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I don't actually want to explain mushrooms at length because I am not a properly trained mycologist, so far what I've been taught and taught myself would lead me to summarize mushrooms as being more complicated and more dangerous than learning to identify trees, or even how to carve wood or use trees for medicinal purposes, firewood, etc. But risk and reward as always seems to scale. If you become mildly interested in mushrooms you can take nice pictures of them and if you are reckless you can also die, if you are willing to slowly learn a whole lot about mushrooms you will have a lot of free food for the rest of your life with minimal risk. They also have other uses, and I'm not talking about chaga tea supposedly fighting cancer, or any other medicinal poo poo that cannot be proven. In terms of drug properties, I think we should limit the thread to talking only about the legal and not that fun for most people mushrooms that contain psychoactive chemicals. If you're interested in learning about Psilocybins that topic already has a home in TCC. I am lazy and will do one species per post, and you all have to do work and provide similar pictures and anecdotes, questions, etc, because I am only familiar with a few dozen mushrooms.  This is a batch of Chlorophyllum Rhacodes, and I will regret not googling how to spell that soon. The common name is the shaggy parasol, due to it's parasol shape at maturity, and that it is a shaggy variation of a more popular and known edible Macrolepiota procera, the parasol mushroom. It's good to use both names as the common names vary by state and country just like any slang in any language. As shown by the Latin binomial they're not as similar as once thought, and it's classification was changed. The shaggy parasol is actually closer related to Chlorophyllum molybdites, which is twice as big and brown only in it's center, and will make you very sick but has killed zero adults on record. Below them is a leather Rawlings baseball and I find about one per season while hiking, they are not edible but are worth about 15 dollars and can be thrown, like a baseball and caught much like a baseball as well. There were a ton of those but this was my first time actually eating mushrooms and not taking pictures of them, so I only took about a dozen. Typically you don't want to harvest young mushrooms, as in the bulbous state they're harder to identify and more likely to be confused with deadly mushrooms. Most deadly mushroom incidents, or best case scenario leading to severe liver damage are from Amanitas. This family of mushroom include both the Destroying Angel and the Death Cap. It also contains a lot of species that are edible, and some that are legal but not fun psychoactives. A good general rule is to avoid amanitas until you're pretty far into the hobby. I cooked them in butter because the internet told me to, and I cooked them for a good ten minutes on medium high until crispy on the outside and soft just on the inside, tastes and smells like a strange but delicious health food alternative to bacon. So far I've just been stirring them in with potato soup and with brown rice, so that they're very much the highlight of the meal. Some people throw them on a steak which makes no sense to me because a steak already tastes like a steak.  When taking pictures of mushrooms to identify and possibly consume, this might be the most important angle that exists. Notice the "bulb" (volva) is included, the stem, the ring from where the bulb grew into a large cap but left it's ring, and an upshot of the bottom of the cap are all visible. Some mushrooms have gills underneath, some have pores. And of course many variations lead to many other words, but you'll need to look at these to not die. (edit) I am a huge idiot and half the volva is actually somewhat obscured by pine needles and even off camera, so that picture is actually a third of an inch bad. Bruising and cutting the mushroom also help to identify it. C. Rhacodes "bruises" reddish to orange when you push your finger into it or cut it, and then that color will fade to brown rather quickly. This is a key to identifying this mushroom especially if you are too lazy to do a spore print, or living out in the woods. That's a lot of words, so that sums up one mushroom as far as I care too. I'm in the northeast United States of America (capital of the world) and there are a ton of these around here. Check pine forests. They're also less likely to be sprayed with lawn chemicals than the more convenient locations. General logic applies here, identify twice, cook thoroughly and eat a small amount and wait several hours before going to town on the rest. extra stout fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Nov 11, 2016 |
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Nov 11, 2016 18:27
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Post reserved for popular books and websites on mushrooms that my friends and professors have read, but I have not and will tell you to anyway: https://www.amazon.com/Mushrooms-Demystified-David-Arora/dp/0898151694 https://www.amazon.com/National-Audubon-American-Mushrooms-Hardcover/dp/0394519922 More very vague and general tips: Mushrooms are not trees. When you step on one, you should probably not have done that but you have not killed some great life force. Mushrooms put out millions or billions of spores, and underground they sort of gently caress each other in a weird complicated way that I don't remember most of the words to. Stringy lines form, hyphae? I believe, and they become huge underground webs called a mycelium. The physical "mushroom" above ground is a fruiting body, a product of this. Much like acorns are to an oak tree, mushrooms are to this mycelium. Unless conditions are poor or the structure is entirely ruined underground, more will pop up. Some species of mushroom in the right conditions see their entire fruiting body cycle in a single day. Nothing is visible, then something, then it grows large and peaks, and can even wilt and die in the same day again depending on minerals, soil including poo poo, amount of sunlight rain etc. Because of this, there are many arguments about mushroom harvesting. Special knives exist that have a fine brush on the other end to clean the mushroom, as most people find rinsing them with water will make them soggy and that's flavor running down your drain with the water. The knife end is probably unnecessary, just a tradition and one more shiny thing to collect. The truth is you need the volva the safely identify a mushroom, and even once you remove this you have not harmed the mycelium, under proper conditions entirely new fruiting bodies will rise through the earth, sometimes an inch away sometimes fifty feet. Take pictures first if you're an amateur, once you confirm an ID it's up to you if you think another mushroom forager will be along before the other fruiting bodies die. I took only a quarter of the healthy shaggy parasols I found, which is stupid because no one around here is into mushroom hunting beyond a few retired professors. I'll go back and find the ones I passed up on gross, and new ones alive soon. Still, this can be good to consider if you live in an area with a lot of cool people or find too much of a mushroom for you to realistically eat within a couple of days. I know absolutely nothing about the safest way to properly dry and can mushrooms, and I don't really care to find out. I'm not preparing for hiding in a bunker in an imagined WWIII, I'm preparing my mind to always find more food when I need food. extra stout fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Nov 11, 2016 |
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Nov 11, 2016 18:29
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thatguy posted:it's been a few years since I went to a seminar about this that a mycologist nearby ran, but I thought he said fruiting only happened when their food source ran out. Is that not the case? I've never heard that before, the most predictable trigger for new mushrooms (for most species) is always rain, or any source of water. Keep in mind fungii as a whole is really too broad of a topic to summarize even if we have an expert post here, just compare the common puffball with the mushrooms I posted in the OP and in one case the "fruit" or specifically the edible part is a bag of spores, and in the other it's fleshy tissue that has often already released most of it's spores before people eat it. There could be some species that function that way, but I don't know of them.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:44
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Free Market Mambo posted:Chaga, Inonotus obliquus Thanks for posting, I saw your picture in another thread and hoped you'd post chaga here. How does chaga tea taste? It's strange to me that most people don't seem to believe that it's a magic healer, no one talks about the taste and yet the value remains there and there is a certain status with a good chaga find. Any tips for identifying chaga vs. a burl? Obviously if chaga is present, the tree is already in some sense dying and not entirely solid, but if it's a burl mistaken for chaga what happens is someone cuts or hacks it off, the tree maybe dies and maybe lives a while, and now they have a burl they don't have a use for unless they're a woodworker with tough hands. In your picture you can see the iconic orangey insides almost bursting at the seems, but in normal sized/smaller cases I don't think this is common. Also just to make sure no one gets too confused: I haven't heard anyone call chaga tinder fungus in my neck of the woods, but they do call Fomes fomentarius the tinder conk, and it is as hard as an actual shell in some cases. This one was harder than the dead log by a long shot. People take one of the layers, I imagine the inside? And somehow press it into a material used as a fabric to make hats and things out of. Looks leathery online, I've never seen anyone actually use it in person.  These are kind of rare around here, most dead birch are loaded up and down with those birch polypores however, which are more like a consistent rubber texture and not soft on the inside nor hard like a shell outside. They're also used as tinder, razor strops if anyone alive still has both the hobbies combined, and rarely spoken of as a food even though they're probably edible. edit Also Otzi the Iceman the famous preserved corpse had both tinder conk and birch polypore on him, but beyond assuming they were both used as tinder or tough chewy food we'll probably never know why.
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Nov 13, 2016 00:55
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Epitope posted:
LoTR gifs should be a staple of this subforum, thank you Free Market Mambo posted:As for identifying chaga, the clearest thing is how black it is, it also tends to grow in more "parasitic" shapes than a burl. If you're still not sure, you can try breaking off a bit by hand. Chaga should come loose, a burl will not. Thanks, I've seen people claim it's as hard as a burl but based on everything I know about wood and burls I assumed this was false, not intentionally, some people just have baby hands I suppose. You don't have PMs, is there anywhere we can chat and you can become my very first friend? Beyond that I'd like to bother you to find out as much as you can about traditional birch skis, but that is for another thread. extra stout fucked around with this message at 08:07 on Nov 17, 2016 |
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Nov 17, 2016 08:04
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ookuwagata posted:
Thanks for reviving the thread with a great post. I have yet to stumble upon porcinis and am jealous of those especially. How do you prepare them? And do any of you have any luck with finding winter oysters?
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Dec 21, 2016 10:12
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Squalid posted:Who here grows mushrooms? I wanna do that... too lazy to collect. Anything besides button simple enough to manage in my basement? I've seen multiple people recommend these and if you look up the price of oyster mushrooms at most farmer's markets it's actually not much of an expense, the only real downside is they seem to not grow too big. If anyone has any ideas about how to maximum a harvest on one of those I'd be interested, or if trying to plant the kit minus box in the back yard is worth doing or probably has a pretty low success rate of preserving the mycelium. https://backtotheroots.com/products/mushroomfarm ookuwagata posted:Haha, I keep forgetting that I always have a knife on me for cutting them off. Not to begin another debate of mushroom opinions but I've never seen any evidence that you can hurt the mycelium by improperly picking, cutting, or ripping a fruiting body of a mushroom out of the ground. I think no matter how experienced someone is, it's probably best to dig up the full body including the volva on at least a few of the mushrooms. Even then there's some small chance you're in an area that's penetrated by two similar looking species and will gently caress up your stomach or kidneys. edit (replying to Epitope) The dirt part is of course true, but that's what a mushroom brush is for, or the sleeve of an old sweater. extra stout fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Dec 30, 2016 |
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Dec 29, 2016 22:28
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Agreeing with Epitope on all three, the first isn't identifiable (and in general most people will want to see a second shot of the gills or pores underneath the cap, if not also a third of the volva) the second looks a lot like the tasty king boletes posted not long before you (but you've come a bit late to harvest it) and the third is an amanita, probably the poisonous amanita cokeri. I took pictures for several months before harvesting or eating any, it's a great segue into free food even if slow learning.
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Jan 1, 2017 18:23
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Epitope posted:The third is an amanita. A lot of these are quite poisonous. The red one in Mario (amanita muscaria) you can hallucinate with, but you get liver damage or something. The destroying angel is pretty metal If there is any liver damage it isn't the kind that puts you in the hospital as a lot of people (legally, they're legal most places) do trip on them. I find them interesting but I'm not super convinced, most people describe it as being something more similar to being very drunk or on benzos and with bad stomach pains than a 'traditional' mushroom trip. Siberian eskimos, inuits or whatever they are called (it's 6 am) would supposedly give them to their caribou/reindeer to eat, then collect and drink their piss. This is because the known active drugs are mostly ibotenic acid and muscimol, and the deer are metabolizing the somewhat bad chemical for you. They would be drugging deers so they can drink piss and make their own trip more enjoyable and less groggy. I've heard it claimed this is the origin story of santa's reindeer though I'm not entirely convinced. CopperHound posted:I recently started taking pictures of mushrooms with the hope of identifying them later. I wish I saw this thread earlier so I would know to make sure to take note of the bulb, ring, and what they feel like. Do any of these look definitely edible, deadly, or Don't eat any of these without researching further but since this is fun I'll wing more guesses: both the one filled with fluffy green powder (spores, it stores all of them in there unlike most mushrooms where they're under the cap and drop after a few days) and the first picture are likely lycoperdon perlatum, the common puffball. Very edible and appreciated when fully white and dense in the middle, and not opened up, grey or green. Mostly a safe mushroom to choose as your first one to harvest, though some people with poor eyesight and extreme laziness have mistaken them before for young amanitas (those big flat ones that are often poisonous) because many amanitas are stubby ball shapes when very young. There's a hundred difference in them, but if you don't carefully look for any of them it can be an issue. Also while puffballs are mostly beloved food, a few are bad if I recall the pigskin puffball is bad for you but it's spores and guts are always black, making it fit within the rule of 'don't eat it' even if you mistake it for an old common puffball. The same is true of giant puffballs, basically they're all white semi-dense and foamy until they go bad where they become a grey or green mush instead. The orange ones could be chanterelles but I would guess are more likely the toxic jack-o-lantern mushroom, omphalotus olearius. (I accidentally didn't quote these and will check back tomorrow, time to sleep) The brown ones with the white underside are either delicious oyster mushrooms or not, they have a few look alikes and the top of those look off to me, but they do each have their own stem that curves and ties into a group, and their gills on most species do follow the stem down and are ringless. Luvcow posted:Awesome! Thank you both of you. Always curious what the names of the things around me are, I'm familiar with most of the birds, animals, trees and wildflowers etc. but when it comes to the mushrooms I have no idea. Thank you for making this thread OP. Thank you for posting in it! Glad the idea didn't die after all. extra stout fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Jan 2, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 12:44
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to you guys?
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Squalid posted:The amanita piss works regardless of what kind of animal piss you're drinking, if you don't have any reindeer around (don't drink piss people). I have joked about doing this with local farm animals but I think it borders too close on animal abuse to try it. Also drinking piss even if you have the right species of animal to complete the ancient tradition is pretty gross I imagine? This is why I regret mentioning muscaria, now this will be known as the thread where people talk about drinking piss. edit Ok after reading the erowid sentence "she pretended to resist" I would say now is a good time to make the thread about all mushrooms that are not psilocybins or amanita muscaria extra stout fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 3, 2017 20:11
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Finally posting the results of my first yield from that little $23 oyster mushrooms for kids type of grow kit, it was a fun experience and I learned a lot. Ultimately you would have to turn this thing into a part time job to get the yield to compete with the price of even paying someone for freshly harvested wild or basement oyster mushrooms, but if you like science projects or (like me) don't live near a place with a mushroom market, I'm voting worth it. Snapped some pictures. Slit a + shape into the knife and removed a thin layer of the mycelium that already formed before starting, soaked in water slit side down for 8+ hours. Kept it at about 50 something degrees (F) which in hindsight was too cold. Took about two weeks for growth possibly because of this. Oh and pinning of the fruiting bodies never came even close to the open slit part of the package, so had I not tilted the thing out of the box I never would have even noticed many dozens of fruiting bodies trying to grow through the tight plastic corners. Cut that open with a knife and gave them some air, many sprays of water a day hoping for food.  Being compressed by plastic for a day or more did not stop these wonderful bastards from growing to their potential despite the slow cold start. Here's a peek at my cheap and ugly looking idea, use the box, cut up some strips of the extra cardboard and use them as a tent for a plastic tent with holes in it. Figured it would promote humidity while allowing plenty to escape to avoid mold. In hindsight you could get the humidity way higher even in a more tight space without this being a problem. Especially with a fan or even just putting it near an cracked window with wind for an hour a day.  They seem to enjoy being sprayed with water five times a day eating recycled coffee beans in a lovely cardboard house. Whatever makes them happy is fine by me.  A lovely blurry picture with a coin about the size of a quarter for reference. Color of the caps is not actually a very good measurement for Pleurotus ostreatus, the most commonly eaten and native oyster mushroom in North America. They can be anywhere from almost black on the top of the cap, blueish, light brownish. They seem to be more lightly colored in the wild,and you will see the caps lose the intensity of their color as they age.  The best guide for when to harvest seems to be more about the shape of the cap, the splitting of the cap, and texture and hardness. It is up to you if you want to eat the mushroom caps when they are prettiest vs. when they are slightly bigger. I felt it was worth giving them one more day to see if they got huge or just slightly older. They went with the getting slightly older looking option. Some good attributes for when the caps will likely not grow more are: -The cup shape becomes a flat top, and then the edges of the flat cap will droop down. -They will be less round, and more of an ear shape. -As seen on a few of the caps, they will begin to split at the edges. Waiting any longer than this will just mean harder or drier mushrooms continuing to become a light light brown. Means it was time to invent a bad recipe by combining generic stereotypes of Scandinavian food of course. I diced the stems and cooked them in aquavit, 80 something proof spiced liquor. Didn't break them down enough, or at all. The caps themselves were delicious, cooked in a small amount of butter and nothing else. Things I learned before eating more of them: I still see no reason not to eat the stems, free food. They are tougher, I don't even know for sure that lignin is in mushrooms but I imagine this is because lignin or the similar mushroom equivalent helps them grow tall and firm. If you cut up the stems and eat them with something you boil in water, even mac & cheese, they soak up both the water and later the cheese and are great. The caps really are good in butter, dipped in lingbonberry jam for a bittersweet cranberry type of sauce. There are loads of studies about the nutritional value of mushrooms and despite not finding any reason not to eat the stems, most people who eat mushrooms seem to throw away a good 40% of the yield by volume simply because they don't like chewy foods. Definitely going to start saving the stems on all mushrooms I grow or forage to throw in soups and stews until I find any reason not to. More words as though this post isn't long enough: Totally recommend this kit for first time adults or kids with supervision. People who have never eaten oyster mushrooms, don't live near a market with one, etc. Despite having loads of fun with it I think I learned enough that I'll do a more DIY and bigger approach next time. Either buy bigger bags of already developed mycelium from a smaller company or I might get plugs and be patient with an outdoor approach, putting them in oak logs. extra stout fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 23:07
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Epitope posted:Good stuff yo. Someone gave me some wine caps they grew in their yard. They had a pretty massive amount of food for the size of their little patch. How did you cook them and how did they taste? Those are still on my to try list. Also I give up at effort posting for a while, you should post some pictures of them good eatin' mushrooms, fella
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Mar 15, 2017 10:08
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Yeonik posted:Gettin to be Morel season up here in the north, fellas. Can't wait! I'll effort post more a bit later, mushrooms are a passion of mine and I'm sure I'll be bored at work. I'm excited to look for them but I've yet to even find false morels (verpa bohemica) which here are supposed to be an indicator of 'true morels' coming soon after, but honestly I'm still learning which of those are edible and local, and I see mixed debates on if black morels are mildly toxic. Most people just say to cook those a bit longer. You will get dozens of  points if you post any pictures of mushroom hunts, even if you don't find any as exciting as morels.Epitope posted:Last year there were some popping this time, but it's been a bigger snow year so, patience... Just gives us more time to interrogate people to reveal their spots to us, I've been doing some hikes and seeing nothing other than tiny inedible growth on a few dead logs and dead standing trees not worth identifying if I'm in a mood for food. extra stout fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Apr 9, 2017 |
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Apr 9, 2017 10:44
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Yeonik posted:I think both of these were last year. Wife got a new camera that I was trying out, trying to be all artsy and crap (you'll see what I mean when I share some of my other hideous pictures.) Thanks for sharing, god drat as though morels aren't proving hard enough to find the fact that the most common non poisonous one is the color of the soil is not going to help. Are those black morels / Morchella angusticeps? If you find more you should cut one in half and post a picture please. My shaggy parasol spot is still barren, nearby spots I've seen giant puffballs and shaggy mane at aren't producing anything yet either. The only fruiting bodies I've seen on my hikes are little half inch inedible bullshit on standing trees, forgot the name and even the family, but I suppose it's a good sign of temperature, humidity and things to come.
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Apr 17, 2017 01:26
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Epitope posted:Maybe a Russula Pretty sure this guy got them all, just by coincidence I was reading about squaw root the other day if I'm not mistaken that's the same plant we call 'bear corn' here. Seems like humans can't do poo poo with it beyond giving it nicknames unfortunately. Not a mushroom but it's cool. I wonder if bears pick it and grind it into a syrup and make literal Mtn Dew with it, maybe in a better world Found some tiny see through mushrooms the other day, all sorts of little shits that I don't care about because they're not known reliable sources of food. But it's coming. We got Mayflowers in April here, now give me some mushrooms in May.
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May 1, 2017 00:14
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Circle Nine posted:These are some older pictures I took in I think 2015. There's a nice park near where I live and it was nice to walk through the woods with my camera, and finding neat mushrooms was always fun. No idea what any of these are though. The first one I'm going to look up when I am back later because I know I've seen it before and I'm tempted to say it's a russula but I feel like it's not, the second might be Ganoderma applanatum / artists conk, which you can draw on the bottom because it semi-permanently bruises heavily when touched, some people even go beyond the finger notes like the one Free Market Mambo posted and actually use a makeshift bruising tool to do crazy art on them, unless it's something else which it could be because I've failed you the yeti posted:Inky caps and dead man's fingers: Awesome finds, all in one day? I'm pretty sure inky caps are a common nickname for Coprinus comatus, which we call shaggy mane here. I found some last year and waited a day for them to peak, gone before I came back. Looks like you found them in the stage where they are useless as food but very good as ink, though I have yet to try writing with it. extra stout fucked around with this message at 18:43 on May 12, 2017 |
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May 12, 2017 18:40
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Modest Mouse cover band posted:Is this enough to identify by any chance? These were growing in my lawn last year so I can't get a better picture. They ended up shriveling up in a couple of days, in a very strange way. Sort of impossible to guarantee from one picture but since you mentioned the rapid shriveling, the cap is upturned and seems black and inky, it's possible they were shaggy mane / inky caps that others have posted. Really interesting mushroom because they're common yet considered rare, easy to identify when edible but then rapidly look like a hundred other mushrooms. I've only found them three times and never got to eat any, but essentially they have a long pill shaped cap that within maybe 30-40 hours splits and comes up, doesn't stay flat, and curls while the cap turns to an ink that some people still use to write with. So (if they're shaggy manes) they're considered delicious but you almost always find them while they're already half turned to mush. There is a lookalike species that I don't think is dangerously poison so much as just less good and less studied if I recall. Sorry for not replying to all the posts, again I'm no expert and I don't know poo poo about Australia, so it's nice to let other people take guesses and reply too.
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May 18, 2017 20:20
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Picnic Princess posted:Also seen in Borneo. It's crazy to imagine eating a stinkhorn, but thanks for posting what I think is the most edible and photogenic stinkhorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallus_indusiatus It does however not fit with my thread title because the veil is incredible and distracts from the cock shape hidden underneath.
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May 21, 2017 07:54
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:41 |
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ookuwagata posted:What I do is generally separate the pores from the cap, (as usually the pores tend to be damaged from banana slug feeding more often than not) and also peel off the pellicle, the brown skin on top, and then slice and sautee in a bit of butter or really good olive oil with a small amount of shallots and garlic. If there's a lot, after briefly sauteeing them, I freeze them. Finally might have found my first porcini (Boletus edulis), didn't bother posting it or uploading the pictures for a while because as you can see: This fucker was not pretty or edible, but I think it's the species. Stem is especially huge and bulbous but everything seems to match, only distorted by age and bugs   I followed your advice just to learn more about it, and like most mushrooms it seems pretty easy to prepare. Just gotta find another one nearby that hasn't been eaten by bugs for two weeks.
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Jul 25, 2017 10:14
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