Foraging Mushrooms and Making Wild Mushroom Croustade

We're off for a walk today somewhere near Wareham and as you can probably tell there has been a bit of precipitation now for several weeks so I have a basket with me and if you're watching this video it means we did find something because I've done two empty basket foraging videos and I think that's probably enough for you so yeah if this video exists then it means we found something to take home and eat I'm just gonna have a look in here because I've seen some fungi in here I don't think they're ones I want to pick but yeah I don't even know what those are really so there's those there there are some more down here which look like they might be deceivers yeah I would say they are deceivers of some sort so I'm gonna have a little wander through here and see what else we can maybe find amongst this mostly pine woodland here if not there's plenty more space to wander down and have a look down there we are at the moment only just off the beaten track so uh it's you know there is all to play for still so now we're moving into a mixture of pine and beech and we've got mossy banks and the moss is looking very lush and verdant there's a very low lying bit here I'm starting to see rushes which might mean it's going to be too swampy to continue off the track big sinkhole here to my left okay well I think I'll probably rejoin the track and we'll have another look in a minute a couple of rushes here and something else down there as well so a couple of russula don't know what they are but some species of russula quite nibbled but encouraging to see mature looking fruiting bodies of any fungus so hopeful signs just down here it looks like we might be able to get into some more mixed woodland with some oak and maybe beech and stuff in it as well so that's what I'm hoping we might find a bit more of a diversity of fungus that we can pick and eat right now this is a hopeful sign here via garak amanita muscaria santa claus is coming to town this is often an indicator species that we will find seps in the vicinity so I'm going to have a little scout around the perimeter here a little look up in this bit of woodland here because well I don't know whether it's just that these things like the same conditions as seps or whether there's perhaps some symbiosis between the two species I very often find them together today probably won't be that day though let's have a little wander up here see what we can find up on this bank oh I can't see anything here but as I say very often find those two things together or used to anyway in the new forest and this is a similar kind of biome here not today though hey now I imagine if I wandered up through this bit here and amongst all the bracken I might find some saffron milk caps although it's a little late interesting little collection of probably scarlet wax caps down here pretty little things now we may have gone from the conditions being too dry to being way too wet unfortunately we had a fairly dry ish summer and then a deluge over the last couple of weeks and so it still might not be the favorable conditions for the kind of fungi I'm thinking I want to pick right so here's a blusher amanita rubicens very poor condition but that's technically edible the species that is edible anyway I tend to shy away from anything in the amanita genus just because there are some really nasty poisonous ones in there and the blusher for example is perhaps mix-upable with the panther cat only if you've been careless I suppose but in any case yeah I tend to avoid the whole amanita family mushroom racism that's called we've got down here some more deceivers and I can confidently tell you that these here are lbms little brown mushrooms so yeah here's a few things we could pick right so there we go that is I'm fairly sure a species of deceiver so we could pick some of those it's called deceiver because the appearance is variable not the deceiver name makes it sound like a dangerous mushroom but it's called deceiver just because the appearance of the mushrooms in this genus is very variable there's quite a few of them just down here if we're looking amongst the moss so now we're into a different kind of habitat so mixed deciduous here I know what the yellow mushrooms are let's have a look at one of these this yellowish thing it's a guild mushroom um yeah I don't know what it is though so we'll just leave that alone but anyway it's a hopeful sign and it looks a little bit to me like sulfur tuft but there's not enough of them sulfur tuft you normally find in big clusters I'm going to just try the app to see if I can get a clue on what that might be so I tried the seek app just to see if it could get me close to what these might be the seek nature identification app is not so great at fungi often if I meet a plant a green plant that I don't recognize it'll give me the right clue mushrooms fungi it generally doesn't even get close and of course as I've said in other videos previously I would never rely on the app for identification as the sole source of identification for something I intended to eat but the apps can be useful just to point you in the right direction so that you get a chance to actually try out you know look up other references sort of narrow you down in the book and give you a an idea and then you can go and check out if that idea is correct or not there's a very very large sinkhole here I think this might be carl pepper's dish I don't think the magnitude of these sinkholes really comes across all that well on videos but that's a big hole and these are sinkholes caused by underlying limestone so this is all an acid heath on top of limestone or chalk underlayer and so the acidic soil that percolates through the acidic heathland here over millennia dissolves away the limestone and creates a cavern and then eventually that cavern collapses and forms a sinkhole such as we are seeing in front of us here I'm not aware of any new sinkholes opening up in the news or anything like that so I think this is something that probably has happened over very vast spans of time and so it isn't a pertinent risk another huge one anyway right now this kind of terrain here is where I might expect to find yellowleg mushrooms so the yellowleg chanterelle trumpet chanterelle we've got half buried logs and moss I can see an amethyst deceiver just down here a tiny little one which I won't pick there is some concern about amethyst deceivers being bio accumulators of arsenic but I think that's mainly only a problem if there's a concentration of arsenic in the soil such as in mine tailings or mineral rich areas this is not one of those areas this is actually probably quite a mineral poor area anyway I'm going to wander across here because these kind of little clearings in amongst this grassy stuff could be productive we've got a mixture of trees here and if we are looking for yellowleg chanterelles they're not always immediately obvious this I think is a common earth ball very unusual looking one kind of a wet egg I shouldn't spend too long looking inside of that I see some little yellow mushrooms down there probably sulfur tuft it's not looking good for the table this evening anyway so nothing so far but let us we'll have a little seat on this log here overlooking Culpeper's dish and have a bit of elevenses elevenses today consists of coffee as always a piece of almond cake I made this cake with the egg whites left over from my carbonara I'm still working on this recipe so as soon as this recipe is kind of refined enough I will post a version of it this is good but I've got to tweak it a little bit more and when this is ready I will post my almond cake recipe on a video it's a very nice cake but I have a few ideas how it could be better so the woods near Wareham were pretty much a bust there were a few things we could have picked there were some deceivers of various different varieties but we didn't pick anything that day so today is another day that's why this video even exists the fact that you're seeing this video means we did pick something for the table so we've come to a different location today different kind of biome there's a lot of beach here it's a bit more open woodland we can walk in amongst the trees instead of just having to take off little forays off the path so we'll have a little wander around here see what we can find there's been some forestry work going on here which may or may not be detrimental to our objective but we'll have a wander in amongst all of this stuff here maybe cut across there and have a look and see what we can find got some little things here not really sure what those are the guild mushrooms of some sort not picking those though I'm just going to have a look really really slimy just going to have a look along these mossy banks because these are often productive little areas and kind of mossy overgrown stumps like this mossy decaying stumps and buried logs and so on in particular the fungus I'm looking for in this environment is the yellowleg chanterelle or trumpet chanterelle this just seems like the right place we might find it but I'm not seeing very much of anything at the moment it just again might not be the right kind of a year okay right these are whoops these are hedgehog mushrooms one two three of them so that's a good sign quite immature specimens there's another one over there I'm just going to make sure before we start picking them that there's plenty of these around we might come back for those in a minute right more hedgehog mushroom here really wonky looking specimen but I'm sure it'll be fine I see something else over there that might be promising and Jenny's pointing at something so it looks like we're picking hedgehog mushrooms but let's just have a look at what those look like so instead of gills they have these little forest of spines underneath the cap I'm just going to cut off the worst of the dirt off of those yeah I think we'll have that one as well it's a really kind of misshapen looking specimen because it's growing right underneath a log here but they are often a bit on the wonky side anyway so there we go hedgehog mushrooms success that's another hedgehog down there but a kind of little weedy rather eaten up one these also look like yep hedgehog mushrooms so some growing straight out the moss here on this tree there's some underneath those branches oh I can see more in there I can see a rather nice one under here I thought it was a nice one but that one's been really munched so I think we'll leave that one that one's been really eaten up or possibly damaged by these needles blowing on it actually but that one's really damaged on the top there that one's been knocked over but it's still good and this one here pretty good and this one beautiful as indeed is that one oh that's a very funny shape okay so it looks like today's dinner is going to be hedgehog mushrooms so I'll just show you there's a slightly atypical specimen because these got orangey caps and that's probably on account of where they're growing underneath something but that's not uncommon to find them looking like that I can see lots of little ones in there I'm going to leave the small ones to develop a bit further so Jenny spotted these these are deceivers not amethyst deceivers but they are related to amethyst deceiver is here these are just some other species of lacaria I can see another I can see some more amethyst deceivers down there these are edible but there is this thing about them bioaccumulating arsenic which makes a lot of people very wary of them so I probably won't pick them it looks like we won't need to because there are some lovely hedgehog mushrooms around that we can forage instead not so for tough there you see something over here which I think is another hedgehog yeah now a bit on the small side that one I think we'll leave that one but we'll have a wander up through here so not quite what I expected to find today although I'm not surprised to find hedgehog mushrooms here in this season but what I was really looking for was the yellowleg chanterelles but we you know there's still everything to play for we might find those in a moment I can see something over here let's have a look and see what this is I don't think this is an edible one but I can see why there's a white amanita there possibly destroying angel or something like that yeah this is more sulfur tuft here ah and I see yellowlegs here we go this is the yellowleg chanterelle and I can see more of them over there and over there on this decaying wood so we're in there I can see a red russula there as well possibly the beechwood sickener this one so we won't be picking that one but yeah most likely since we are under beechwood that is the beechwood sickener anyway I think we will have some of these yellowlegs this is interesting so this is a wood ant nest that is now dormant here this pile of pine needles and bark and so on and there's a really really healthy colony of amethyst deceivers on here on this ants nest um as I say it's not going to pick them because I don't really need to I have eaten them in the past and I'm not especially worried about the um notional arsenic risk because for one thing it's not like I eat them every day but also it's not like this is a a mining area or anything like that where there would be an abundance of arsenic in the soil there is always some arsenic in soil or nearly always but it's not like there would be a an overabundance of it here so I can be reasonably confident that we're not going to find that we wouldn't have a huge concentration of arsenic in the mushrooms but since there are other things to pick we might as well have those so these little mossy dells like this are sometimes productive for chanterelles I see another hedgehog mushroom there but rather poor looking specimen okay there's another hedgehog that's kind of the size I would pick really they do tend to crumble when they're picked these mushrooms they are a bit brittle and fragile that's one of the reasons I pick into a basket rather than a bag another rather munched russula there hard to say what that was could be the charcoal burner that's a bit on the purple side for charcoal burner but russulas are really difficult to tell apart but none of them are deadly in the family russula so as long as you're looking at a russula there is a taste test thing you can do where basically as long as it tastes well as long as it doesn't taste bitter or peppery they are supposedly safe to eat I've never really been brave enough to try the taste test although I do believe it of course one day I will if I find some really decent looking russulas the only thing you have to be very certain of is that you have actually got russulas but they are quite an easy group of fungi to identify right well this is pine woods over here so different kind of environment so I don't know that we'll go very far into that I think we'll head along this way now there's a little pale very pale yellow amanita here probably amanita citrina the fourth death cap so not finding a vast amount of stuff here and I think that might just be what the kind of a year it is conditions in any particular year are so variable and the fungi just fruit when they want a fruit so you know it's a very much luck of the draw thing we have definitely got enough there for a meal though so let's not be downhearted sometimes these little mossy hummocks like this that's probably once a tree stump sometimes they can be productive but nothing there at the moment they're maybe just a little bit too early because the hedgehog fungi and the yellow legs are both autumn winter species so it could be that you know another few weeks and you won't be able to move without tripping over them here this is more like it so still undersized but we've got a nice troop of hedgehog mushrooms here going through I can't pick them all see another one over there Jenny's just yelled from behind me that she's found something as well so this is a bit more like it now they are rather beaten up specimens but still perfectly good for the table I'll pick judiciously I'm only going to pick the larger ones smaller ones I will leave to develop right and need two hands for this anyway so we're not going to fill the basket to overflowing but we are going to do okay today another white amanita there and I'm 90% certain that is a destroying angel I'll see something else over here though which Jenny has already spotted looks like another little troop of hedgehog fungi not very big ones again and rather battered all right you know what we've got plenty in the basket I think these ones deserve to be left alone okay well I think we've done good and I hope it's for obvious reasons I'm not going to disclose the exact location here let's get these mushrooms back to shrimp cottage and see what we can make now nice as these hedgehog mushrooms are this is a fungus that brings a little bit more of the forest floor in with it than perhaps some other species of fungus I've got this little mushroom brush that's on this it's actually a mushroom knife didn't use this one today I used a different knife which is specifically for brushing little bits of forest floor off didn't do that actually while we're out there probably should have anyway I'm going to get some of these cleaned up that's all they need I'm not even going to attempt to wash them because all of the little spines here would tend to wash off anyway and you just end up washing dirt into them if not so anyway that's how we clean them so also worth noting that with these mushrooms sometimes they've actually grown around bits of debris so sometimes cleaning them does actually entail scraping off a little bit of the fungus to get at the dirt that's or sometimes it's not dirt sometimes it's like a strand of moss or something like that that gets embedded in the fungus now because I'm invariably scraping off bits of the fungus here including spore bearing structures or bits of the fungus on which spores may have settled I'm going to collect up all these little bits and I'll go and scatter that in our own woodland but yeah so sometimes you find little bits get embedded or trapped in the folds that this mushroom creates as it grows because it's very uneven looking mushroom it starts off as a fairly neat capped mushroom and as it grows and develops it gets more and more wavy and contorted and those waves and contortions will tend to trap bits of detritus see there it's fine most of that will just brush out whatever doesn't brush out it'll just trim out with the knife and I do apologize to anyone if you know if you're distressed by the idea of not washing these mushrooms the usual concern is that wild animals may have done their business on them and of course that is the nature of the outdoors although it's perhaps not as big a problem as you might imagine it's not like the entire countryside is drenched in urine or anything like that but you know it's a thing it's not enough of a thing to make me want to ruin these mushrooms by washing them but we should bear in mind also that these are going to be cooked so any actual you know biological risk that might be attached to that it's going to be mitigated by cooking I just want to get the grit out really any bits that might be gritty one thing I've never found with these mushrooms is I've never found a maggot in any one of them I don't think this is a species that is attractive to fungus gnats or any of those kind of insects that infest other species of mushrooms never once had a problem with that with hedgehog mushrooms even though they you do find holes in them so things do eat them woodlice perhaps slugs snails if you find a deep hole such as I have found here just worth investigating making sure that there's nothing still inhabiting that so we are ending up with some lovely clean mushrooms and all of these bits and these bits are going to go in the woods so that's probably enough for today's dinner there's probably about the same amount left in the basket there which we'll have tomorrow these yellow leg mushrooms the only thing we really need to do there to clean these is just peel apart the stem because they've got a hollow stipe or stem and that can sometimes harbour little bugs and beasties and that's going to be the basis of today's dinner and these I'll just put in a cold room I'll put these in the utility room where they'll be nice and cold and they'll stand until tomorrow so big old beech tree here we'll just scatter these around let them take their chances there and hopefully you know we might have introduced enough spores for these things to take hold you never know importantly this is not a species that is parasitic on the beech tree so you know I wouldn't want to necessarily introduce anything that's going to attack this tree and cause it to decay and fall down anyway we'll see what happens I doubt that will really make any difference but you never know so we've got these gorgeous fresh and now clean wild mushrooms to use I was going to make it a kind of pancake thing very often what I do with hedgehog fungus is put them in a kind of stuffed pancake in a creamy cheesy sauce or something like that I'm going to do something a bit like that but not pancakes I've got these part baked rolls this is from Lidl I thought what we'll do is we'll make something that's kind of carbonara adjacent but also Welsh rabbit adjacent so we're going to cook the mushrooms with a bit of bacon in a cheesy sauce with egg in the sauce and then stuff these rolls and bake them in the oven so first off bacon actually guanciale leftover from the carbonara video so what I'm going to do here is just cut the rind off of that carefully I did by the way also test taste test independently I haven't done it on video the difference between guanciale and speck because speck is another well northern Italy you know alpine region kind of cured pork if you can't get guanciale or carbonara I would say speck is a better substitute than say pancetta just because it has a similar fat content and a very similar flavor so actually what we're going to do here we'll have a bit of guanciale and we'll have a slice of speck yeah and as you can see really quite similar this is made from pork loin I think this is made from cheek so there are different cuts quite similar this is not quite as fatty as fat but this is a fairly leanish example of speck anyway we're going to have a slice of speck as well so we'll cut both of these up into lardons and get them sizzling away in the pan until they're crispy and when I say pan you bet I mean the vision pan which we're still experimenting with I've used this a fair few times since the video where I unboxed this and I'm really quite impressed with this it definitely cooks bacon really well mainly because I think the radiant heat from this ceramic hob goes straight through the glass and you're basically grilling the bacon in the pan so this won't sizzle when it hits the pan because the pan isn't the thing that gets hot here it's the food there we go that's already starting to render and sizzle so from experience that means it's already time to turn this pan down turn it down to about four a couple of nice spring onions and we'll go for all of the white bits and most of the firm green bits these leafy bits here we'll save as a garnish then this bacon by which I mean guanciale and speck already starting to go crispy a lot of fat has rendered out of that I think at this point those onions can go in and now the mushrooms and I'm just going to break these up by hand into pieces kind of quickly crumble them in now these have got quite a lot of moisture in them so what's going to happen here is these will start to spew in their own juice which is absolutely what I want because that will also pick up the fond that was developing on the pan so actually I'm going to put about half a glass of water in there now maybe a bit less and now we're just going to bring the heat back up and let that just simmer this method of cooking mushrooms where you kind of fry then stew then fry develops a huge amount of flavor out of the mushrooms even with mushrooms there's something about the process of boiling these mushrooms a little bit or stewing them a little bit in some liquid and then letting that evaporate and soak back into the mushrooms develops an amazing flavor anyway so we're going to leave that to sizzle away while I make the sauce and that sauce is going to be two whole eggs birthed browns my favorite and then some pecorino a couple of spoons of creme fraiche we'll just whisk that together also some cheddar you might need to switch to a different whisk now so let's just see how that's coming together pretty good I think we'll have a little bit more pecorino in there just for some punchy flavor okay there we go and I also fancy just a little pinch of dried herbs in there so as you can see what's happening here is these mushrooms are gently simmering away they shrunk down a whole lot mushrooms do that anyway but also all of that flavor that's coming out of them this broth which is part of this dark color is the fond off of the pan but part of it is the broth that's come out of these mushrooms basically the reason this fry stew fry method makes tasty mushrooms is you just end up cooking them for a lot longer and what you're doing is breaking down the cells in the mushrooms releasing all the amino acids and stuff which is flavor I need that to be completely dry before I combine it with the sauce so this is my cunning plan with these bread rolls I'm not sure how well this is going to work but we will see so these little pans don't want anything to stick in here so I'm just going to smear some butter around the pan like this that's good and then my plan is to try to cut these rolls halfway through just through the bottom crust and then open it up okay like that rest that inside that dish and then the filling is going to go into there that kind of works I think we got away with it back over here at the cooker most of that moisture is gone now and the sound is changing from bubbling to sizzling so I'm just going to give that I've turned it down a little bit I'll just give it a little bit longer just to drive off some more moisture now somebody may be wondering where's the salt someone always does uh guanciale and speck both quite salty cuts of cured pork so there's the salt oh somebody asked in the comments on the vision pan video doesn't the handle get hot no it doesn't that end is barely warm that ends actually still cold in many ways that's a way of saying that this is not a good material for cooking on surfaces that rely the heat to be conducted through the pan but this is a ceramic hole where it heats by radiating the heat and that heat comes straight through and heats the food directly although these pans do eventually heat up and this one is now retaining this is off the heat now and that's still going to continue frying in the heat that's stored in this ceramic material so anyway that comes off the heat now green bits of spring onion and just slice up now so what's going to happen now I'm going to divide this into four we'll stuff it inside the bread so that is literally a case of you know spread it out on the pan like that divide it in half divide it in half again and there we go we got four relatively equal portions so each one of these is going to go into one of these bread rolls I was going to mix this in with that egg sauce but actually I don't think there's any reason to because we're going to bake this now in the oven I'm just going to put mushroom bits in there and we'll pour the liquid sauce over the top I found actually with this bread in the end if you cut a little circular plug out of the bottom of the bread then cut the x it's a lot easier to get your finger in there and open these up I'm still not sure how this is going to come out we'll we'll see it's fun to experiment I'm sure even if it doesn't look right it's going to taste good because well these pieces of mushroom they're cooked now so so hedgehog mushroom is an incredibly well flavored mushroom really rich mushroomy flavor the flesh of the mushroom stays nice and firm it even after cooking it's got a really nice bite to it I hesitate to call it meaty I don't think it is meaty actually it's just really mushroomy right then this egg and cheese mixture then this egg cheese and cream mixture it's going on top and that works out right I think then a little bit of this green spring onion on top like that and then you know because why wouldn't you a bit more cheese okie dokie so that is now going to go into the oven at 180 celsius fan oven 20 minutes or so until the egg is completely cooked through the bread goes crispy everything else just comes together I will probably use a temperature probe to probe down in the inside make sure they're completely cooked through so I'm just dressing this salad this is a little salad I made from shredded lettuce and spinach grated carrot sliced radish and dressed with some of my blackberry and elderberry balsamic a bit of olive oil lemon juice tiny bit of honey and then to emulsify it normally you'd use mustard Jenny can't have a lot of shop-bought mustard because it contains sulfites and she's deathly allergic so to emulsify this I use peanut butter which will give it an interesting nutty flavor I'm sure in fact why don't we taste a little bit now of course if you had a peanut allergy that would be a dreadful idea but Jenny has the other allergy sulfites oh that's good my timer has just gone it's time to retrieve those things from the oven well they look pretty good just going to probe them in the middle so yeah we got 80 85 90 celsius in the middle that's plenty cooked so let's just see what these look like well really lovely and crispy and toasty on those edges they have kind of met my expectations I'm just going to let them cool a little bit because at the moment cheesy bacony mushroomy napalm while we're waiting for these to cool down I should say actually it's around about this time in one of these kind of recipes where I just make it up as I go along that I start to wonder if this thing already exists and already has a name so if this dish already exists is this is this like a mushroom croustade do let me know in the comments and I'll put the name of the dish in the video description if it'll fit okay well time for plating up let's see if it comes out the dish it does indeed just have a little bit of this winter salad on the side so there we go that is my wild mushroom I'm going to say wild mushroom croustade I think that's gone pretty well but we'll just briefly go over to the okay well here it is I have a feeling that actually well this might either be knife and fork or it might be a case of cut it into wedges and pick it up so I'm going to try that it is incredibly hot in the middle so do beware the eggy bits are soaked into the bread and then baked so it is a bit like a quiche but with a bread crust instead of a pastry crust I think very good you like it yeah very nice yeah I'm happy with that and if one isn't enough there's another couple of outside well success and just nice to have something foraged so a couple of quick after dinner addenda firstly I believe yes this is a croustade so I didn't invent anything here I just made something up as I went along and invented something that already exists that probably happens more than I realize but anyway recipe notes for future shrimp we could put more liquid in that egg mix so there was only the one tablespoon full of creme fraiche in there we could put a little bit of milk or some more cream in there because it did set quite firm so I think we could have done more liquid more like the filling of a quiche and have it soak into the bread and be more full and a little bit more tender perhaps a little bit more tender and creamy perhaps so recipe notes for future shrimp there these were nice enough as they are though I've got to say and these two are reserved for midnight snack for me and Jenny so that's my wild mushroom thing I hope that's been interesting thanks for watching and I hope to see you again soon