Foraging and Cooking MASSIVE Golden California Chanterelles (Cantharellus californicus) in Sonoma

Whoa, look at the size of this chanterelle! Are you kidding me? This thing is huge! Hey YouTube, it's Gordon, fascinated by fungi. I'm out in Sonoma and I'm going to show you guys how to find these absolutely massive, beautiful edible mushrooms, golden chanterelles, or cantharellus californicus. Let's go! I'm out here in Sonoma in kind of mixed oak and dug fir habitat. There's a good amount of bay and I found a couple of shanties that are a little blown out and wet, looking like this. They're a little ratty around the edge. The ones that are buried are in better shape. They're a little bit fresher. You can pop it right out of the ground and show you just how beautiful those blunt ridges are. These are called false gills sometimes because you can't bend or break them the way you can a normal gill and so these are somewhat morphologically distinct and different from other mushrooms and that's one of the ways you can tell what a chanterelle is. You can also look at the white spore print and white flesh of this delicious edible meaty mushroom. I'm going to go ahead and show you guys how to find them in habitat. So as you're looking around this forest ecosystem, you have to be very aware for small perturbations in color, shape, texture, and luminosity. So I can see the orange of this sterium on this log here but as I look around in this habitat, I'm looking for little flashes of yellow and do you guys see what I see? There's a few down in here and I suspect they might be some of the most massive chanterelles I've ever seen in my entire life. Check this out. Oh my gosh. So I think these got so big because they're kind of protected under all this duff and these leaves so they didn't get totally washed out by the rain and you can see just how absolutely massive they've gotten. So I'm going to very carefully kind of clean them off and try to get them you know ready to pull out of the ground here and I can see that this one is probably going to be a two or three pounder at least and this one's probably going to weigh a pound. So I'm going to pop this out and show you the bottom side here. Absolutely gorgeous. We have another one that's still sort of in the button phase. It hasn't completely opened up but it's pretty solid. I'm going to pop it out and then oh my god oh yeah it's ready. This is so exciting. Oh just a nice little release there and wow oh my god look at this thing. It's so huge. I can't believe it. Wow. Still pretty dirty on top but it's beautiful and clean underneath so I'm going to go ahead and trim off the base of this mushroom, pop it back down in the soil, cover up this hole and I'm going to go home and clean up the shanty to cook it up. Should be absolutely delicious. So I like to try to clean my chanterelles off as much as I can out in the field. Leave as much of them in the woods as possible and get them as clean as possible so they don't get dirty in your basket. Go ahead and scrape these ridges off. That's one of the things you can't scrape off real gills but you can these ridges. They'll come off pretty easily with the back of a knife. I always like to trim the base of the mushroom here back into the soil. So I'll pop that back in the hole. I found it. There's a big controversy about whether you should cut chanterelles or pluck them. I don't really have a strong feeling about it. I just usually do what sort of feels right in the moment. I have noticed that if you're cutting chanterelles from a cluster the other ones will continue to grow so that's one argument. If you find them in a cluster it might be a good idea to cut them but I've also seen evidence that says that cutting chanterelles can actually expose the mycelium to other pathogens that can come in through the cut stem base and then invade down in the mycelium. So in theory it might actually be better to pluck chanterelles than cut them but there's no real good evidence one way or another. There is a study from 30 plus years of data that was done in Switzerland that says that the difference between cut and pluck is basically inconsequential, insignificant. They didn't see any big difference in terms of the number of mushrooms that showed up year to year in plots where they cut versus plucked. So to me that sort of says it doesn't really matter. The important part was to try to leave the forest floor as undisturbed as possible and not compact the soil too much. So again I'm going to cut off this big chunk and pop it down in the ground where I found it. Try to leave myself with as much kind of clean delicious mushroom stuff as possible. And what I do with these chanterelles is when I get them home I will wash them pretty thoroughly. I don't care if they get totally wet and soggy that's fine they're wet and soggy out here in nature and that doesn't hurt them. But I will set them out on paper towels to dry for a day or two and then I'll pop them in the fridge and then they should last at least a week or two if not longer because chanterelles can grow for a long time in nature and thus they can survive in your fridge for a long time. So what a fantastic beautiful edible mushroom this is Cantharellus californicus the gorgeous golden chanterelle. Wow look at the size of these things this is at least three or four pounds of mushrooms right here. Wow it is so beautiful out here in the woods of Sonoma and it's even better when you're finding a ton of these absolutely gorgeous golden chanterelles. Wow look at those. So I got pretty lucky today finding all these beautiful chanterelles and sometimes what happens when people see me with this many mushrooms is they get really concerned that I'm harvesting too many and that that is a very valid concern. I kind of want to address the idea of the honorable harvest or sustainable harvesting and that's the idea that you leave some behind for nature basically. The point of a mushroom is to disperse the spores so that the mycelium underground the body of the fungus can continue to kind of propagate and these are ectomycorrhizal which means that they're living in association with their host trees these sort of big oaks behind me and it's really important that you have a healthy bunch of mycelium associating with the roots of these oak trees because it helps keep them alive and resist drought stress and other pathogens and all sorts of stuff like that. So the relationship between the chanterelle and the host tree is very important and you don't want to disrupt that by taking too many of the chanterelles out of the environment. So sort of the the rule that a lot of foragers go by is to leave somewhere between 25 to 50 percent of the mushrooms behind that you find. I tend to shoot for about one third and I'll leave all of the really old ones that are kind of blown out and ratty and I'll leave the young ones that haven't really had a chance to mature and disperse their spores yet and sometimes when people harvest chanterelles they like to harvest what they call the buttons those kind of little uh really dense ones and I don't like to harvest those because like I said I like to give the mushroom time for these spores to develop and release before I harvest the mushroom. So with these really big ones that I harvested that's fine because they've had probably several weeks of dispersing their spores before I went ahead and harvested these and I left behind a good number. You don't necessarily see that on camera but there's a lot of mushrooms still out here in the woods and there's also a lot of mushrooms that I didn't find. I only went to a little tiny piece of this habitat and had sort of a small opportunity to really get in there and find a lot of these mushrooms. So that's one of the things I want to want to talk about when we talk about harvesting chanterelles and what amazing edibles they are is also giving them a chance to give back to the woods and let them do their thing. So when you're hunting chanterelles you want to be really sure that you have a true chanterelle, a cantharellus species, and not a look-alike like the omphalotus which is toxic. So I'm going to show you guys what they look like side by side. Here we have a jack-o'-lantern or omphalotus along with a chanterelle. So these guys are going to be growing at the base often of a dead or dying tree. This one's pretty soggy and blown out but it does have those kind of orange decurrent gills that run down the stipe similar to a chanterelle except these are really ridges and these are true gills which means I can The omphalotus species out here on the west coast tend to get fairly large and be kind of a greenish orange so they're a lot harder to confuse with a true chanterelle but you still want to be able to tell the difference. You can also see that these have a much deeper darker orange spore print where chanterelles have a white spore print and this is kind of whitish flesh that stains a little whereas this has kind of greenish deep orangey almost brownish gray flesh and so being able to tell the difference here between omphalotus olivacens and cantharellus californicus is really important so you don't get sick. Make sure you will only eat a chanterelle if you've gotten multiple confirmations that is indeed a true chanterelle and not a toxic lookalike or another mushroom that you might confuse it with. Okay I just got home and it's time for me to clean these chanterelles. They are quite dirty as you can see despite my best effort to clean them in the field there's still quite a bit of dirt in there. The best way I know to clean these chanterelles is to just put them under some running water and I like using the spray setting because it helps dislodge some of the dirt. I'll just do this for a minute or two. Sometimes I'll use a little bit of a knife and brush off any of the stubborn dirt or things that are a little discolored or brown. Go ahead and turn it over just give another rinse on your side and I'm not worried about getting this wet because I'm going to let it sit out and air dry for anywhere from a couple hours to even overnight and that'll help it last quite a bit longer in the fridge and not get all moldy and soggy. But here is this just absolutely massive beautiful chanterelle. I have a couple little pieces of dirt but I can always dislodge them later with a knife or once I put it on the cutting board and let it dry out. Wow look at the size of that chanterelle. Holy cow! Oh yeah! Chanterelle quesadilla. Thanks for joining me in the woods here in Sonoma. Like and subscribe for more!