Home | Community | Message Board

Cannabis Seeds - Original Sensible Seeds
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Left Coast Kratom Buy Kratom Extract   Mushroom-Hut Liquid Cultures   Original Sensible Seeds Bulk Cannabis Seeds   North Spore North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom   Bridgetown Botanicals CBD Concentrates   Amanita Muscaria Store Amanita Muscaria   PhytoExtractum Kratom Powder for Sale

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
Rains bring out mycological delights [CA]
    #5489465 - 04/07/06 10:32 AM (17 years, 9 months ago)

Rains bring out mycological delights
By AMY COOMBS
April 7, 2006 - capitalpress.info

This time of year the soggy forests of the West are ablaze with bright crimson and orange mushrooms.

Spores are spreading through California and Oregon, which are home to more than 130 native edible mushrooms and 3,000 species of fungus.

?Our temperatures are mild, the wet season is long, and when it?s wet here, it?s really wet!? said Debbie Johnson, an organizer of the annual Santa Cruz Fungus Fair.

During a recent mushroom hunt, she darted around tree trunks coated with translucent, teardrop-shaped mushrooms and stooped to collect a batch of copper-colored caps from the forest floor.

?This is a candy cap,? she said. ?It?s kind of a cinnamon brown color and is unique to Northern California and Southern Oregon. You can?t find them anywhere else.?

At $125 a pound, sweet-flavored candy caps are a gourmet treat, but like many tasty mushrooms, candy caps look very similar to poisonous species. Johnson said foragers have to know what they are looking for before they start sampling foraged fungi.

?This group of mushrooms are called milky caps,? she said. ?They literally lactate, and this is an important diagnostic feature.? She sliced the underside of the mushroom cap and a clear, white milk began to flow. According to Johnson, other lactarious mushrooms look similar, but the milky fluid turns a different shade after being exposed to the air. If the milk turns yellow or green upon exposure to air, the mushroom isn?t edible.

Knowing these nuances is what sets apart an expert mushroom identifier from someone who ends up in the hospital. Phil Carpenter, a chemist and longtime member of the Santa Cruz Fungus Federation, unearthed a poisonous look-alike just a few feet from Johnson?s batch of gourmet candy caps.

?Notice that it?s growing on wood,? he said. ?The candy caps were growing on the ground. Notice that it doesn?t lactate, therefore it?s in a completely different genus.? Carpenter broke the stem to demonstrate that it?s more fibrous than the candy cap stem, which snaps in half like chalk.

It?s easy to make mistakes, but with a little education, Johnson and Carpenter said, poisoning can be avoided. They hovered over a 4-inch-wide Boletus edulis bursting through bunches of loose grass and rattled off recipe ideas. Otherwise known as porcini, it has a cap that looks like a hamburger bun, and Johnson said the nutty flavor goes well with fresh cream. They talked of chanterelles with soft-shell crab and lemon butter and candy cap creme brulee.

?The other night we had persimmon pudding with infused candy cap cream on the top,? Johnson said. ?I?ve also used candy caps in rolled pork tenderloin. Boy, are they good with pork and a little fruit.?

Dawn Whitaker, a Santa Cruz mushroom enthusiast and beginning hunter, said proper mushroom preparation is nearly as important as proper identification. While frying mushrooms in her kitchen, she said that some mushrooms have to be soaked to dilute trace toxins. Some have to be cooked more thoroughly than others.

?As a rule I would strongly encourage anyone foraging for mushrooms to make sure to cook their mushrooms thoroughly,? she said. ?Some mushrooms that are edible in their cooked form are actually poisonous raw.?

Whitaker said that even if a mushroom poisoning doesn?t kill you, it will cause hours of agony. Her close encounter was with chicken of the woods fungi, which grow on trees like a shelf. Some people can eat the yellow-colored mushroom without complications, but a small minority of people have idiosyncratic reactions. Whitaker realized a little too late that she and the chicken of the woods are not compatible.

?I made the mistake of eating this mushroom before I went to work,? she said. By the time she arrived at the facility where she works as a psychologist, she was nauseated. Before long she went home to spend the next seven hours in bed.

Carpenter said Whitaker was lucky. The most poisonous mushrooms in the world grow in the forests of Oregon and Northern California and some people don?t survive their mushroom mistakes.

?The most poisonous mushrooms in the world are in the genus Amanita ? of those the worst is Amanita phalloides, called the death cap. It?s the one that is responsible for the serious poisonings. There have been local deaths from that mushroom.?

Carpenter demonstrates the difference between edible and nonedible mushrooms during a guided demonstration. He leads a group into the forest in search of Russula mushrooms ? only some of which are edible.

?See how white the gills are,? he said, pointing to a Russula silvicola, a red-capped mushroom with a white stem. ?Take a bite of this. Just chew it up and spit it out. If it tastes like cayenne pepper, it means the mushroom isn?t safe to eat.?

Lisa Akeson, a local mushroom connoisseur, puts a small piece of the cap on her tongue.

?Oh my, it?s really hot,? she said. ?It has a really chemical feeling on the palate. It?s very distinctive and nasty.?

Her teenage son Stuart tries a bite and spits it out immediately. ?My tongue is numb,? he said.

With Russulas, as with many mushrooms, edibility is somewhat ambiguous. Some are toxic only if the entire mushroom is eaten, and for others it may take a handful to make you sick. Some cause a reaction in one person but not another and some are less toxic if prepared a certain way. The peppery Russula silvicola, for example, is generally considered nonedible, but Carpenter said this might be because its spicy flavor makes people queasy. Its toxicity is considered low to moderate.

?My suspicion is that if you ate cayenne pepper by the spoonful it would make you sick, too,? Carpenter said. He said the best way to prevent a distasteful experience is to avoid eating unidentified mushrooms. The biggest problems arise when people see an edible mushroom and then misidentify other mushrooms with the same cap color.

?If you aren?t sure, take (the mushroom) to someone that can identify it,? he said. ?Someone you trust with your life.?

And in the world of mushrooms, questions abound. Santa Cruz is one of the best mushroom habitats in the world, but unclassified mushrooms are still periodically discovered, and some mushrooms can be identified only by studying the spores under a microscope.

Santa Cruz has tried to help minimize confusion through the annual Fungus Fair ? a winter event that serves as the Antiques Road Show for mushroom connoisseurs.

Mushroom collectors bring baskets of mushrooms and stand in line for their turn at the identification table, where they are told what they have found and how likely they are to die if they eat it.

?We?ve just had some of the agarics come in,? said Henry Young, a long-time identifier and member of the Fungus Federation. He tosses a handful of small white mushrooms into a large compost bin. ?These are the inedible loose your lunch bunch ? they are related to the button mushrooms you find at the store,? he said, ?but they have a compound in them that causes gastric upset.?

By offering teams of on-call identifiers and exhibits featuring fresh wild mushrooms, Young and his colleagues teach visitors how to distinguish the poisonous mushrooms that grow in local parks, schoolyards and woody backyards.

?A lot of people are surprised and disappointed when they find out that the mushrooms they found in their yard are poisonous,? Young said. ?You can count the edibles I go after on two hands. The rest are interesting and beautiful, but as far as the table is concerned, there are a limited number of mushrooms to choose from.?

To avoid the wrong types of fungus, experts advise taking good notes about the types of trees directly above a mushroom?s habitat. Along with a spade and knife, many foragers carry a pad and pen in their wicker baskets.

?Habitat is very important when you talk about finding mushrooms,? said Carpenter, ?because fungi form symbiotic relationships with the trees.?

Mushrooms help the trees absorb water, and the trees give off sugars that help the mushrooms grow. Boletus aereus, an edible mushroom associated with madrone trees, is very different from porcini mushrooms, which are associated with long-needled pines. Chanterelles are associated with oak trees, and candy caps are found under scrubs and Douglas firs, he said.

But most experts can?t identify a mushroom based on location, habitat or cap color alone. A variety of characteristics distinguish between a poisonous mushroom and an edible treat. This is why experts emphasize the need for education.

?There are old mushroom hunters and bold mushroom hunters,? said Marjorie Young, as she comes to relieve her husband at the identification table. ?But there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.?

Respected identifiers can be contacted through the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz, or at http://www.fungusfed.org


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: Left Coast Kratom Buy Kratom Extract   Mushroom-Hut Liquid Cultures   Original Sensible Seeds Bulk Cannabis Seeds   North Spore North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom   Bridgetown Botanicals CBD Concentrates   Amanita Muscaria Store Amanita Muscaria   PhytoExtractum Kratom Powder for Sale


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* Rains bring out mycological delights [CA] veggieM 1,061 0 01/14/06 06:00 PM
by veggie
* Growing frenzy (Marin Cty, CA) veggieM 828 0 01/16/05 02:35 AM
by veggie
* Deadly fungi sprout [CA] veggieM 958 1 12/26/05 01:06 PM
by GGreatOne234
* Rain-sodden Swedes consoled by mushroom mania veggieM 849 1 08/15/05 11:45 PM
by bwalker
* New policy allows patients to carry medical marijuana [CA] veggieM 2,356 4 08/28/05 10:50 PM
by Ravus
* Cornell's mycology museum harbors good, bad and macabre fungi veggieM 1,467 0 12/09/04 09:48 AM
by veggie
* Shroomery mentioned in the News [CA] veggieM 1,548 13 01/21/06 09:46 PM
by blaze2
* Music festival ended with numerous arrests [CA] veggieM 3,560 9 06/24/05 03:30 PM
by SuperD

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: motaman, veggie, Alan Rockefeller, Mostly_Harmless
770 topic views. 0 members, 17 guests and 5 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.024 seconds spending 0.009 seconds on 13 queries.