Not really. Gyromitra esculenta, the really poisonous one, books love to bring up as a lookalike, actually looks like a waterlogged brain. Morels have a pitted texture. They are impossible to confuse unless somehow, with no idea of what you are looking for, you want to convince yourself that the blob in the ground is a morel.
I can see how Verpa bohemica can be trickier to the untrained eye but it would still be a 100% self inflicted wound, the most cursory lookup would show you that it is not a morel. That one would not kill you but would certainly make you regret it. Funny enough it is edible, if you boil it and dump the water before cooking it.
Cutting them is my safest bet. Yeah, if you are confident then you donât need to cut them. Though, I heard that even high end restaurant cause food poisoning or reaction serving morels. So, for my safety I wanted to make 100% sure itâs a healthy morels mushroom. Not some mutation or bacteria infected inside the mushrooms. Plus, make sure there is no wax or spider web, and that itâs symmetric to each other.
What Iâm trying to convey is this: 100% confidence only comes with familiarity with the mushroom. Once you become familiar with it there should be 0 doubt in your mind, which is when you are ready to harvest then for the table.
There are mushrooms that took me two full seasons before I became confident enough to eat them, one of them was gypsy mushrooms, Cortinarius caperatus. Brown gilled mushrooms with several poisonous lookalikes. I learned them one season and harvested them just for id purposes, then harvested some more next season, again for id purposes. Now I know them and love them.
Also I harvest them only in my neck of the woods. I know what looks like them here on my state, I donât know what may look like then on the east coast.
Yeah, they are mildly poisonous raw. And actually, false morels can be eaten if cooked properly but theyâre deadly poisonous if you donât cook out all gyromitrin, so itâs really not worth the risk.
Fun fact, the toxicity from false morels comes from gyromitrin converting to monomethylhydrazine in the body, which is a type of rocket fuel.
You have verification of more than one or two rare poisining from morel mushrooms? (Regardles of the high or low end of the restaurant industry).
Seems like a topic for a British or American tabloid you might see at
a checkout lane someplace. Some of the stories they run to sell their yellow rag!
To everybody who wondering about edibility of the mushrooms. Several rules here.
Never ever take somebodyâs word for mushroom edibility unless the person has years of experience and HOLDS the mushroom in his/her hands and staying at the place where it was growing. You canât use picture for exact identification. There is also smell, environment, spore color, change of flesh color and a speed of this change and many other property that is difficult or impossible to see on the picture.
Mushroom takes a lot from environment and can be bad just because they grew in a wrong place.
There are many types of mushrooms, but from ones that have stems there are two groups: the one that have âspongeâ under their caps and ones that have gills. From the first group there are mushrooms that not edible, bitter, smell bad or can give you stomachache. But there is no such bad ones that can kill you(if you otherwise healthy). All the deadly ones belong to a second group - with gills. So if you are a beginner or moved from one area to another stick with ones that have sponge. I am picking mushrooms since 4 years old, my father wrote a book called â100 mushrooms of Russiaâ, but still, when I moved to US I studied local mushroom books and decided to stick with sponge mushrooms.
Some people just canât eat mushrooms, so if you been fed mushrooms and feel sick do not panic right away, but go to emergency room even if everybody else are fine.
Wild mushrooms are heavy proteins and need to be cooked for at least 20 min.
There are mushrooms that kill your âquietlyâ, the symptoms start couple weeks later.
and the last one - it is not really recommended to can mushrooms at home due to botulism concerns.
Look, three people eat them. One get sick bad, one a little, one was OK. It doesnât call poisons mushroom. People often overlook mold on the ]mushroom. The mold itself can be the poison or they under cooked the mushrooms, and so on. I wouldnât put a stamp âdangerousâ on something that was eaten by generations because a single case of bad stomach.
It depends on the compound and for a lot of those some are just more susceptible than others. Cooking then denatures a lot of those compounds. I break in hives for a week if I eat raw shitake mushrooms.
Heck lots of beans are epic blow out through both ends level of poisonous unless cooked. Sadly people donât know that you are not supposed to slow cook beans at too low a temperature because the compound doesnât break down on that environment. One of the worst offenders? Good old kidney beans.
Same way you develop certainly on anything, practice. I just added a few mushrooms to my eating repertoire but I have been harvesting and learning about them since last year.
Iâm looking forward to chat with the mycologists that will be on hand at the girdwood fungus fair. Iâll learn a few more, harvest them just to get familiar with them, and hold on eating them until I develop the certainty.
Just Google ârestaurant âmorelâ poisoningâ. You will get dozens of reports, many about a restaurant named Daveâs Sushi in Montana. Most of the reports blame raw or undercooked morels.
As I said, beans and quite a few other foods are highly toxic when raw and undercooked. I donât get why mushrooms get to be so special when many other foods are the same.
Actually I do get it: the world can be divided into cultures that cherish mushrooms and those that are leery of them. Former British and Spaniard colonies are in the leery column, other European and Asian cultures are in the loving it column. On the latter group hearing about a mushroom poisoning registers the same as any other food poisoning, while on the former it reinforces that mushrooms are dangerous.
think a part of that is just what mushrooms were around where the culture formed. like thereâs so many more edible mushrooms in some places than in others. and more poisonous ones in other places.
I take the same caution with berries as with mushrooms. I donât eat what I canât be sure of, foraging. and I allow some inedible or poisonous ones to grow at my place, but pick or cut them out of spots where the dogs could get them etc
There is still a profound cultural bias. There are probably more poisonous berries around here but mention berry picking and mushroom picking and you will have completely different reactions. For one there is an assumption of safe, the other an assumption of danger.
Mention the same in one of the fungi loving countries and the most likely reaction is âoh! Bring me some!â.
Talking about mushroom, I have a friend that told me mushrooms that are grow on a tree are safer than the one that have been grow on the ground. Myth or fact?
Get him some pholiotas. It wonât kill him but it would disabuse him of that silly notion in a hurry. Just make sure you donât confuse them with Death caps, Amanita phalloides. He would not be around long to regret it.
This isnât too useful on its own. There are plenty of edible mushrooms that grow on the ground and at least one deadly mushroom (that I know of) that grows on rotting wood, galerina marginata: Galerina marginata - Wikipedia
However, in combination with other characteristics, the material a mushroom is growing on can be important for identifying the species.
