Grifolia species, right? maitake? I've never seen Grifolia here, we have G.umbellata and G.frondosa, but they are very, very rare.
Hey, with your morel hunting, do you think we might perhaps, come to an arrangement where I might buy some spores off you? the morels grow here, they aren't plant pathogens, and there'd be no question of any laws broken. I'd very much like to, if you'd be willing to wipe down some sheets of tin foil with rubbing alcohol, let it evaporate (or a drop or two of vodka, anything to ensure it's sterile, and leave the mushrooms you are waiting to cook there, for whatever you'd not eat as soon as you got home, until some spores are shot out of those precious little asci?
it wouldn't take long either, being ascomycetes, unlike most mushrooms we eat, which are basidiomycetes, which form spores in tubes, basidia, which drop them into the wind, ascomycetes actively FIRE spores out of asci, little tiny spore cannons. I've picked, although of course, not eaten, a relative of the false morels, black and white Helvella species, and if you lift one up to your ear, that is mature, and listen, you can actually HEAR it hissing and fizzing, quiet and subtle, but you can hear the spores being fired out in the hundreds of millions, and it'd by no means detract from your eating the fungi after. You'd just get to make some money on what otherwise would be waste, or at least more spores than you could possibly use alone for subculture.
Think you might do that for me IQ m'ilady? I'd pay, whatever we worked out as fair, you'd just lose a few pieces of kitchen foil, and gain some money in return (or other services if you'd prefer some lab work done for example) Next time you find any come the spring, be they white, yellow or black morels, I'll take any of them, plate the spores out on agar, homogenize the agar in a sterilized nutrient broth and then innoculate steam-sterilized woodchip bags until they are all nice and infested, mix with a pile of sterilized woodchips etc. and start some outdoor cultures on big piles of woodchips.
I'd love to give it a try, growing my own morels. That would be simply divine. I love 'em, but I don't see them often at all, very uncommonly and it's been years since I've ever seen one. And with you going to hunt them every spring...that could give me the chance to get the biomaterial I'd need to start some agar plates.
That bolete...a bay bolete, Boletus badius, perhaps? I find that species locally, if it is B.badius. Does it blue rapidly when bruised? tend to grow under oak, beech and miscellaneous deciduous?
Apparently knowledge of edibility of native ozzy mushrooms is pretty poor all round.
BTW, I'd be willing to pay for Grifolia, spores, tissue cultures, cell lines, I could supply the plates, give you instructions on how to take the tissue cultures, and give them a try growing them, innoculating tree roots. The top one looks like Grifolia frondosa to me, am I right? we get them here, but I've never seen one other than in the textbooks, they are so vanishingly rare I'm not likely ever to find one.
Although I HAVE found extremely rare mushrooms before.
Reminds me, I've samples of edible puffball species dried for culture, in the lab, so we could even do a spore trade, if you'd like, IQ? Lycoperdon species, modest size, good edibility, I'd have to culture them and do a fresh ID to determine species, since I made a meal of the fresh ones I had when they were fresh and it was quite a few years back, but I saw the bag of dried, ripe spore-sacks I collected just the other day whilst looking for a teflon-coated magnetic stirbar as it happens.
But if you'd prefer monetary reward for morel spores, or lab work, then either are up for offer on my part in return for some. I've never got to try white or yellow morels, but I'd be just as pleased to try growing those, although I admit, I DO like the black ones, M.elata. So many things you can do with them, stuff 'em, roast 'em, stew 'em, make morel and steak chili con carne with chickpeas, dried, detoxified fly agaric (could trade you prepared fly agaric caps, if you'd like those for spores, too, I pick LOADS of fly agaric every year that I dry for the future year)
Still bioactive, but they have been cured to convert the ibotenic acid toxin to muscimol, the psychotropic. I like most of all to cook with them though rather than use them as an intoxicant. And to use them as a herbal medicine and winter tonic, when brewed into a honeyed tea, after the obligatory heat-cure to detoxify them (they are poisonous raw, although not fatally so, but they will make someone pretty sick. I have tubs full in the kitchen cupboard, just waiting for the next time I cook steaks)
It's great, all the guidebooks say 'poisonous', so nobody else ever seems to go picking what I have gotten used to thinking of as MY golf course full of MY fly agarics. I've staked a claim, so to speak. Those mushrooms are MINE on that golf course!!!! I have several spots though to pick them (and they are ALL mine
), so I'd have enough to trade. They make a wonderful kitchen spice/seasoning for red meat. Quite unique, a sweet, honeyed flavour, and at the same time, VERY umami, absolutely dripping with umami-ness, and they drag it out of meat too, kicking and screaming if they have to
Can turn GOOD meat into WONDERFUL meat, and a nice pot of chili into something you might see people start fighting each other over the last bowl, bashing each other's heads in with the nearest rolling pin or frying pan in a mad squabble to get to that last spoonful.
As for the detoxification procedure, it's already done, and so you can have added security if you were to accept some dried ones in trade for morel spores, I have personally eaten of the batch I have currently, a good many times, as well as made my winter tonic medicinal tea based on them. At no time have they sickened me, and nor will they sicken me either. Amanita muscaria IS a species you cannot consume RAW, but it is just one of the fungi that you have to prepare specially, there are a few like that. Some you shouldn't do, regardless, like Gyromitra (false morels, deadly poisonous raw, have killed even when cooked thoroughly after two parboils in two water changes. And sometimes with those, some diners will be fine, some will end up in hospital or even dead. Hell sometimes the FUMES have killed the cook, so toxic are the false morels, the gyromitrin being a simple formylhydrazone of monomethylhydrazine, a highly poisonous, volatile compound more well known for blasting space craft into orbit, as a hypergolic rocket fuel when mixed with dinitrogen tetroxide or red fuming nitric acid for example.)
Notorious, for people trying to eat them, cooking carefully, like the japanese make sushi from poisonous fugu puffer-fish, but, the toxin levels in Gyromitra vary according not just to species, but to season, to where they grow, altitude they grow at, the weather patterns, the country, the strain of mushroom within a species, the individual consumer's susceptibility to trace levels of the hydrazone of MMH, but these, they truly are deadly poisonous, and have killed many people, there are only two instances of recorded deaths as a result of eating Amanita muscaria. And one of these, was not a poisoning, but a fatality among campers, who consumed them, and fell into a deep, deep sleep, as they will do if used recreationally, and it was winter. They died of hypothermia, just as they might have done had they drunk a fuckton of alcohol and passed out in the cold.
The other fatality, was an italian diplomat who ate a whole plateful of the mushrooms, without any attempt to detoxify them, thinking them to be Amanita caesarea, the Caesar's mushroom, which doesn't grow here, in the UK (sadly, because it is reputed to be very tasty), and he died as a result. Other than that, in the last century, thats the ONLY deaths I am aware of, and I do read a lot of mycotoxicology case reports of various kinds in scientific journals, of people. Not counting dogs who have eaten a lot of them raw, dogs are highly susceptible to actual poisoning by A.muscaria, and of course, they neither dry, nor boil nor do they cook in any other way, they just grub them up and eat them, which would sicken anyone (unless you happen to be a reindeer, who apparently love them so much, the Lapp people can call in their herds by simply scattering pieces of dried fly agaric over the snow and the reindeer will come running)
These, I can give a personal guarantee, have been prepared, are safe to use medicinally, recreationally, or in sub-bioactive doses as a delicious and unique kitchen seasoning. The Lestat Rett personal seal of approval, picked and prepared by mine own hand, and they've gone down my own throat, so you can be quite safe in knowledge that these have indeed, been collected and identified correctly, and prepared correctly. I needn't even say that I know my mushrooms well (I do, of course, but that's me. I'm as much a mushroom-forager as I am a chemist, in fact, I've been foraging longer than I ever even had a lab, from a far younger age than I had the means to start building my first lab beginnings)
And have been chowing down ever since on all manner of woodland and meadow-growing things fungal, deciduous woods, coniferous forests, open grassland, sheep pastures and grassy waxcap meadows all, old tree-trunks, you name it, I've probably foraged in it. 28 years of experience (I'm 32 now) Actually I might be 33, I can never remember which. And only ever one bad reaction, and that from a mushroom correctly ID'ed, and listed as eaten by some in the guidebooks, but I just happen to be one who can't eat them, not that anyone with any sense WANTS to eat a stinkhorn egg more than once. Yuck. Yuck yuck and ten fucking fold YUCK!. Quite disgusting as well as making me spew my insides outside all night long out of both ends at once. Needless to say, I won't be eating those again any time soon
They can stay the fuck out of my cookpots. And for that matter out of my house, because they stink something truly foul, like rotting carrion mixed with shit, and they look as obscene as they smell, taste, and do to my insides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallaceae LOL!
Quite hilarious looking fungi. There's another kind, less common here, Mutinus caninus, that looks like a dog cock with a bright pink end when the surface layer of greenish 'shit' (the gleba, containing the spores and the foul smelling sulfur compounds) has been washed away or eaten by flies.
I once had a rather unfortunate, but hilarious accident involving stinkhorns. Phallus impudicus being the species. Either me, or my old man must have tracked in some spores, or they must have been brought in by a passing fly, and deposited on the carpet behind the warm part of the compressor powering the fridge and freezer in the old house before we moved away, and there, they took root and managed to grow, somehow, from just the carpet. A big luxuriant clump of witch-eggs, sprouting obscene, lewd and scatologically phallic monstrosities, giving off a tirade of dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, dimethyl trisulfide, the last of these, is sickeningly foul at just one part per TRILLION in air!, and we had a sodding big clump growing behind the fridge freezer compressor.
We called the gas repair guy round, thinking, due to the stench, that it was due to a release of the mercaptan compounds which are added to natural gas supplies to serve as a warning for the flammable but otherwise odorless natural gas, so people are aware if there is a leak. They smell even worse than the mercaptans do though, these alkyl sulfides, IMO. You can smell ONE stinkhorn fruitbody growing in the woods
from maybe a quarter to half a mile away if they are upwind of you, and know it's there long before you ever see it growing, smelling like rotting flesh and sewage. really strong, sickening stench they give off.
So, the gas man, he probed and he examined, and found he could detect no gas leak anywhere in the house. Never looking, fortunately, behind the fridge freezer, as it didn't of course HAVE a gas supply, if he had, he'd probably have shit his britches to look at the things. All sprawled out luxuriating on the carpet, the heat of the compressor pump helping volatilize even more of the filthy stench of eau-de-corpse covered-in-its-own-bum-offal and floating in a shallow pool of stagnant water, or worse than water. Absolutely STANK, especially a huge clump of the fungi, growing inside a house, when even one mushroom is enough to stink up a good size area of forest. Looked like a pile of pallid, white mold-encrusted scrotumless bollocks, each one burst in a glob of pus-like gelatinous slimy ooze with a shit-covered cock poking up out of each ruptured bollock. Each with it's own 'head' on the top, covered in it's own greenish-olivescent food poisoning diarrhea on a white, spongy curved schlong.
I can't imagine what the look on his face would have been if he'd ever seen those horrors sprouting out of the carpet. The smell was bad enough, he looked pretty green around the gills put it that way. Although I'd love to have caught him on a video recording to see his reaction preserved for eternity. That'd be youtube material for sure
