Review of mushrooms found in our yard

[corvi]

Cantharellus species
The classic wild mushroom, though we only found one this year. Solid meaty texture, hearty earthy autumn flavour, like a grocery store button mushroom that has lived a thousand years in a wizard's tower and grown strange and powerful beyond mortal ken; an eldritch elder mushroom. Loves cheese sauce, cheese soup, macaroni and cheese. All around excellent cheese-friend. Five stars. 


Coprinus comatus
Extremely delicate flavour and texture. Seems to be easily overwhelmed if cooked with anything more aggressive in flavour than butter. Usually soft, though we got one set of really young ones that stood up for themselves a little better this year. Has to be prepared within about an hour of collecting, or it will dissolve into ink. You can write with the ink; it's a sort of verdigris colour! Three stars for basically being some sort of soft mushroom-flavoured fog that fades away to nothing whenever you try to cook it, like those clouds in Super Mario that disappear while you're riding them, plus one star for being green ink. Four stars.


Leucoagaricus leucothites, aka Whitey McWhitershroom
Basically a softer, blander grocery store mushroom. Its best feature is that for about two weeks in September, you can walk outside and pick a couple dozen from the front yard in the morning, and there will be a couple dozen more that evening. Quantity has a quality all its own. Eh, sort of. Three stars.


Lycoperdon perlatum (pearly wolf's fart)
You are all FIRED for not telling me about these. They are super recognizable and they grow everywhere and I didn't eat them until this year, which is a deep tragedy. Has a slightly tough outer skin and a softer inner bit, and an intense savoury taste, and the combination of squishy/crispy/savoury fries up very much like delicious mushroom bacon. We also dried them in the oven and ground them up and made delicious mushroom bacon powder, to put on popcorn, and in soup, and on toast, and on eggs, and on everything. Five stars for delicious wolf farts. Zero stars for Fake Friends Who Never Told Me About Them.


Pseudohydnum gelatinosum
These guys! Luminous and translucent, like ghosts, or the forest spirits in Mononoke Hime.
They have a jellylike texture and taste like unsweetened gummy candies, so we soaked them in a syrup of hibiscus flowers and orange blossom water and made them into actual gummy candy (though their bumpy textures kiiiinda make them look like tongues if you soak them in red liquid). It was incredibly good. Five stars.



Russula brevipes
One of the classic wild mushrooms is Hypomyces lactiflourum, the lobster mushroom, which is actually a Russula brevipes mushroom that has been parasitized by the Hypomyces fungus and transformed to grow different reprodctive structures. As the common name might suggest, lobster mushroom has a firm texture and a somewhat fishy flavour that is traditionally used as a substitute for lobster - it's especially good barbecued, in my opinion.
We were talking to a mushroom friend, who said she liked the uninfected Russula brevipes better than the parasitized ones, so we decided to give it a shot. It has the firm, solid texture of a lobster mushroom, but zero taste. Like a more solid, fibrous-textured tofus, almost. Very firm tofu that grows in creepy pale fairy rings on the forest floor. So we sliced it into thin strips and marinated with hot sauce and grilled it to make tacos. Excellent chewy taco filling! Four stars.



Russula xerampelina
This one is often called the "shellfish-scented russula" or the "crab russula" and does indeed have a slightly musty shellfish taste. I would definitely use it in a Thai recipe that called for fermented shrimp paste or fermented crab paste. We used it to make a broth for hot and sour soup. We also dried a bunch of it and made a crab salt for popcorn, but demand for crab-flavoured popcorn, as well as fermented shellfish flavour, has been low. Three stars.


Suillus caerulescens
Like other suillus mushrooms, generally slimy texture. So we thought we'd try making a thick stew with them. This is Generally Regarded As A Mistake, and We'll Speak No More Of It. One star, which they only get for turning blue when you cut into them, which is kind of fun.

(Infamously, many mushrooms containing the psychoactive chemical psilocybin turn blue when cut, so a certain annoying sort of mushroom hunter gets very excited when encountered blue-staining mushrooms. Many other chemicals commonly found in mushrooms also turn blue, much to the disappointed of poorly-read would-be trippers. But we had at least some fun going "oh noooooo it's ~*bluuuuuuuue*~" when making the Really Disgusting Stew.)
 

Comments

[pie]

I never told you about Lycoperdon because the ones I've tried were kind of boring tofu-shrooms. Maybe they are sensitive to substrates or they have some cryptic species going on?

IME Suilli improve a great deal when you dehydrate them - texture and flavor both. I never eat them fresh, but because it's easy to find a lot of them and they're safe to eat raw, I use them for mushroom powder.

You make a compelling argument for bothering with Russulae.

[corvi]

Hmmm, might give that a shot with the Suilli.

[maribou]

heeeee! blue!

i never told you about the pearly wolf's fart ones because I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF SUCH A MAGICAL AND APPARENTLY DELICIOUS THING BEFORE IN MY LIFE.

If you're not too busy thinking how fake we are for not discovering this for you sooner (totally understandable feels), might you tell me the story of how you finally found out about said wondrous fungus??

[corvi]

The Pacific Northwest has an invasive white poisonous mushroom, the Death Cap, Amanita phalloides. It's a regular mushroom-shaped mushroom, but it has a "veil" that covers the whole mushroom when it's young and makes it look like a little sphere.

Any mycological book or meeting dealing with mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest has a giant warning in red text that you shouldn't eat any little spherical white mushrooms, (like Lycoperdon perlatum, a puffball that's edible when it's young before it gets all hollowed out and puffy) because they might be stealth Death Caps. You have to cut them in half and make sure they're solid spheres and not unrelated sneaky mushroom-shaped mushrooms with veils, like this:

image from University of British Columbia

Reading the Dire Warning in every book got us curious. :) We did carefully cut them all in half to make sure they weren't sneaky Death Caps.

[maribou]

delightful!

[dorchadas]

Pseudohydnum gelatinosum kind of looks like it has a place in the Monstrous Manual, like it should suddenly start moving and clawing its way across the ground.

[corvi]

I always want ttrpgs to encourage players to explore the natural world and poke at weird mushrooms have more encounters that are mysterious and wondrous but not necessarily threatening, but I haven't come up with a way to make that interesting to anyone except me.

You could have a game where, like, collecting weird mushrooms or exploring new places was part of the "reward" in that various authority figures would pay the players for information or samples but that just turns "a sense of wonder" into more freakin' bookkeeping. Assigning minor useful effects, something like 'eating this slightly luminous mushroom restores a single point of mana' has the same effect. Nobody likes spell components, they don't make things seem more magical.

Maybe a game where interesting natural places (waterfalls, standing stones, etc) maybe have strong magical properties that aren't always useful but might be in very specific circumstances. An oath sworn while standing in this waterfall must be kept for a year and a day. On the winter solstice, this standing stone will transmute grief into steel. Drinking from this stream will turn you into a rabbit until sunrise.

Probably ttrpgs aren't actually the place to exercise my delight at the natural world. :)

[dorchadas]

I would play a video game like that in a heartbeat--Stardew Valley has some elements of that kind of wonder, especially during the festivals--but I'm not sure a TTRPG could evoke the same kind of wonder, at least not from me. Their strength is usually conversational, less on something that involves searching areas of the natural world (which require either a bunch of tables or an enormous amount of GM planning).

[maribou]

I am currently playing a healing-focused life cleric in a transmuted version of an old first edition D&D campaign, and her enthusiasm for collecting samples of unknown to her things (including some cave mushrooms!) is creating plenty of entertaining trouble, that's for sure.

[corvi]

That sounds great. I would love to play in a campaign with that character.

[corvi]

Though I have wondered if Ryuutama would be any good for this sort of thing. Have you played it? Would it be?

[dorchadas]

I have not--I own Tenra Bansho Zero and Golden Sky Stories, but Ryuutama passed me by.