MYCOLOGY 101 - PART 1The Vice Guide to Really Fascinating American Mushrooms
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| PHOTOS AND TEXT BY DAVID FISCHER, mushroom expert and coauthor of Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America: A Field-to-Kitchen Guide and Mushrooms of Northeastern North America. Go to Americanmushrooms.com for about a zillion more mushroom fun-facts. |
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| It’s always exciting to find some chanterelles because they grow symbiotically on tree roots and can’t be cultivated. I found some the other day behind a cemetery. They’re very expensive to buy. Wegmans, a huge grocery store near my house, has them for $39.99 a pound, presumably picked wild from the Pacific Northwest. The Golden Chanterelle [pictured] in particular has a wonderful fruity odor, much like apricots, and it tastes delicious. But please note that all wild mushrooms must be cooked before you eat them! |
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Stinkhorns smell like rotting flesh and are very phallic looking. The Impudent Stinkhorn [pictured] almost looks like it has a testicle down at the base, and the Elegant Dog Stinkhorn looks like, yup, a canine penis.
Believe it or not, when they’re still in the egg stage, stinkhorns are considered delicacies in some parts of the world. They slice them open, and what’s eventually going to become stinky slime is, at this early stage, high in sugar and very sweet. |
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| These are umbrelloid mushrooms with a cap and stem, but instead of gills on the underside they have a layer of downward pointing tubes. It looks like sponge because you’re seeing the open ends of the tubes. The cool thing about them is that they bruise blue. If you break off a piece it turns from yellow to blue before your eyes due to oxidation. Some of them make great edibles, but others are poisonous. No boletes are psychoactive, though. |
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TO BE CONTINUED:
MYCOLOGY 101 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
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