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    The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms: Helpful Tips for Mushrooming in the Field
    The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms: Helpful Tips for Mushrooming in the Field
    The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms: Helpful Tips for Mushrooming in the Field
    Ebook155 pages51 minutes

    The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms: Helpful Tips for Mushrooming in the Field

    By Pelle Holmberg and Hans Marklund

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    About this ebook

    When you’re in the wild and you spot a nice-looking mushroom, how do you know if it is safe to eat? Question no more with the The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms. This tiny companion is the perfect book to bring along when foraging for delectable fungi. Inside its neatly arranged pages are fifty-two edible mushrooms as well as the mushrooms with which they are often confused, whether edible or toxic.

    Beautiful photographs adorn the pages with mushrooms in the wild as well as picked, showing them from a multitude of angles. Study these photographs and you will become adept at recognizing edible and safe mushrooms. Even those who are unfamiliar with the mushroom forest can make a start at foraging with this instructional work, and, with the help of The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms, can become experts in no time.

    Using practical symbol systems, distribution maps, and tips on picking, cleaning, cooking, and canning, the reader will also become familiar with a wide variety of wild mushrooms, including morels, black trumpets, chanterelles, sheep polypore, porcini, a variety of boletes, and many more. Grabbing this guide on the way out to go hunt for mushrooms will ensure a successful foraging experience.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateJul 1, 2013
    ISBN9781626364844
    The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms: Helpful Tips for Mushrooming in the Field

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    Book preview

    The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms - Pelle Holmberg

    Introduction

    The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms is a smaller, portable version of our book Nya Svampboken, to be used in the field. The selection of species included is reduced, however it still includes the most important edible mushrooms and of course the most common look-alike mushrooms. Those who would like further information about the mushrooms presented in this book or find some species missing can refer to other resources, listed in the back of the book.

    In the first edition of Nya Svampboken (1996), we introduced new symbols for the mushrooms and these can also be found in this book. The symbols are based on each edible mushroom’s potential look-alike counterpart. Edible mushrooms in group 1 can only (within reason) be confused with other edible mushrooms. Those in group 2 can be confused with mushrooms that are unsuitable for consumption but that are not poisonous. Group 1 and 2 are what we call beginners mushrooms. Edible mushrooms in group 3 can be confused with slightly poisonous mushrooms, and those in group 4 can be confused with lethally poisonous mushrooms. We consider all mushrooms presented here to taste good, but which taste the best? Well it depends on a lot of factors including how they are prepared, what they accompany, including beverages, and of course personal taste.

    Have fun foraging for mushrooms!

    What is a mushroom?

    All mushrooms presented here are made of mycelium, a network of thin threadlike structures in the ground (see photo on right). The mycelium forms fruiting bodies (see below) that mature and become attractive to mushroom pickers. The fruiting bodies can be compared to the fruit on a tree and have as their biological task to form spores, or reproductive bodies.

    The fruiting body of a Parasol Mushroom

    White and yellow mycelium underneath a decaying log on the ground.

    Young fruiting body (button) from a mushroom of the Amanita genus

    When can mushrooms be found?

    In order for the mycelium to develop fruiting bodies, they need rain. A dry summer usually means a lack of mushrooms; but if a dry summer is followed by a lot of rain, it can then produce a fall rich in mushrooms. A summer and fall with both sun and rain give good odds for a bountiful mushroom season. A rainy summer can produce a lot of mushrooms but if there is too much rain, the soil can become sodden, resulting in fewer mushrooms to pick. Each season is unique; a year of trumpet chanterelles precedes a penny bun year and so on. Some years August may be the best month for mushrooms and another year may find that September-October give the biggest yield. Other years the middle of the country may have a fantastic harvest whereas the north may fare less well.

    The variations are significant. Normal seasons seem to become less frequent when it comes to the weather but usually August and September are the big mushroom months. On the west coast of the US, the season extends into the winter months, the time of best rain. States in the Southwest and Southeast US enjoy mushrooming well into the early winter months.

    Some tips regarding...

    picking

    Mushrooms are fresh produce and therefore fragile. Some mushrooms such as boletes, brittlegills, and the shaggy ink cap have to be taken care of as soon as you get home. Others such as chanterelles and those belonging to the craterellus genus are less sensitive but should be stored in a cool place if they are not to be used right away.

    Use a basket rather than a plastic bag when picking mushrooms. The moisture from the mushrooms can’t evaporate through plastic and the warm air will create a greenhouse effect. This allows bacteria to thrive making the mushrooms quickly become inedible.

    cleaning

    Clean away any soil and leaf litter from the mushrooms at the picking stage. Larger mushrooms can be halved to check if they have been contaminated by maggots. Remove any parts infected by maggots or slugs, for instance the earthy part of the stipe, and, with larger boletes, the soft pore surface.

    Once you’ve returned home, place the mushrooms on a table. This is especially important if the mushrooms are damp. Feel free to organize them right then and there, placing spicy and strong tasting mushrooms with each other. For example the chanterelle, look-alike saffron milk cap, weeping milk cap, and the crab brittlegill should be divided up. They can then add flavor to milder tasting mushrooms.

    preparation

    All mushrooms that are to be eaten must be cooked. This includes heating the mushrooms and allowing them to release their water. Previously some varieties have been recommended for use as raw food but later research has shown that raw mushrooms contain heat sensitive substances that can be harmful to humans. Preparation can be separated into two stages: 1. pretreatment, either blanching, e.g. red hot milk cap, or precooking (to cook in its own juices) and 2. cooking.

    You can easily preserve mushrooms by drying. Tips for preparing and preserving mushrooms are given within this book for each species. (You can also refer to Nya Svampboken or other mushroom guides.)

    What do mushrooms contain?

    Around 10 percent of the mushrooms fruiting body is made up of dry substances which are mainly fibrous cell walls, nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. The other 90 percent consists of water.

    Fiber

    The cell walls of a mushroom are not made up of cellulose like some plants, but another form of carbohydrate that is similar to chitin, which is found in the shells of crustaceans and insects. It is likely that this chitin has a similar positive

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