OUTDOORS: Foraging for Mushrooms

 

At half past eight on a bright spring morning in early May, John Wheeler and Erhard Wendt are hiking up a slope at Catamount, on the border of South Egremont, Massachusetts, and Hillsdale, New York, in search of morels. The wild, elusive fungi are associated with mature ash and old apple or dead or dying elm trees, so, having seen a number of ash trees at Catamount, Wheeler’s guess is that it might be a propitious site. It has rained recently as well.

 

“Morels like moisture in the soil, but they are temperamental,” Wheeler warns, before angling off into the woods, where he moves swiftly between ash trees next to a creek. Morels are notoriously hard to spot even when you’re staring right at them, and it’s a wonder these guys can find anything at their pace. After a few minutes of searching here at the ski mountain, Wheeler jumps the creek. “Nope,” he says to Wendt, who’s on the other side. “None here.” In a few minutes they’re heading for the car.

 

Wheeler, 55, is the blue-eyed, laid-back president of the Berkshire Mycological Society. He and his wife, Judy, a graphic designer turned gardener, own the MycoLodge Bed & Breakfast on in Housatonic, Massachusetts, a warm and welcoming blue-gabled farmhouse the couple shares with sons Max, 17, and Luke, 14. The cozy house is chock-full of fungal decor: from the framed art prints on the wall to the ingredient canisters in the orange-and-white kitchen. Even bags of straw impregnated with oyster mushroom spores hang from the rafters.

 

“I start dreaming about mushrooms in February. It’s like gold fever,” Wheeler says of the hunt, which lasts from morel season in the spring through the fall harvest of chanterelles. “It just turns on the hunter-gatherer part of your brain, the finding-food part. It’s primal.”

 

As Wheeler tells it, his initiation took place on an otherwise uneventful September day twenty-two years ago. A friend called needing a ride to collect “the honeys.” “The honeys?” Wheeler had asked, clueless. The two picked a pound or so each of edible honey mushrooms from a hillside that had fruited perhaps a thousand pounds or more. That day, they also bagged a strange growth that looked like a waterfall of ice, known as bear’s head tooth, which tastes, Wheeler claims, like crabmeat. Smitten, he spent the next eight years out in the woods with his basket, bringing specimens home and looking them up. Now he’s a skilled forager with encyclopedic knowledge, willing to lead interested individuals on a friendly foray into the woods on most Sunday mornings during mushroom season.

 

 While Wheeler loves to eat mushrooms, he’s as happy discussing their medicinal properties, weird behaviors, and taxonomy as he is talking about their flavors. He tallies species and collects whatever he finds. That’s not true of foragers like Wendt, who are foodies first. Wendt, the hale and enthusiastic chef-owner of the Williamsville Inn in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, just five minutes north of the MycoLodge, began foraging mushrooms as a toddler with his family in the Westphalia region of Germany. He and his wife, Kandy, came to the Berkshires eight years ago from Germany by way of Newport Beach, California, where for three years Wendt cooked at Pascal’s, the renowned Orange County restaurant. Though the couple ended up here for several reasons, fungi were high on the list. Wendt is passionate about foraging and incorporates whatever wild edibles he finds—ramps, fiddleheads, sweet woodruff (which he uses in ice cream, May wine, and lemonade), watercress, dandelions, and, of course, mushrooms—into his menus whenever possible. He leads the inn’s guests, and anyone else interested, into fields and forests in the spring and fall to forage and then into his kitchen to cook the bounty.

 

Wheeler and Wendt are generous with almost everything: mushrooms, advice, knowledge, recipes, time. Wendt has made gifts of ramp butter, pickled ramps, and a rich sauce made of veal stock, white wine, cream, butter, shallots and, of course, morels. When Wheeler, who makes furniture for Nicholas Mongiardo Decorative Arts Studio in Housatonic, learned that this writer had never tasted a morel, he set about remedying the situation from his own considerable stores. Morels sautéed in butter, warm on the tongue, are a powerful aid to understanding; suddenly, all of it makes sense: the hours upon hours spent in the woods, the repeated bouts with Lyme disease, the obsession, the reverence. Those odd little dun-colored jewels are indescribably delicious.

 

 These guys are altruistic, yes, but only to a point: don’t ask them to divulge the whereabouts of their favorite mushroom patches—they won’t, not even to each other. In fact, on the drive back from the fruitless Catamount search, when asked about the personality profile of the typical mycophile, Wendt blurts “Secretive!” from the back seat.

 

“Well,” responds Wheeler, who is driving, “I’d never raid one of his patches, but I’m not so sure about Erhard. He’s a restaurateur.” He shrugs, as if further explanation is unnecessary. Wendt, smiling, doesn’t respond. When it is pointed out that Wheeler has yet to detail the origins of his forty-two-morel haul of the day before, he gives no ground. “Hey,” he says, “it took me five years to find my five morel patches.”

 

So, generous, secretive and … a tad obsessive. “Yeah, once you start hunting for morels, you can end up like a crack addict,” quips Jeremy Stanton, the thirty-eight-year-old chef behind Fire Roasted Catering in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Stanton, who lives on Barking Dog Farm in Southfield, Massachusetts, with his wife, veterinarian and bread maker Emily Newman, and their two children, Ryan, 12, and Maia, 9, cooked at the now-defunct La Bruschetta in West Stockbridge for four years after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He describes the frustration he felt for years when foragers would show up, baskets full of mushrooms, at the back door of the kitchen. They were “sort of like stat-crazy baseball fans,” Stanton says, noting that they were almost as eccentric as the mushrooms they collected. He admired their deep knowledge of and connection to the land and the peaceful, even meditative, quality of their hunt. Deeply impressed from a young age by the high priority his maternal grandmother—also a forager—put on eating high-quality local food, and always more comfortable outdoors anyway, Stanton figures it was just a matter of time before he, too, was hooked.

 

“There was no dramatic epiphany,” he says. “I just realized one day I didn’t want to work seventy hours a week in a restaurant kitchen.” It was 1999, and Stanton took his son, Kyle, then just a baby, into the woods to begin educating himself, just as Wheeler had. He recalls one particular day.
“I was in a parking lot in Great Barrington where a foraging friend saw my one morel, and said, ‘The key is southern-facing slopes under ash trees.’” Stanton immediately went in search of such a place and, as a result, bagged his first substantial take of morels. Today, he uses whatever he finds—stinging nettle, Japanese knotweed, staghorn sumac, chanterelles, or chicken mushrooms (his kids call these “stop-sign mushrooms” because their dad slams on the brakes when he sees them). And he cooks for his clients and their guests his own way, over an open wood fire outside. “It took a lot for me to do it,” he says of moving out of the kitchen, “but it has changed everything.”

 

When it comes to favorites, the same mushrooms are mentioned repeatedly: truffles, porcini, chanterelles, black trumpets, shaggymanes, morels, honeys, bear’s head tooth, lobsters, oysters, bicolor boletuses, young hen-of-the-woods, and chickens—all of which, with the exception of truffles, are found in the Berkshires. As it happens, our woods contain a veritable cornucopia of fungal species, including the statuesque and aptly named death angel. Wheeler talks about collecting one hundred and fifty species or so in the course of an hour and a half’s amble through the woods, and Don Roeder, who teaches mycology at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, estimates that there may be as many as a thousand fungal species here altogether. According to Roeder, our forest is part of the transition zone—the Northern Hardwood Forest—between the boreal forests of the North and the true deciduous forests of the Appalachians, and as such contains trees from both, creating rich variety which in turn increases the variety of the mushrooms at their feet.

 

While not all mushrooms live in conjunction with trees, many of the wild ones we all like to eat do. Mycorrhizae, as these tree cohorts are called, help trees to flourish, supplying them with more phosphorus, nitrogen, zinc, copper, and manganese than would be available otherwise. In turn, the tree gives the fungi essential carbohydrates. What we actually see is the “fruiting body” of the mushroom, a short-lived occurrence for the dispersal of spores; most of the actual structure of the mushroom is underground, an immense, subterranean network of microscopic root-like cells that thread through the soil, sometimes over acres. This network acts, in a way, to extend the reach of a tree’s roots.

 

Then there are the saprophytes, like shiitake and oysters, which live off decomposing dead matter—leaf or conifer litter, tree stumps, dung—breaking down the waste material on the forest floor and turning it into nutrients for new growth. The third class is that of parasites, like the honeys, which attack and kill their living hosts.

 

 As tasty as some mushrooms are, they can also be quite peculiar. Consider the smelly squid stinkhorn, which looks like a cephalopod buried head down, or the inky cap, which can emerge and dissolve into a pool of blackish ink in the course of a day. Or “dead man’s fingers,” which resemble, unfortunately, just that. Or the mind-altering Psilocybe. Or the innocent-looking, even pleasant-tasting “death cap” that kills in a few short hours by way of complete renal failure. “No, gratifying human needs and desires is just not what mushrooms are about,” says Michael Pollan in his bestselling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Mushrooms are wild things in every way, beings pursuing their own agenda quite apart from ours.”

 

As Stanton puts it, “I need to know the soil or circumstances that bring about the tastes I experience.... Without that information, the food is dead, off a truck, groundless. For me, eating like that has no soul.”

 

 And soul, it seems, is what wild mushrooms are all about. [AUGUST 2010]

 

Maria Black is a freelance writer living in Lenox, Mass. Having wanted to know more about mushrooms for years, she’s thrilled to now know the difference between ascomycetes and basidiomycetes. Thanks, Professor Roeder!

 

THE GOODS

Berkshire Mycological Society
Free hikes, Sundays at 10

Fire Roasted Catering
Great Barrington, Mass.

MycoLodge Bed & Breakfast
260 North Plain Rd./
Housatonic, Mass.

The Williamsville Inn

West Stockbridge, Mass.

 

 

FUNGUS AMONG US

Some mushrooms, of course, can be very poisonous. As cautioned by the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms (Knopf, 1981): “Before you eat any mushroom, check every possible source of error. If any doubt remains about the edibility of a species, do not eat it.”

 

The first of its kind organized with a visual key, this book is an excellent resource for foragers, featuring 762 full-color pictures detailing more than seven hundred species.—MB