In these times of peril, people are taking to their nearest patch of woods to pursue an escape from the phony and closed world around them. This escape is something historically pursued by both aristocrats and peasants; it requires skill, knowledge, and rootedness in the mysterious lands where one resides. In fact, the foraging of mushrooms may present one of the last organic ways for individuals to find mystery, excitement, and adventure in this postmodern wasteland.

Now, before one goes off to their nearby woods to hunt for some delicious mushrooms, it pays to know the basics. I will start by saying the cliché line about any kind of foraging: “One should not eat what one does not know.” The good news, of course, is that there are roughly a half-dozen species that can easily be positively identified, that grow in most of the United States (as well as in Europe), and that grow for at least a decent window of time each year. In mushroom hunting, all knowledge is very local. Learn the specificities of the area you are foraging, as there will undoubtedly be quirks in where mushrooms show up. Nonetheless, this is intended as a basic guide with almost universal advice on a few significant species of shrooms.

If you are interested in mushroom foraging, it is best to be located in either Europe—especially Eastern Europe, the British Isles, or parts of Italy and France—or North America, either east of the continental divide (especially Appalachia, the driftless region of the upper Midwest, and the Ozarks) or in the lush forests of the West Coast. Many of the following shrooms appear around the globe. Chicken of the woods, for instance, has foragers everywhere from India to Siberia, Central America to Alaska. Talk to locals, read books, and look at local online resources: message boards, social media groups, etc. This cannot be stressed enough. There are even apps for easy mushroom identification.

There are plenty of mushrooms that can be identified by nearly anyone with basic sight and a guidebook, and I intend to cover most of these basic mushrooms in this guide. I will focus primarily on the mushrooms likely to be encountered in the United States; however, this article will still be a good baseline for any aspiring mushroom hunter and an excellent intro to “speaking mushroom.” More interesting shrooms will await you in the promised land of mushroom mastery, many of them quite flavorful—but like any worthy skill, a good handle on the basics is needed to get there.

I will repeat once again that you need to be careful. Any mistake can be deadly, although oftentimes the dangers are a bit overplayed. There are dozens of internet groups that can help you learn about mushroom identification. Use these resources as much as possible. Please be mindful of the environment you forage in and avoid contaminated sites, such as places where toxic chemicals are routinely sprayed. Nobody, except your mother-in-law, wants Chernobyl mushrooms (I apologize, this is a Russian joke that you can look up and tell at the bar to your mushroom-hunting comrades).

Spring

Let’s start with the morel mushroom, generally the first-choice edible mushroom to pop up each year, and the most popular mushroom to forage in the United States. There are two main varieties of morels, although the rules for finding and identifying them are roughly the same. The two main varieties start with black morels, which tend to grow early in the season and are more common in higher-elevation and higher-latitude locations. The second is the yellow morel, which is the more common of the two. The yellow morel grows from Northern Texas to Canada, often in low-lying areas or scrubby habitats not far from suburbs, and pops up later in the spring season, from about mid-spring to late-spring, emerging as late as mid-May in many areas.

The key to hunting for morels is very simple: dead and dying trees. Specifically: elm, ash, apple, and cottonwood trees, although there are plenty of morels found each year near oak, maple, and tulip poplars. Many search for years and can never seem to find morels, but the actual hunt should focus less on looking at the ground for morels while walking randomly through a forest and hoping to get lucky, and more on hopping from sick-looking or dead trees and zeroing in on the immediate vicinity of these trees. 

Once you begin to find morels, take note of the type of spot you found it in. Was it near a river or stream? What was the soil like? How much decaying matter was nearby? This will allow you to hone in on the specific conditions where morels are found in your area, and to repeat your success by finding locations that replicate these conditions exactly. 

All morels have a sponge-like texture and can be easily positively identified by cutting them in half. If they are hollow, they are morels. If they aren’t, you have likely encountered the inedible and even toxic “false morel.” Discard.

Cooking morels is simple. Put a little butter and salt and pepper in a pan and sauté them, adding soy sauce. A brief note ought to be added here about other opportunities for wild food in the springtime. In much of the American country, wild turkeys can be hunted, crappies are spawning, and the pheasant back mushroom is emerging from the soil. Since the turkey hunting and crappie fishing (both opportunities for developing your woodsmanship skills) are out of the scope of this article, I will briefly go over the pheasant back mushroom.

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Pheasant back mushrooms are the consolation prize of the morel hunter. They are a good sign one has found solid morel habitat, or is at least close to finding it. This fungus grows on trees and is best eaten young—as young and small as possible. As it has pores—small holes on the underside of the mushroom cap—and not gills, and the characteristic dots on top of the fungus seen above, it is almost certainly a pheasant back mushroom. Positive identification can be achieved by simply smelling it: it should smell like watermelon rind or cucumber. These mushrooms go well sliced and pickled, or put in ramen soups.

Summer

Summer mushrooms include many species, but I will focus on one that is accessible to most beginners: the chanterelle. A word of caution must come immediately: the jack-o-lantern, a very toxic mushroom, is a lookalike of the chanterelle. One key feature distinguishes them: The poisonous jack-o-lantern has gills under its cap. The benign chanterelle does not have gills under its cap, and instead has some ridge-like entities that look like gills. Most can tell the difference after being acquainted with some pictures and accompanying a more experienced mushroom forager into the woods.

Unlike morels, chanterelles’ growing patterns are a bit less easy to identify. However, there are some basic guidelines: look very specifically at oak trees and in hardwood forests that have been left relatively undisturbed by development or destruction; look along game paths in said forests. Chanterelles prefer to pop up immediately after rains, in the hottest and muggiest parts of summer. If you aren’t sweating to the point your shirt is soaked, you have probably picked the wrong time of year to look for chanterelles.

Chanterelles are highly prized in France for their flavor, and are often described as a beautiful symphony of “peppery” and “fruity” flavors. My experience with chanterelles is more limited, so I will not give culinary advice here, although recipes can easily be found with a quick search online. An experienced mentor is highly recommended to help find this specific mushroom, due to both the difficulties in finding suitable habitats and the aforementioned toxic lookalike.

Late summer is the perfect time to harvest the ever-abundant and nearly universally distributed chicken of the woods. This is a mushroom that starts popping up on logs in early summer and, in rare cases, late spring. When picked at just the right time, it tastes vaguely like chicken—hence the name—with a slight citrus flavor as well. It is truly an abundant mushroom, and its brilliant orange color makes it super easy to spot, even from a distance—I sometimes carry binoculars into the field during chicken of the woods season for this reason.

Almost any place where there are dead trees or logs on the ground, there’s sure to be chicken of the woods at some point. Oak forests are especially prime. There are basically no inedible lookalikes, so as long as you study the identification pictures carefully, you shouldn’t have any problems. Just check and make sure your shroom isn’t bug-infested before you eat it (although you should probably realize that eating wild anything will entail eating a bit of…extra protein).

My recommendation for chicken of the woods is to fry it up using the same recipe you would use for chicken or fish, as the texture is somewhere in-between, and pickle what you don’t cook. There’s plenty of detailed articles explaining how to pickle mushrooms, so I won’t go into detail on that. One nice thing about chicken of the woods is that your guests and friends who normally hate mushrooms will probably be accepting of it. It doesn’t really taste like a mushroom, and makes a great, protein-packed substitute for tofu and other soy-based meat substitutes that can mess with your hormones.

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Fall

Fall, especially the last month or so, offers the hen of the woods mushroom. This mushroom has basically no toxic lookalikes, although it does have another edible lookalike, the black-staining polypore. Hen of the woods grows generally in the cooler parts of the United States, only barely reaching the South. Oaks are key here, especially oaks near washes and ravines. 

An additional fall treasure is the giant puffball. These too are pretty easy to identify: if you find one, cut it open. As long as it is solid white, it is edible—brown or black means it is either the wrong species or it is dying, and non-solid white means it might be a young version of another mushroom that is poisonous, the death angel. Giant puffballs taste like tofu, so just imagine them as a more based substitute for soy. They don’t keep well, so be prepared to eat a lot of puffball in one day if you bring some home with you.

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The lion’s mane is a true treat of fall or summer—if you can find it. It tastes like seafood, so when your vegan boyfriend or girlfriend comes over, you can evoke a lobster dinner. They’re not exactly common; to find them, look on the undersides of semi-hollow logs or on the sides of dead trees, particularly after it’s been rainy or moist out—these shrooms, even more than many of the others, seem to really like humidity.

Conclusion

It should be noted that in medieval times, the right to roam the forest and pick its fruits were considered to be universal. Even the lowest serfs had a right to forage mushrooms. In today’s society, an increasingly restrictive state has implemented more and more rules on the use of nature, cutting us off from the true rights we once possessed. Mushroom foraging is no exception. Many nature preserves, being administered by people who hate actually being outside, have banned foraging, as well as other traditional aristocratic leisures such as hunting. 

With this in mind, foraging for mushrooms is becoming a far cooler pastime than it already was for centuries. It is a way to contest, in a small way, the sovereignty of what were once open spaces for the public. To take back what is yours by birthright. Foraging is a way of asserting yourself as the owner and master of the land. It is punk to walk around the woods with a foraging basket, telling Big Agriculture and the government that you don’t give a fuck about their silly rules and signs that say “No Foraging.”

Many lame justifications have been given for why these bans have been implemented, but the simple truth is that our regime doesn’t want people to feel the mystic rootedness in the land that only experienced foragers, hunters, and fishermen come to feel. What ought to be done? Dissent. Rebel. Find yourself some shrooms.

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