Lobster Mushroom Forage, ID, and Cook!

Hey everyone welcome to Mushroom Wonderland and today I'm going to take us on a walk into the woods to hunt for lobster mushroom. I've heard that they were popping up so let's go find out for ourselves if we can find some delectable amazing wild lobster mushrooms on this episode of Mushroom Wonderland. Welcome to Mushroom Wonderland. Oh look at this coming up right on the edge of the trail. This is an amazing summer find. This is the lobster mushroom hypomyces lactiflorum. So it's a host mushroom with a parasitization that makes it bright orange like this and all contorted and a really great edible. Look at this they're just boiling right out of the ground right alongside the trail. These are just kind of like sitting here. These are definitely still attached and that's awesome. We're only oh my gosh I see a much bigger one. I'm probably gonna toss that one. Look right over here. Oh baby. So look at that. Here's your lobster mushroom. Look at that perfect example. Nice. So these are the first ones I've out here. I was hoping to see them. I've seen them showing up on Facebook groups and stuff down in California and southern Oregon but here we are in the Puget Sound finding hypomyces lactiflorum. So this one's even already riddled by bugs and again I'm going to toss that one out. But this one scientifically called hypomyces lactiflorum and that is the parasitization of this host mushroom that's a russula brevipes. So russula brevipes is a big boring white mushroom and it gets parasitized by this fungus known as hypomyces lactiflorum and hypo meaning beneath or under and mysis meaning fungus so that's fungus under and so you know it's like under the skin I suppose and lactiflorum, lacty meaning milk, florum meaning flowing so that would represent the host that's the russula brevipes which kind of related to the um lactarius mushrooms so lacty like lactarius so flowing with milk fungus under so there you go hypomyces lactiflorum. This is a perfect specimen right here. Look at the coloration on that and then you can see this white color and that's the spores of the parasite and I'm not really sure if the parasite you know parasitizes the fungus underground or if it comes through the air but I mean you see this primordia come up already parasitized which would suggest that it's already there in the soil we know that it transforms a pretty boring mushroom into a really desired edible mushroom so you can't mistake this for anything look at that I mean that is just one of a kind and you can see why they call it a lobster mushroom it's bright orange just like a lobster and then if I cut a section of it out you can see the inside flesh is white look at that looks just like lobster meat and so some people say that they smell fishy I get that sometimes but typically if they're fresh they shouldn't have much of a fishy scent in my experience. So yeah not too fishy when it's fresh like this now when they get old they'll definitely have a fishy smell but I think if you're finding fresh lobster mushrooms they're not smelling much like lobster you don't want really fishy smelling ones and these ones smell just a little bit fungal maybe a little bit of seafood but you know nothing off-putting and don't eat rotten food so if your mushrooms are smelling really rotten or fishy probably would avoid eating those but this is generally edible for everyone I don't know of anyone that's had problems eating a lobster mushroom very gentle mushroom on the GI system super excited to see these out here in the woods right now beautiful lobster mushroom let's go see if we can find some more see this kind of winking at me right here oh she's a little a little bit cracked got pretty hot and dry the last few days it's been 95 degrees for a couple days not a rainbow chanterelle this one cantharellus firmosus I know because this area we just don't ever get rainbow chanterelles because we don't have spruce so you got to have that spruce but it does have a pretty bright colored hymenium look and there's barely even gills or false gills under there but you know sometimes they look like this and out east they have a species of chanterelle that are commonly called smooth chanterelle so sometimes I find what looks like a smooth chanterelle but it's just uh it's just a golden chanterelle that's just a little bit different morphologically because of the dry conditions but it's living on the roots of this probably this big huge douglas fir tree right here you can tell because these cones right here and they got these little little tails sticking out of the scales but great mycorrhizal host so yeah I collect that really delicious mushroom and you can find these in the summertime despite it being super dry you know some of these mushrooms survive because they associate with these big trees and get moisture out of the roots so that's a nice golden chanterelle and uh take that one with me oh and it doesn't hurt to pluck the mushroom out of the ground if you ever farmed mushrooms you will know that it does not harm the fungus to pluck the mushrooms off and you actually get more material and I can just shave the outside of this off and save all of that if I cut it right there at the soil line you would have missed all of that you're actually probably doing it a favor by doing that I'm carrying a plastic bag in my pocket because I had a feeling this might happen I didn't want to bring a basket here with me because that's just bad luck but uh look at that perfect little guys amazing so this way people don't really ask what I have in the bag let's assume it's dog poop or something like that and you like my knife isn't that amazing you can get this at modern forager modern-forager.com super sweet knife my favorite foraging knife I've ever had look how quick this opens boom you need one of those you need one very cool as you can see here comes Gunner yeah he's got a little bit of a limp he's got arthritis in his ankle and it's just been getting worse over the years he's had it for a long time but he's on carprofen he feels okay he's just kind of slow and got a limp so he's in fewer of my videos but he's still coming along with he loves to get out in the woods but maybe not for the super long walks luckily this spot is kind of close to my house which is nice so nice to have this cloud cover for a change it's seriously been upper 80s and all the way up into the mid 90s the last several days so we're not really built for that here in western Washington so usually there's a little streak of that through the summer hopefully we just got it over with but still no rain in the forecast it's been really dry out but the they're one of these mushrooms that'll come out in the dead of summer I've heard the same story on the east coast and out in Pennsylvania and stuff that you know really dry summers they still find lobster mushrooms that's been my experience too so don't be discouraged by the lack of rain so we got to an area where I know they grow I see something poking out and you probably wouldn't see this if you were just walking down the trail unless you got a really trained eye but they're like this sometimes so check this out you almost can't see anything but right here you can see this orange kind of poking out look at that that's what we call a shrimp a mushroom bump look at that that thing's let off a lot of spores and look right next to it you probably didn't even see this look at that so when you see these in the market they were always picked wild and you can see how tricky some of them are to find they're just like really hiding down here it would be so easy to have walked by those but luckily I've found them in this exact spot before so my eye has been a little bit trained so usually look for the flag look for the one that's kind of poking out and then slow down from there and then often you'll be like oh there's another one and there's another one and there's another one so versatile mushrooms very cool those were hidden I like to hide my little holes back up so that maybe passerbys don't don't notice so much right gutter that's right so look at that western hemlock douglas fir western hemlock alder salmonberry a lot of different things growing right in this area where the lobster mushrooms like to grow so you see this forest that I like looking for the lobster mushrooms in some of the unique characteristics is going to be the diversity of this forest it's it's got a lot of different plants going on we have some hardwood alders and willows and there's big douglas fir and big western hemlock a lot of this salal brush this is usually present when I'm finding lobster mushrooms as well as sword ferns so these these are called sword ferns and you know you often see both of these species growing underneath conifer canopy like this and these are the areas where I find lobster mushrooms the better the species diversity under these canopies of evergreen the higher chance I seem to have of finding lobster mushrooms they really like diversity so rarely in a purely douglas fir tree farm stand do I find them it's usually in a pretty mixed type forest like this another thing about the areas where I often find lobster mushrooms is that it's where some sunlight can kind of get through the the canopy so there's speckled sunlight often on the ground and on the brush around where I'm finding lobster mushrooms and chanterelles can grow in those areas too but it seems like chanterelles seem to prefer darker shady or mossier habitat where the lobster mushroom doesn't mind a little bit of sunshine and there's usually wild blackberry growing right around there I often scratch my arms up on the blackberries because they like that dappled sunlight as well this is another common one I often find around lobster mushrooms the the wood fern or the bracken fern these are really common in lobster patches look right down here be easy to miss those but we got more of these super dry summer chanterelles look at that notice how it's all kind of one uniform color you know that's indicative of the cantharellus formosus the rainbow chanterelle is going to be much brighter underneath the cap and much duller on top of the cap look at that it didn't look like much from the top but those are pretty substantial little mushrooms man you get a few of those and you got a good meal today's the 18th of july stoked to be seeing some some lobster mushrooms out already in the fall if you were carrying wet mushrooms in a bag like this they would just be getting polarized and turn to mush but you know here in the summertime these mushrooms are so dry that um they're it's okay to carry them in a bag for a little while you can do whatever you want really you don't need to listen to anybody giving you a hard time no pick shaming here if you want to pick in plastic bags okay but I will say that if it's dry if it's really wet out they're gonna get grody yeah more chanterelles they're summer fruiting look at that beautiful little nuggets and there's a few of them right here very nice if you go into my mushroom recipes playlist there's a recipe for lobster mushroom bisque which is really really good just a cream based stew of lobster mushrooms and um really delicious so you could put seafood in there or you don't have to I just use the mushrooms as a replacement for lobster and again it's not super fishy but a really amazing cream of mushroom soup hey what you been doing man all right so we found some amazing lobster mushrooms out here in the woods in the middle of july so I'm going to take this back to the kitchen wash it off and cook it up and see what it tastes like I'll give you my official review so let's go back to the kitchen and cook up this beautiful lobster mushroom all right so I got home with my lobster mushrooms and a few chanterelles but what I'm going to do is I'm going to clean up these lobster mushrooms I'm going to cut the dirt off with a knife and then I'm just going to spray them off with water it's okay to wash your mushrooms and especially lobster mushrooms I'll often just lay them out in the yard and hit them with the hose but I can just hit them with the faucet really quick and get them nice and just going to cut away any of the dirt and discolored parts and I rinse them off once I'll set them aside and keep rinsing off all the other ones and then when I come back after a second and that water is kind of soaked into the dirt and stuff then they just really get clean the second rinse all right I'm going to put down some paper towels and just set these out to dry for a little bit but look how pretty those are now that they're washed up all right I got some nice choice specimens here I'm going to start getting a pan hot I'm just going to use a little pan you could use a big pan for if you're going to cook for a lot of people I'm just cooking for myself I'm intentionally using a smaller pan because I'm going to cut these into little cubes and I want to make a layer of them about three quarter inches thick across there and I'm just going to keep stirring it so I want to get them golden brown but I don't want to get them too crispy and that's one thing that can happen with lobster mushrooms is that if you cut them into thin slices and then try to brown them on each side because they'll be like potato chip crispy and I don't quite want that I want a little bit of softness I want a little bit of that softer texture rather than just really crispy bits of mushrooms which lobster mushrooms have a tendency to turn into so there we go they're nicely cubed up pretty uniform size and the host of this mushroom is the russula which is known for being very crunchy so it's a different kind of texture than your grocery store button mushroom so I'm going to start with extra virgin olive oil and we're just going to go right into the pan with these and like I said I want a nice layer of the lobster mushrooms because if there's too much room in the pan they tend to get really crisp almost kind of burned it is starting to get a little bit seafood-y smelling in here and I'm just starting to get all the moisture out of these so they are going to steam a lot of water out of the mushrooms and if you cook eggs with lobster mushrooms it'll turn your eggs red or purple colored which is pretty crazy I'm going to add in a little bit of salt and that's really going to kind of draw the rest of the moisture out of there and now I'm going to add in also a pad a nice pretty nice size pad of butter I'm going to add in some fresh herbs I have marjoram and oregano that I'm just going to add the fresh leaves right in there with the butter all right these are about ready to dish up got our nice sourdough all right and there we go we've got some lobster mushroom sourdough toast looks pretty amazing so I'm going to give it the official taste test big bite of the mushrooms on that so good when cooked like this they kind of have the consistency of fried potatoes they definitely remind me of potatoes because they just have a nice crunch to them this is amazing if you were to serve these on crostinis to your guests everybody's mind's going to get blown this is so so good you could even make a little sauce that might um you know be great in a pasta or something like that but this is the way that I like to cook lobster mushrooms and uh they're just delicious they're absolutely exquisite so I suggest you get out there find some lobster mushrooms cook them up oh my gosh what a what a treat so thank you for joining mushroom wonderland join me on patreon at mushroom wonderland instagram facebook tiktok everywhere or go to mushroomwonderland.com also check out modern forager at modern-forager.com they help sponsor this video and we'll see you on the next one much love everyone peace out