This is my Man and some of our mushrooms. We’ve spent the week harvesting wild chanterelle mushrooms.
Finding food has to be the most fun thing ever. I’ve collected berries, nuts, wild greens and now mushrooms. I’m seriously thinking I need to learn how to hunt. Nothing is more fun than finding food in the forest.
Just as long as it doesn’t find you first.
Did you ever find something…can’t remember exactly what my bro-in-law called it…something like a chicken mushroom? It’s great big like those, but supposedly tastes and has a texture similar to chicken.
What a wonderful haul! We had some dried chanterelles in our stuffed cabbage this Christmas. I make a dried chanterelle risotto every few weeks. Chicken of the woods are Ok but chanterelles, morels, and cepes, what could be better? Truffles maybe?
Nice man, btw. I do like men.
Every spring I wait with bated breath to see if any morels come up in the yard. About two years out of three, we’ll have a few, if we can get to them before the squirrels.
A few years ago I bought a kit that’s supposed to allow one to grow morels, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. It’s a lot of effort, but I’ve finally given up. One of these years, I am hoping that we’ll have several pounds of the things where the growing patch was.
If you have an elm stump, that would be so much in your favor as to be a requirement, as I understand. Why elm, I dunno. Do you have an elm stump?
It may depend on the species, a number seem to enjoy certain hardwood species with a particular amount of decay. Others like their hardwoods but do even better if a fire has been in the immediate vicinity. I do my picking at a public campground where campers just leave their fire rings for the next campers and the rain washes the resultant ash around the campsites. Sometimes I even have several dozen growing in a wavy line that you can tell was where the water and ash finally settled.
I presume we’re still talking morels, here?
Oops! Uh yeah.
So, how many species are there? To be honest I wouldn’t have thought there were really more than basically one.
Okay, here’s some Wikipedia info about morels:
"Morchella species don’t have symbiotic mycorrhizal relationships but they are commonly found beneath certain trees. Trees commonly associated with morels in the northern hemisphere include ash, sycamore, tulip tree, dead and dying elms*, cottonwoods and old apple trees (remnants of orchards). Yellow morels (Morchella esculenta) are more commonly found under deciduous trees rather than conifers, and black morels (Morchella elata) can be found in deciduous forests, oak and poplar. Morels in western North America are often found in coniferous forests, including trees in the genera Pinus, Abies, Larix, and Pseudotsuga, as well as in cottonwood riparian forests.
Black morels may grow abundantly in habitats which have been scorched by a forest fire. The mechanism for this is unknown. Where fire suppression is practiced morels often grow in small amounts in the same spot year after year. If these areas are overrun by wildfire they often produce a bumper crop of black morels the following spring. Commercial pickers and buyers in North America target recently burned areas for this reason. The Finnish name, huhtasieni, refers to huhta, area cleared for agriculture by slash and burn method."
*Well, I got that part right, anyway.
Sounds like you’re talking about this:
http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Mushrooms.Folder/ChickenMushroom.html
There’s three “poultry” mushrooms that I know of, all different species; chicken of the woods, hen of the woods, and fried chicken.
I have wondered that for morel sp. that seem to grow where fire has been if it maybe isn’t so much the fire itself but the bi-products of fire. This certainly seems to be borne out by the location where I collect. Some of these campsites are on slopes and the ash from the fire washes down slope with the rain and the morels are always where that runoff either slows or stops.
That’s interesting. 
We just have one tiny elm, but have dozens tulip trees, including some uncleared logs anywhere between 2 and 20 years old, and several stumps. Thanks for the info. A friend of mine collects morels for a few of the best-known restaurants in Virginia, and, although he doesn’t tell anyone where, I’m pretty sure the area he goes into is mixed coniferous and deciduous (depending on elevation).
I haven’t managed to find real morels here yet only false ones. Saying that though I had false morel sauce at Christmas in Sweden and it was lovely and no sore stomach. They had been dried for a long time, boiled then the water discarded before making the sauce. Really earthy almost truffly taste.
D
Here in the States most false morels are probably better left in the field. The levels of gyromitrin in most Gyromitra sp. is high enough to cause serious health issues. They can be par-boiled a few times, doing it outside would be the safest way, in freshwater each time and dried but there is still the risk that levels of gyromitrin, a hemolytic toxin, could be high enough to cause problems. Mycology taxonomy in the States can be quite challenging at times, just the edible morels are confusing to most taxonomists.
Yeah, I’m with dwest on that one. On the other hand, the idea of fugu sashimi doen’t put me off at all, so let’s not try to chalk this up to reasoning on my part.
Preparing certain hot peppers for canning can be an interesting endorphin and pain filled adventure. I rarely have made that mistake more than twice.