Shroomin on a Sunday Afternoon...

King Boletes or Porcini (Wikimedia Commons).

Ha! The title is a red herring. It is not what you think. You were thinking, He means ingesting psychoactive mushrooms? And the answer is...no. Not that interesting. Or maybe more interesting to different people. Who knows.

I'm a wild-food nut, as anyone who knows me is rather nonplussed to discover. Even worse, I'm a bit of a mushroom fanatic. Every Spring and Fall I start getting a weird urge to walk out in the wet and buggy woods and poke around for hideous toadstools. I can't help it. Everything from Chicken-of-the-Woods to Giant Puffballs are on the menu here. The weirder, the better.

This August blessed us with a tremendous amount of rain, meaning the outdoors are virtually inaccessible due to the preponderance of mosquitoes...but to a shroom-hunter, it means a bonanza. Spring is generally disappointing in Michigan; I've never had much luck morel-hunting, since they never seem to grow where they should, instead appearing in such bizarre spots as my parents' backyard, and then only every fifteen years or so. But Fall mushrooms are much more dependable. The weather is stable, at least in September, being clear and hottish in the daytime, cool at night, and with a low dew-point. Mushrooms like it moist at night when they're growing; but daytime mugginess causes them to rot quickly. Most shroom hunting has to be done at the crack of dawn.

I was on my Sunday afternoon constitutional, walking the River Trail down by a certain park (sorry, gotta keep my shroom patch secret), when I thought I'd check out the picnic area. I'd seen Bolete mushrooms there a couple of years ago, among the oaks - not a massive amount, but some. I got off the trail near and started poking around.

Within five minutes, I'd found a bonanza of Boletes.

Huzzah for Boletes!

The patches kept getting bigger the further I explored...

 Boletes are common around hardwoods, especially oak and hickory. They're easy to spot, since they're often large, and identification is a snap - suede brown is the default color, and the underside of the cap looks like a sponge. Just about all the Boletes are edible, except some of the wilder-looking crimson ones, which are easy to avoid. Certain types are prized in Europe, especially the King Bolete or Porcini, which is called beliy grib in Russian. This mushroom saved many lives during the siege of Stalingrad, when it was virtually the only food available.

Back to the park...whether or not any of these are Porcinis is up for debate, since some species of Boletes are difficult to tell apart; I do know that Cracked-top Boletes were in residence, as well as the Superman Bolete, a reddish cap with bright yellow undersides that stains an alarming shade of blue when cut (it's edible). There were so many of the darn things, I got to be a little choosy: caps that were wormy, soft, or shedding spores I left on the ground, to help continue the species.

Emeticus.

Boletes aren't the only kinds of mushrooms in this habitat. I also saw some nice patches of emeticus, a small, low, apple-red mushroom with deep gills. Emeticus, as its Latin name suggests, causes vomiting and diarrhea if ingested...powdered, it used to be used like Ipecac. Its cousin the Charcoal-Burner, a plumper, dark-purple variety, is edible; thankfully the two are pretty easy to tell apart.

Lactaria species.

There were also some Lactarias (pictured right), mushrooms that exude a milky sap when cut; some species are edible, but others will make you sick. I don't know about the edibility of these; I'll have to do more research.

We might as well wade into the prejudices surrounding mushrooms, while we're here. People tend to think all wild mushrooms are a) deadly, or b) hallucinogenic. As usual, over-caution has snowballed into superstition. The vast majority of fungi are simply inedible - like wood, or rocks. A large coterie are useful for various purposes - medicines and the like - with a smaller contingent being edible. A handful are edible and tasty and easy to identify, like morels or Chicken-of-the-Woods. A very, very few are hallucinogenic. And of course, like snakes, a tiny slice of the myriad species are toxic to humans, and of that a very, very few are killers.

Panther Cap.

 In our case we must discuss the Amanitas, a group of beautiful, conspicuous and sometimes destructive mushrooms. Pictured on the right is the Panther Cap, a close relative of the fairy-tale white-spotted red Fly Agaric. Amanita pantherina is sort of the ugly cousin of the Flying Mushroom, both physically and pharmacologically; ingestion can cause hallucinations, but more likely convulsions and coma, with a good possibility of death. And apparently they taste delicious. Go figure.

Destroying Angel.

 On the left is the related but vaguely-defined Destroying Angel; basically, any pure-white Amanita. Its name is not a pretense. Ingesting half a cap leads to liver and kidney failure through - get this - DNA damage. The Destroying Angel will literally break your genes for having the temerity to eat it. Thankfully quick intervention can avert agonizing death, but symptoms don't show up until 24 hours after ingestion, and even with treatment, the damage to your organs is irreversible.

More Panther Caps...

 Yeah, I can't help sensationalizing a bit...I guess it's part of the thrill of mushroom hunting. There's a certain aura of wood-witch weirdness about the whole thing. Fungi give people the creeps, perhaps with good reason: they're not like us, and yet - they are  like us. Fungi are actually more closely related to animals than plants; their epidermis is made of chitin, like insects; their structures are composed of proteins, like muscle.

And more Panther Caps.

But that's where the similarities end. The caps themselves are merely fruiting bodies - the real organism lives in its substrate as a dense web of filaments called hyphae, which take up nutrients, often from other organisms. Boletes are actually benign tree parasites, while the Amanitas are symbiotes, giving back some of what they suck out of their host tree (weird, huh? The edible ones are the lazy deadbeats here...). The caps produce and distribute spores, which are like hermaphroditic sex cells that need to make contact before they can begin weaving a new fungal web.

So yes, mushrooms are weird; but they are also essential to soil development and plant growth. The hyphal network actually transports nutrients from one area to another. Fungi are able to break down just about anything, even oil, and can suck up radioactivity in such places as Chernobyl. Nutritionally speaking, fungi are chock-full of protein and minerals that a growing body needs. By just eating grocery-store mushrooms all the time (which, by the way, are bland as hell), we miss out on a rich panoply of flavors and experiences provided for us by nature.

A huge Bolete, sunning itself. Blissfully unaware...

 Now, I'm not saying you should just stomp out in the woods and start picking the darn things right left and center; you'll need a good mushroom book for your region, and most important of all a woods-wise individual who's been eating these things for years. And even then, you need to be careful that you don't have an allergic reaction, or eat a raw mushroom, or ingest alcohol with certain species, which will ruin your week. Remember: have fun, be careful.

Well, ain't that pretty?

Back to my Sunday hunt: I managed to find a half-buried Panda Express bag to haul home my harvest (just a little dirt; I lined it with dry oak-leaves). I picked about ten pounds' worth, and left plenty for someone else to find. That many Boletes will dress out to about five pounds, once you get rid of the stems and gills. Pictured on the right is half of my harvest in a colander, with gloves for comparison. On top you can see a smallish Superman bolete, already blushing blue on its yellow underside.

A flapjack? A catcher's mitt?
A huge Pita...?

My prize of the day was a veritable Sombrero of a Bolete, pictured left with the traditional tableau of knife, beer-can, and Osage orange for comparison.

Boletes are easy to clean, and smell yeasty, like fresh bread. I cooked up a couple of them in butter and garlic - not the best way, but still decent (Kudos to my roommate Joe for trying them out). I found some good recipes for  them online, so I don't ruin the experience by deep-frying to poor things.

Hopefully I'll find more mushrooms popping up as the season wears on. I'm still on the lookout for some good Lion's Mane mushrooms to cook with milk and Dinty Moore beef stew - you end up with a delicate broth, and the mushrooms have a fishlike texture.

At any rate, wish me luck with the Bolete recipes! I'll freeze some for deer season, and throw them in when I do my Venison roast. And to all you shroomers out there: Happy Hunting!

Rick Out.