty; orange cap, bright yellow gills, bright yellow stem, no polka dots, same egg sack as other amanitas. Bonus tip: the closest lookalike has a yellow cap instead of orange, pass on those.
I do know a lady who was an experienced mushroom picker got poisoned the first day she went to Alaska for vacation and picked up some mushrooms in the woods. I read that many mushrooms in Alaska came from Asia in ancient times before the land bridge was flooded.
My wife sent me a link to this report of toxicity ascribed to consumption of undercooked morels… one that most folks consider to be quite safe to consume… but I don’t eat any mushrooms uncooked…
All too true. Something about wild mushrooms makes them weird and scary to a lot of people. There was poison hemlock all along the railroad tracks in the part of Vancouver where I used to live. Super deadly. So easy for some kid to stick it in their mouth. Never heard anything about it. How about potatoes? Leave them out long enough to turn green and they become poisonous. No big deal. Or the various ways you can poison yourself just by preparing food wrong. Botulinum is the deadliest toxin known to man and you can get it by eating improperly canned food.
I think a lot of it is lack of exposure and familiarity. Mushroom hunting is kind of a niche thing unless you’re from eastern Europe or northern Asia. I’m comfortable with it because I grew up with it (thanks Polish grandpa!) but most people don’t. It’s easy to start doubting if you have to self teach based on book descriptions. Is that Caesar’s mushroom cap really orange, or is it yellowish? etc.
Oh man you should eat those golden chantrelles! The wrinkly false gills are a safe identifier. And they are one of the species that are really worth it. So tasty.
That is extremely common; I know the lookalikes of the mushrooms I target in my neck of the woods, I have no idea what they may be elsewhere. When I go on vacation I looooove going mushroom hunting. To learn that is not to eat.
Our Omphalotus olearius, jack-o’-lantern mushroom, can come pretty close to look like a chanterelle. Still, for my neck of the woods they are impossible to confuse because simply put chanterelles do not grow here. I can see mushroom lovers having seen pictures of huge chanterelle flushes from Alaska South East and thinking that they just hit the jackpot in South Central. More than one have learned the difference the hard way.
I found some Chanterelles growing in a Seattle park,but wanted to be sure.I sent photos to a mushroom expert and was told they were,but the false kind.
Shuimitao,yours do look like the real ones.
Here’s a video,about how to tell the difference.
Another,showing the difference concerning the Jack o’ Lantern
Here the id is easy; if it looks like a chanterelle it isn’t
Well down by Girdwood, the northernmost end of the Tongass national forest (northernmost rain forest in the world) we do get the tiny Cantharellus minor. They are too delicate for most dishes but I like to use them on seafood doria and rice soups. The only reason I target them is because they are in the same area as one of my favorite mushroom ever, hedgehogs.
I love hedgehogs. Just as good as chantrelles flavor wise and also more available in my area. Cleaning them can be a trick though.
The most reliable wild mushrooms in the part of BC where I live are lobsters and suillus. Neither of which are considered top tier by most but I like 'em. For “better” species like morels, chantrelles and boletus edulis we need rain at times of the year that are often very dry like April, August and September. But the lobsters come up almost no matter how dry it is and suillus show up in the late fall when moisture is more reliable.
The maybe-gypsy-mushroom I found that one time was at very high elevation. I guess they must like a climate similar to yours.
@Shuimitao, ours look more like chanterelles than those.
@pine, I have to go down to the forest at Girdwood in order to find hedgehogs which is about 2 hours from where I’m at. They don’t grow on my immediate neck of the woods. Then again that place is a rain forest so the mycology you get to see is breath taking.
Every year they run a fungus fair where you get to see tables full of id’ed mushrooms and can sign up to go with mycologists mushroom foraging. It is awesome when you can turn to a pro and ask them on the spot “can I eat this?”. This year my focus is to learn about mushrooms for dyeing fabrics.
Speaking of which yesterday I picked this dyer’s polypore, Phaeolus schweinitzii. Looking forward to find more.
Pine, there are plenty of Gypsy Mushrooms in the North Shore Mountains. I see them regularly when I’m looking for other types of mushrooms, I’ll try attaching a photo from Oct 26, 2014, from somewhere along Nelson Creek in West Vancouver. I tried them years ago and didn’t find them to be as good as Chanterelles or Hedgehogs, which are available at the same time; so, I don’t look for them or harvest them.
Good to know! I must have passed over those as a more difficult gilled mushroom back when I was living in Vancouver and less experienced. There are just so many good and easy to ID species in that area. I had secret spots for boletes, chantrelles and shaggy parasols, the last being my favorite.
I agree on caution. (But, inflation hitting food, free food from the forest sounds better and better all the time.)
Have a couple mushroom books…but still only have 4 or 5 that I comfortably identify and pick. And other than morels, the timing is not dependable as to best time to look for them.
I found most mushroom books to be close to worthless. I remember the last one I got, very comprehensive and thick. I did a complete pass just looking at the pictures to see how many I could recognize and i ended up id’ing just five with amanita muscaria being one of them. Books that show you one or two pictures of any given mushroom are not good enough.
My goal is for every year to learn five new mushrooms. I already have the candidates I want to learn, mushrooms I keep seeing that I don’t know what they are. Now, just because I don’t know them it doesn’t mean I haven’t been learning about them. Mushroom morphology can be all over the place so when I spot a mushroom I keep seeing I still pull them, smell them, taste them, and become familiar with it’s features. Eventually I bring a batch home and work on the actual ID and lookalikes but by that point I’m pretty good at knowing them in the wild.
I have been foraging for a few years and I’m still leery of gilled mushrooms. Russulas are easy, if they taste bitter and peppery avoid. I learned gypsies because I had the opportunity to pick them while taking a walk with a mycologist, that was worth hours of trying to Google them and at the end still not feel confident.
Beside the Chicken of the Forest, I consumed some wild Morels Mushroom. My girl went hiking with her friend and they saw some people picking up wild mushroom. They given her some and she went hunting for them too. She took some home and wanted so consume them, but I go hold it for a minute before for eating them. I study them online and they was indeed Morels and not the false Morels, which can be deadly. The only true way to tell is to cut them in half and exam the internal of the mushroom. That’s what we did and they tasted creamy.
I’ve learned with chicken, take only the outside edge of each “shelf”, it will grow a second crop for later if you leave the base attached where it’s growing. also it’s less likely to make sensitive people feel sick, the outside edge.
my pink oysters are just starting to pop up. I have an experimental morel patch going- ash from the barbecue and smoker are mixed into wood chip and pine straw, I’ll be covering with leaves come fall. I inoculated with slurry from local morels.
there’s a raised bed I’ve got that was covered in inky caps this past spring, they’re just gorgeous to me. not food but cool to look at
living in the pnw for the last near 30 years, I relearned all about mushrooms. it’s different here than where I grew up. truffles and chanterelles are good here, sulfur/chicken, lobsters and morels are the easiest to ID with less lookalikes.
I grow oysters and winecap now in the garden beds. but I like to go looking
