Mushroom Trade Grows Along Calif. Coast March 22, 2006 - chron.com
LOS ANGELES ? Doug Stenger pulled the lid from a small cardboard box of chanterelle mushrooms in a chilly storage room. Inside was a jumble of the knotted, fleshy lumps that command nearly $20 a pound from restaurants and upscale markets this time of year.
"Of all the exotic wild mushrooms, these are probably the ones people want the most," said Stenger, an employee at produce wholesaler Davalan Sales.
Growers have found ways to cultivate some popular wild mushrooms such as morels and hen-of-the-woods. But not chanterelles. The fungus favored by gastronomes for its meaty texture and fruity flavor only grows in the wild, and at certain times of the year.
The rarity _ combined with Americans' increasing interest in fine cuisine, and exotic mushrooms in particular _ makes chanterelles a valuable commodity for the Central Coast ranchers who find them growing at the base of oak trees.
But the enterprise also has caught the eye of an unusual breed of rustlers who target the mushrooms on midnight missions and sometimes use high-tech devices to keep track of their whereabouts.
"It's been a big issue," Santa Barbara County sheriff's Lt. George Gingras said. "Some of those ranchers and farmers count on those chanterelles as a source of income."
In February, three men were arrested near Lompoc for investigation of trespassing on private land to pick mushrooms.
Deputies seized several thousand dollars worth of chanterelles from a hotel room where some of the men were staying, Gingras said. Ledgers detailing more than $10,000 in sales of mushrooms were found in the car of one suspect, according to a sheriff's report.
Officials believe the men, based in the Pacific Northwest, used global positioning devices to record locations of chanterelle patches.
"They'd make a harvest, click in the GPS coordinates, and then they'd come back next year," Gingras said.
The men are scheduled to be arraigned on March 28 on charges of theft and trespassing. They are suspected of hitting ranches and forests along the West Coast, moving north to Oregon and Washington in the spring when mushrooms fruit there, Gingras said.
Bill Giorgi, a cattle rancher in Buellton, said chanterelles are plentiful on his property. Yet he didn't realize the value until pickers first invaded his ranch in the 1980s. He's been picking and selling the mushrooms ever since.
He even has deals with his neighbors to harvest chanterelles on their farms and share the profits.
Sales of chanterelles and other wild mushrooms are not tracked by the much larger cultivated mushroom industry. But the demand for cultivated specialty varieties such as shiitake and oyster mushrooms jumped more than 26 percent, to more than 15 million pounds a year, between 2002 and 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Chef Brett Macras, who keeps in-season chanterelles on the menu at Campanile, a popular Los Angeles restaurant, usually buys his chanterelles from a mushroom broker.
But he sometimes goes directly to an elderly man in Santa Barbara County he calls "The Mushroom Hunter." The chef has paid as much as $16 for a pound of the mushrooms.
"Anything with a mushroom sells," Macras said. "Our customers are always looking for something new."
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