Well sure, Sg.
Too bad your not in the NW UK, or I'd bring you out with me when I go hunting for 'em, I don't mean to blow my own trumpet, as they say, but mushrooms are one thing I know and know well.
Taught myself to read with a mycology textbook at age 4 apparently, and I've been at it ever since. Almost 32 now, and I've been munching away with only one bad experience. And I KNEW what I was eating, the guidebooks call the egg stage of the stink-horn, a phalloid mushroom which true to its name, when adult, gives off a foul stench of dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, trisulfide and similar sulfurous satan-farts, that can be detected at as low as about a part per trillion in air. You smell them long before you see them, and when you do they are a sight for sore eyes and brain bleach. Adults look like a cock made of styrofoam with a little hat on the end covered in green slime that looks like food poisoning diarrhea and smells like somebody with severe food poisoning already ate it, vomited it up, had the dog eat their barf, crap it out before they cooked it in fermented piss and ate it.
Twice. At least.
But the textbooks list the 'witch eggs', the leathery, slime filled scrotal tumor-looking immature fruitbodies, as edible. So I tried some, and spent the rest of the night really wishing I hadn't, throwing up repeatedly, sick as a dog. That was the textbooks fault not a mistake in identity on my part however, I just can't tolerate them, some people are like that with in quite a few cases, perfectly edible species, even oyster mushrooms, sulfur polypore is another one that does a few people over, not fatally, just makes people ill, uncommonly however, even the Ceps (Boletus edulis, widely regarded the world over, and one of the most important mushrooms in commerce, used in mushroom soup because its intense mushroomy flavour and scent survives canning, bottling, pickling, frying, drying or several of these processes intact, and fresh fried in butter are to most, absolutely gorgeous eatin' make a very few react badly to them)
Honey-fungus is another that sickens some, but most people can eat it without ill effect, they are parasitic and saprotrophic, killing then eating trees, and producing clusters of honey-mushrooms. A few people are allergic, but I like them, as I do the sulfur polypore, a yellow to whitish (yellow usually, sulfur colored surprisingly enough with it's name, as nobody could ever guess
)
I love it, harvested young and soft, then dipped in eggy bread batter and deepfried, it has a slightly sour flavour, just nicely tangy, with a soft, juicy texture, and they melt in the mouth when done like that, like a sort of fritter, chicken of the woods they call it, binomial being Laetiporus sulfureus, I've been known to take a running jump up a tree just to grab some high up ones.
I think my favourites though if I had to pick three, would be giant puffballs, which, true to their name, are puffballs, which reach truly monstrous proportions, the largest reported being around a meter and a half in diameter, and weighing almost as much as I do. Young and fresh they are wonderful, can be sliced into thick, juicy mushroom 'steaks' and fried in batter, or just sliced and fried in butter with a tiny bit of sea salt sprinkled over, although they have a naturally salty flavour to an extent.
Also Macrolepiota procera, the parasol, a large, shaggy-capped white mushroom with a somewhat grey cast to the cap, grey to brown. Not to be confused with certain relatives, smaller members of either the genus Lepiota itself, which contain in some cases, a truly heinous pack of toxins known as amatoxins, the same as the infamous death-cap and destroying angel Amanitas, A.phalloides and A.virosa respectively. The amatoxins act by inhibiting RNA polymerase type II, and thus shut down protein synthesis in cells, with the end effect being somewhat similar to ricin, although it acts differently at the cellular level to ricin, and being about 20 times as deadly as cyanide, very slow, very cruel poisons that more or less leave you shitting your liver out as a blood milkshake, whilst your kidneys fail, brain swells and your heart gets chewed up too sometimes. Taking someone about a week to a week and a half of the most excruciating agony you could ever hope not to know about before finally the poor bastard to eat such dies screaming blood from both ends at once.
Nasty, nasty nasty little bastards, the Amanita phalloides (deathcap) alone being responsible for 90% of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide annually. I've only ever seen it once, up at Arnside Knott in yorkshire. Although there is a chemical screen for amatoxins, the Meixner test, which employs high lignin paper like newspaper, mashing a sample of cap onto the paper then adding a drop or two of strong hydrochloric acid, a purple halo forming within about a half hour indicates amatoxins, although the test isn't specific, it will crossreact I believe with psilocin/psilocybin, since the amatoxins, like tryptamine psychedelics share an indolic core, in the amatoxins, a tryptophan aminoacid residue in the center of the cyclic octapeptide structure of them, and should also react with virotoxins and phallotoxins, the latter also found in A.phalloides although poorly absorbed orally, virotoxins being more minor peptidic toxins found in A.virosa along with amatoxins.
Either way you don't want to eat those, needless to say, and the deadly Amanita species, indeed the whole genus is one that is strongly discouraged for newbies to eat of, although there are edibles, and a psychedelic species or two, along with some virulent liver toxins and some (different, based on an allenic nor-leucine structure, possibly also implicating chlorocrotylglycine, these being in the stirps Lepidella within Amanita, whilst the amatoxic species reside within stirps Phalloidea)
But, there is also the fly agaric, listed in the textbooks as poisonous, but nonfatal. However prepared correctly it is also a hallucinogen with a similar nature to ambien, acting at the GABA binding site of GABAa receptors as a potent full agonist, namely muscimol, the decarboxylation product of a glutamatergic neurotoxin, that breaks down when they are cooked to form muscimol. Its a medicinal mushroom too used correctly, that can be employed as a tonic, and dramatically boosts endurance to pain and to cold (not protecting against hypothermia, but its effective at eliminating discomfort. I experimented with this, and found I could walk miles, in a screaming blizzard, snowing and pissing down with rain, with no clothing from the waist up. Didn't feel a thing, just walked to the shops to buy some beer and snacks.)
I also highly esteem it, once prepared to eliminate the neurotoxin, ibotenic acid, as a seasoning and spice for cooking with red meat, it acts as a sort of concentrated essence of 'umami' the savoury taste sense. Delicious honeyed sweet smell pervades the kitchen just opening the tubs of dried fly Amanita caps I ALWAYS keep on hand in the kitchen. A spoonful or two always goes in my chili con carne, or as part of the spice blend for steak I make.
And last favourite, sulfur polypore/chicken of the woods.
If I had another, and I do, it'd be Lactarius deliciosus, a pine-woods mushroom known as the saffron milkcap, for when the flesh is broken, it bleeds milky liquid, and the color of the fruitbodies is that of saffron, with a greenish tint to bruised areas and the little pits in the stem especially in older species, although L.deterrimus looks very similar, and is less good to eat, being more bitter.
Doesn't harm one to confuse them however, L.deterrimus is simply a good edible mushroom but not AS scrummy as the saffron milkies. I've a nice spot though that produces sacks of saffron milkcap every year, that I take home, freeze some, while eating them fresh, roasted on the grill, then covered in mozzarella cheese and worcestershire sauce, roasting them simply by sticking them on a fork and holding it over the gas burners is good too, or frying, stewing, they are just good all round, with a firm texture and delicate flavour that is quite simply that of a mushroom of rare quality indeed, one of the best edible mushrooms I've ever tasted. And when I see sacks of the things the size of a side-plate, my main thought process goes something like this 'Lactarius...hmm...Deliciosus or Deterrimus....Deliciosus!!!! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
And I confess too, to being a real sucker for boletes of many kinds, especially Suillus species, particularly Suillus luteus, the slippery jack, a stocky mushroom with a brown cap and yellowy pores, a large ring on the stem, growing in association with larch and pine, covered in a surface layer of slime which is removed effectively by peeling the caps, and then frying in garlic butter with some pepper and a spritz of fresh lime juice and a wee pinch of lime zest. A few people are allergic to S.luteus. But to most it is an edible, and I find it to be a favourite, one of those 'squeeeee!' mushrooms that'll coax me out of bed before dawn, going out to hunt for them with torchlight to make sure I can get me some for breakfast. Them and the related larch Suillus, or larch bolete (it is in the subgenus Suillus, a boletoid family, with pores under the caps rather than gills), almost all having cigar tobacco brown spore prints.
I'm a bit of a pig for those things, and will happily devour them by the bowlful, cooked up russian style, with the lime or lemon juice and garlic butter.
And forests? nowhere is safe from me when its mushroom season for anything good. And you picture me pretty accurately, going over an entire forest or meadow pasture with a fine toothed comb, eagerly searching out that tasty little morsel hiding in the leaf litter, occasionally climbing up trees or down the banks of a lake to snatch something especially good.
One must know what one is doing of course, but, I do. I know what to look for, how to identify them, I've a good microscope if it boils down to the likes of chemical reagent testing and examining the ultrastructure of the tissue, looking for cystidia, clamp-connections in hyphae etc. before either throwing it out or eating it, cost me a couple of hundred pounds for the 'scope, but its an essential tool for me, and besides, microscopy is fun. And useful in my biotechnological research avenues, the sorts of things involving petri dishes, agar slants and fermentation bioreactors full of fungal gloop, floating in nutrient broths and various trace elements, aminoacids, surfectants and god only knows what.
I've got a project that I'm really enthusiastic about, I've been attempting to culture Claviceps purpurea in submerged culture, immobilized in a calcium alginate microsphere particulate suspension based on Ca alginate and a perfluorocarbon solvent emulsion for enhanced oxygen transport. These are extremely poisonous, causing tissue necrosis and potentially seizures, loss of limbs if poisoned, but the alkaloids can be processed to yield lysergic acid, from which LSD and analogs of it can be made. Of course I'd never do such an evil, horrid thing as to make acid, not innocent little ol' me.
Strain selection and stabilizing alkaloid productivity down subcultures is the hard part though with Claviceps. Lol I even bought THE seminal literature on the family, a book by Vladimir Kren and Ladislav Cvak, called 'the genus Claviceps', dealing with the culture, the chemistry, pharmacology, genetics and more, of this interesting parasitic fungal genus. They are parasitic, in nature, growing by infesting cereal grain crops, and wild grasses, and I do have a jar of Claviceps purpurea sclerotia, the cornuate-shaped dark purplish black resting overwintering fruitbodies, with which to create cultures.
Its challenging work in the extreme. They are finnicky, hard to stabilize productive strains, I'm aiming for at least 1 gram per liter of total lysergic acid derived peptidic alkaloids, such as ergotamine, ergocristine, and the other lysergic acid peptide alkaloids from which lysergic acid can be made via a basic methanolysis. The chemistry is difficult too, with sites prone to irreversible and reversible isomerizations to useless products, very PH sensitive, some work has to be done under dim, red light, to avoid photocatalytic degradation, even chlorine in tap water destroys these sensitive alkaloids, but its such a challenging project its well worth it to me. If I can succeed in producing a viable production strain, I'll get it out there to the clandestine chemist community via trusted individuals, and let it out on the dark web thus, the success will, if I can pull it off and breed/mutate me a productive strain thats stable, and even better, one which forms a monoclonal spore line of conidia type spores (Ergots have both sexual and asexual life cycles, quite a complex family of fungi) then I will consider it a personal badge of pride in the achievement.
What can I say...I just love my work in such areas. Its so much fun, although as close to the black arts as science can get, pretty much, so tricksy are the ergots.
