A Typical Oyster Mushroom
I remember as a boy going with Daddy to take our bird dogs for a walk in late August and September. It gave the dogs much needed exercise and allowed us to take inventory of any new quail coveys. What I most remember about those walks is mushrooms. We would often happen upon a stand of spores and Daddy put many of them in a sack he carried just for that occasion. He would then go home and cook them, while our family watched closely to see if he keeled over from a poisonous toadstool. When he didn’t, we ate them, too. And they were very tasty.
Amateur mycologist (mushroom expert) Jonathan Bowman offers some words of advice about how to get started in mushroom hunting.
First, he recommends looking for something more obvious, and without a bunch of “look-a-like” mushrooms that are not edible for one reason or another. One of his favorites for beginners is the oyster mushroom.
Oyster mushrooms are easy to identify, have a subtler mushroom flavor than some others, and you can cook them with any dish that calls for mushrooms. There are several types of oyster mushrooms in Virginia, and they are all edible. Oysters are easy to spot from a distance, so just start looking at fallen trees while walking around the woods, and you will start finding oyster mushrooms and many other kinds. He found nearly 40-lbs. this year on one fallen tree.
One of the mushrooms Daddy sought out was the big fat mushroom that, when they dried, you could stomp on, and they would blow up in dust. They are called puffball mushrooms and they are both easy to identify and delicious. The inside flesh is solid and white. Daddy would slice them in thick slabs and sauté in butter.
These common mushrooms grow everywhere – in open pastures and dense forests, so there’s no telling where this fungus will show up.
Puffballs come as small as a baseball and as big as a basketball. Immature varieties of other mushrooms can look like a puffball on the exterior, but you can cut them open to be sure. If the flesh is totally solid from one end to the other, then it’s a puffball. If there is any kind of hollow area, stem, or cap, then it’s something else.
It’s been a wet summer and mushrooms are popping up everywhere. Try your luck with puffballs and oyster mushrooms. Then go from there.
They are really good, they are abundant, and they are free.