8 Popular Wild Mushrooms- Forage and Feast

Hey everybody welcome to this episode of Mushroom Wonderland and today I'm going to show you eight different wild mushrooms you can go into the woods and forage and I'm going to show you how to cook each and every one of them. Thanks for joining on this episode of Mushroom Wonderland. Welcome to Mushroom Wonderland. Look at some of these like laurel hedges here and if you look down under the laurel hedges we have some beautiful late spring early summer mushrooms. Look at a couple more right back here. Oh beautiful agaricus augustus. Nice and young. Look at that. Buttons. These are so choice. Look at those. Amazing. The prints. Toasted marshmallow looking. What a beautiful mushroom. Wow four perfect buttons. Here's the haul for the day. A lot of morels there but I'm going to get these agaricus augustus out from underneath all these morels. These are agaricus augustus. I'm going to rinse them off really quick. Dutch oven risotto turned out pretty nice. I want I want I want John to be the official taste tester. Not bad. This is some alder growing kind of near a wetland. Let's have a look. You see that? How pretty are these? So here's some blue it's growing right here. We've got this kind of brownish cap. Kind of a violet. Violet gills. That's a pretty mushroom. They actually have a really sweet smell. I think we're gonna gather these up. Give them a try in the frying pan. We're gonna be trying out these delicious wood blue it's this morning. See what they taste like. Blue it. Nice color on them. All right we're gonna we're gonna taste test the blue it. Yeah I've eaten eastern blue it's so this is gonna be a nice little taste test. It's like nuts. It's definitely nutty. Yeah there's something about it tastes like a gluten-free pancake or something so I feel like that might be the nut thing. Nice. It's not bad. They're popular all over the world. Now that would be good in a nice little mix like a little stir fry. A little crunchy. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Look at these. Nice trio. I'm gonna cook up a little porcini after our mushroom hunt lunch. All right we got some amazing Boletus aegylus cooking. Official review. What's this? I don't like to pile them up or they just start sweating and getting slimy so I like to do like one layer. It's very good. Can't go wrong. So in my neck of the woods the best chanterelle patches are deep in this salal and it doesn't mean that all the chanterelles I ever find are under this salal but it's this area where I live that these kind of forests just neck deep in salal the chanterelles are all underneath them. Right down here at the bottom are some nice chanterelle. Wow. It's about perfect. So they're kind of coming out of the brush. There's its little friend. These are picture perfect golden chanterelles. A younger one that's just came up probably within the last couple of days. A little bit more mature one but how pretty. What you do is you get some of those chanterelles and then you get that pork steak and it's all just cooked together. So these are some pretty cool mushrooms that we found growing right here around this decaying rotting stump and these are an inky cap. These ones are known as Copernelis mycaceus or the mica cap and they have a really dark gill under there that's due to the really black spore prints that these mushrooms have and they grow off of decaying wood making them a saprophic mushroom. Copernelis mycaceus or the mica cap is a good example of that. This is an edible mushroom and you could eat these although they deliquesce into a black ink pretty rapidly. Some people use it in stocks and in soups. You can find these pretty much growing all year round. Definitely enough to add some flavor for just a couple of servings. I'm going to start by dicing up a little bit of onion really thin and I'm going to cut up a little bit of garlic like one clove of garlic. A little pat of butter and we're going to sweat some onions and garlic. Now we're going to add our mushrooms. We could just basically just dump the basket right in there and we're going to just sweat all this stuff together. It doesn't really have to be caramelized. The mushrooms will put off quite a bit of water. All right we're going to stir this all up and you can see that black kind of ink coloring the butter there that dark color. They actually have used this ink to write messages, secret messages and stuff. Back in World War II they would sign documents with this kind of ink and so they could put it under the microscope and see the spores and know that it was authentic. How cool is that? Now I'm going to add in this nettle and you want to do this probably with the glove on but I'll just add it right in there and let that heat kind of start to wilt them. We're going to add a little water. There's a cold March wind blowing out here so I set the pot right down into the coals to get this thing cooking. So I'm going to kind of chop the nettle leaves up a little bit. So she's got a little bit of beef stock here. We're going to add that to it just for a little bit of flavor. You don't have to or you could add a little vegetable stock and put that right in there and we'll let it dissolve in there. Add a little bit of salt and pepper to the mix. Notice the inky cap really kind of made it dark colored. I think just a little bit more salt tea but it just really enhances everything. All right we got the nettle and mica cap stew. Me and my mom are going to try it out here for Mushroom Wonderland. Our March foraged stew. Look at that. Smells wonderful. Mushrooms, nettles. Yum. Oh man. That's nice. Cold out here so this is good. Really good. The soup she foraged. What do you think? It's good. It's good even for a kid, huh? Look at that. A big chunk of mushroom and nettle. Never been a prouder to have than right now. Because it's yummy. She likes the mushrooms, huh? Awesome. That was really good. This is a craterellus tubeformis or the winter chanterelle or the yellow foot. Very handsome, right? Kind of looks like a black trumpet but this is a gold trumpet. I don't know if anybody ever calls them that but same genus craterellus and these are a great edible mushroom. Mycorrhizal mushroom grown out of the moss here at the foot of a whole bunch of Douglas fir trees. A lot of this evergreen huckleberry. A lot of salal. Oh, a nice flush of mycena. Oh, but look right over here. More of the yellow foot and they can grow in really big numbers. It's easy to collect a lot of these at once. Gorgeous mushrooms. They're very tough. They withstand cold weather and heavy rain really well. You can fill up your basket really fast and they're really delicious. They hold up really well to cooking. Yeah, gorgeous mushrooms. All right, I think this looks like a good place to do a little bit of outdoor cooking, don't you? One thing about mushrooms in general is that you really can't overcook them so make sure they get nice and cooked and just take your time and relax. Let them really, really get cooked all the way through. It's just going to taste better that way too when everything can cook together. It doesn't get much better than this. Wild mushroom omelet in the woods. It is so, so good. Okie. Tonight I'm just going to be cooking up these hedgehog mushrooms that I found a couple of days out on the coast. These are arguably my favorite mushroom. Tonight I'm just going to make some chicken breasts smothered in a light cream sauce and a bunch of hedgehog mushrooms. Let's get to cooking. Chicken breasts are nice and seared on both sides. Now they're still like raw in the center and that's fine. They're going to finish cooking in our mushroom sauce. So now I just have the pan with a little bit of the chicken drippings in there and I'm going to deglaze this real quick. You can deglaze this with wine if you want. Maybe white wine would be nice. I'm just going to use a little bit of water. It just gets those little bits off the bottom of the pan. Get some moving around and I'm going to add in our mushrooms and this is going to allow them to dry saute in here and really exude all of their moisture out of them so that we can get a nice brown on them. One mistake I see people make is they just constantly are touching and moving the mushrooms. Let them just sit for a little bit and start to exude their moisture and you'll see all this water come out of the mushrooms and once that evaporates off then we'll start the browning. So look at all that water that came out of those hedgehog mushrooms. Not just chanterelles. You should do this with just about all wild mushrooms. Give them the dry saute or the dry fry. Look at all that water. I mean that is a lot. So you could even strain some of that off of there or just let it reduce all the way out. Some people will reserve this mushroom broth and then use it later in a gravy but I think that if there are a little bit of bitter undertones to a mushroom that getting this water out of there is really going to take care of that. So it's your choice what you want to do. Typically I'll let it evaporate all the way off or just discard it. So now I'll just add in the butter and let them start to caramelize. I'll also add in the onion at this point. We're going to start getting a lot of caramelization going on. We're going to add in a little bit of pepper and just a touch of salt. I like to season everything as I go along. This is about medium heat so I will give them a little stir after about three minutes and let them kind of start to caramelize on the other side. So I'm going to take a nice heaping tablespoon of flour and I'm going to lightly sprinkle that over everything and let that cook for just a minute. All right that's called making a roux. That's kind of a French way to thicken up a sauce is with that flour and you don't want it floury tasting. So you let it cook for just a minute. Looks pretty dry in there and I'm going to add in chicken stock now and that's going to deglaze it and that's going to thicken and really make this amazing mushroom chicken sauce. You see that starting to thicken. It's starting to get that nice shimmery look. Chicken breasts go back in and we're going to just let these simmer until they're done. All right this has been simmering for about 20 minutes and once I turn the heat off it's going to kind of thicken up. There you have it. Hedgehog mushrooms on rice with chicken and broccoli. Pretty simple. They have such a good bite to them. Such a good texture. I just love hedgehog mushrooms. So get out there get you some. As I'm setting these up to like take a picture of them I look over and I see yet another one. I mean these guys are really kind of hidden here. Just really popping up out of the duff. Look at that. There's another. Man look how bright those guys are. Beautiful. So this is where I'm just going to cut off these stem bases. See how solid and white that is inside and I'm going to stick them in this little foraging bag. Now I can carry this around drop spores in the woods. Kind of hard to do one-handed but I'm going to try to minimize the dirt. You can actually use the brush on this and clean off the caps before I put them in my bag but I'm going to keep my foraging bag in my backpack because this is kind of a well-known trail so I don't really want to draw a ton of attention to the fact that these are here. But what a super score and excited. I'm going to take these chunks and just scatter them out into the woods. Don't worry you can't over pick the patch but how cool to see the ghost pipes growing right here where the host is known to be growing. I'm 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 has kind of soaked into the dirt and stuff then they just really get clean the second rinse. 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 is 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 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