The signs were all around me: snow just up the mountainside, cool air, moisture and dappled sunlight. Hazel trees pushing out catkins, Sierra gooseberries leafing nicely. They should be here—I just knew it, even though looking around, peering down, I couldn't see them. That's the thing with morels. Unlike a flashy red amanita, these mushrooms hide. You don't look for them so much as you look for signs of them, a spot where the sun breaks through the canopy to warm the ground just enough, the kinds of trees they like to grow near. But once you get there, you could just as easily find nothing.
Morels found by the author in the Sierra Nevadas
A little voice in my head told me to change my perspective, and I fell on one knee. I loosened my focus, and there they were. Colonies of morels, all around me. The feeling was almost spiritual: It is the realization that your will alone is not sufficient to make good things happen. You have to acknowledge how small you really are before the Mycological Force will pity you. And then maybe, just maybe, it will reveal what you seek.
To be a mushroom hunter is to be the Indiana Jones of foragers. You must be part scholar and part adventurer, willing to head far off the trail and brave real dangers to return with riches. And there is something else, something mystical—every mushroom hunter tells the same story, a variation of my magical moment with the morels. Mushrooms can be all around you, yet until they show themselves, you will never see them. You must be worthy.
I was not worthy for a long time. Mom instilled in her children a deep love of wild places, and that gathering the bounty nature provided was the finest expression of that love. I took it to heart early, running home with fistfuls of wild onions as a child. But, perhaps suddenly nervous that a pretty, poisonous cap would cut short her intrepid little forager's promising career, she banned wild mushrooms from our lives. Only the humble buttons from the grocery entered our kitchen (and then almost exclusively as an adjunct to beef stroganoff). Mushrooms became fascinating objects of dread, psychedelic in color and form, yet strictly forbidden.
But one day in school, our class went to some nearby woods. In New Jersey, where I grew up, there are swaths of forest that are wild and dark; some have not seen the axe for four centuries. There, our teacher showed us something I'd never seen.
Mushrooms, unidentified, found underfoot during a morel hunt
It looked like a frozen lava flow oozing from the base of an oak, layer upon orange layer, shining like a beacon beneath the dim canopy. We stood rapt, until the old man broke the spell: "It's called chicken of the woods." We giggled, until he said you can fry them in butter and they will taste a little like chicken breasts. This was a wild mushroom that you could eat. He cut a few pieces off and put them in a paper bag, then told us he was not allowed to give us any.
Before that day, Mom had always been the wisest person I'd known when it came to the woods. But this old man knew something she did not; there was more to the world than what my mother could teach. To find and eat a wild mushroom would be an act of liberation, almost defiance. The idea was thrilling, but even my teenage rebellion had its limits, and I eventually thought punk rock would be safer than poisoning myself. I forgot about the fungi for a while.
Years later, as a line cook after college, a taste my chef's duxelles of chanterelles over swordfish reignited the old fire. Though I was rudderless for a while, I eventually discovered the bible that set me free: David Arora's Mushrooms Demystified. It's a massive tome, thick with hidden lore about the mycological world: stipes and spores and habitats and tricholoma-amanita-esculenta—ohmygod! Don't try to read this book cover to cover; it's like looking directly at the Ark of the Covenant. Your head will melt.
I began trawling through forums on the internet, learning the lingo and trying to glean tidbits about where I might be able to find edible mushrooms. Then it was time to return to the woods, this time for real: I joined a mushroom hunting club.
We met in a parking lot on a misty winter day. In the obscuring fog, I felt like an initiate in a secret society, but it wasn't, apparently, a glamorous one. We were a sorry-looking lot of dilapidated hippies, shifty hipsters, plaid-wearing farmer types and REI-clad yuppies, all bound by the desire to find and eat fungus. We fanned out to comb the sodden park for mushrooms, and soon I realized that we spoke our own dialect. I spotted what I was certain were blewits, a pretty lavender mushroom that is mild and lovely sautéed with butter. I showed them to a white-haired veteran of the Summer of Love. He nodded.
"Ah, I see you've found clitocybe nuda!"
Yes, aren't they awesome!
"Well, just be sure they're not Corts."
Ah yes, the Corts… (These would be Cortinarius mushrooms, a largely toxic group of species, some of which impersonate blewits. Look for web around the cap to tell the difference.)
Since then, I've taken to bringing home lots of odd-looking mushrooms, just so I could stare at them for hours, Arora's book by my side. The Book has long, numbered "keys" you use to identify a particular mushroom. They go something like this: If the mushroom is larger than 20 cm, go to No. 3. If not, go to No. 5. This is the point at which you realize there is a reason why there are so few mushroom hunters. A galaxy of species lives out there, and most do not relinquish their secrets lightly.
A salad of wild violets and spring porcini, a forager's lunch
Not long ago, I managed to successfully "key out" a patch of honey mushrooms that had been growing in a friend's yard. Honey mushrooms are not a beginner's mushroom; they're wicked hard to properly identify. They have both poisonous lookalikes and an edible relative called the fried-chicken mushroom, which, oddly, tastes nothing like fried chicken. Nor is it related to the chicken of the woods mushroom. And neither is related to the hen of the woods mushroom. And for that matter, the honey mushroom tastes nothing like honey, either. Who names these things?
Hunting mushrooms has been a combination of mind-bending confusion, careful, meticulous study, and—like when patches of morels suddenly reveal themselves to you—pure otherworldly magic. It's maddening and exhilarating. No other wild food can both chill me with that childlike fear of the unknown—am I sure that bite I just took isn't poisonous?—and at the same time thrill me with a rush that borders on lust. If you ever find yourself standing amid $2,000 worth of porcini, you'll know what I mean.
It won't be long before the Sierra snows recede and I can return to my magical morel spot. Just a few days ago, a good friend of mine asked me where it was; he should have known better. I smiled and told him that it's somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 feet, between Nevada City and Squaw Valley. He laughed. "Couldn't hurt to ask, right?"
More mushroom stories
Make your own porcini salt
Cooking with button-cap chanterelles
Soft-poached eggs with mushrooms
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