Have taken some of mine, about to take others.
I have done before, although never a stuffed crust kind.
No special oven for it, just threw the requisite things in the requisite places, drowned it in cheese, olives, pepperoni, cooked what turned out to be the mariana trench of deep pan pizzas, a big fluffy fuzzball of a thing, that looked like somebody dropped a tactical nuke on a pizza dough factory but went down a very deep pizza shaped hole in a very short space of time, and wasn't sorry that it had either.
The ready made ones here, normal oven is up to temperature within a few minutes or so give or take, pizza cooked in ten minutes and scarfed down in two or three. You just caught me eating one now actually. Or would have if you'd have been here within the time it takes to fold something flexible a couple of times and munch it down in a handful of bites. (I didn't do two this time, because I only had two left, and I want to have something either for later tonight other than a tub of cream cheese or possibly some dehydrated just add boiling water and the contents of a packet of dehydrated flavouring BBQ beef noodles (although I like to throw in a bit of dark soy sauce too, and plenty worcestershire sauce, plus a couple of pinches of the ready-to-use dried fly agaric mushrooms that I harvest every year from as many of the spots for picking them I have close to hand or a good hike around as I can, as many times as I can. They are a pretty common mushroom in terms of general occurence, and not at all threatened. Most people wouldn't even eat them, as all the mushroom guidebooks list them as toxic. A few, idiotic and overcautious ones even as deadly or potentially so.)
But I know of only two cases in something like the past century, maybe two, that anyone has actually DIED from eating them, one being an italian diplomat quite a long time ago, who mistook them for the choice edible Amanita caesarea, which he must have been somewhat of an idiot to do, because fly agaric has a red cap, the Caesar's mushroom orange, fly agaric with white warts of the velum totale remnant flecking all over the cap, forgiveable mistake, sure if you are inexperienced. But to confuse bright orange stem and gills with pure white? thats a bit much. And besides, Caesar's mushroom doesn't even GROW in this country, sadly, although I'd love to try eating it.
The others being campers, who were using it recreationally. In the trance like state laden with extraordinarily vivid dreaming it induces in such doses, during winter, they froze to death. They were not poisoned by it, they died of hypothermia, same as they would if they had gotten comatose drunk.
It is slightly toxic, to somewhat poisonous, but if you know how to prepare it, its damn tasty, fresh, it'll poison you, although not fatally, barring sheer gluttony in mistake for an edible you don't need to prepare specially (there are some, that raw or undercooked are bad news, a couple of them shouldn't be eaten at all, and at least one genus, the false morels, Gyromitra spp. contain monomethylhydrazine, highly toxic, to the liver, neurotoxic, a convulsant, generally really, really bad news, contains it in the form of a metabolically-labile precursor, gyromitrin, breaks down in the body to MMH. The later being used as high velocity hypergolic fuel for space rockets and missiles, and its downright unpleasant in terms of toxicity. Sensitivity being highly variable too, some people at a meal, from the same mushrooms (the level of gyromitrin also varies, mushroom to mushroom, season to to season, country wise, habitat wise, just about everything that can go wrong, probably will with false morels), will fall ill, some will not, all may or all may not. In some cases, people have eaten them, when thoroughly boiled twice, changing the leaching water twice at a minimum before cooking the way they are to be served, and instead of getting the diners, the volatile (it is rocket fuel after all, volatile in the case of false morel, MEANS it) methylhydrazine that offgasses as the crap is boiled out of them repeatedly, has gassed and killed the cook, even though they have eaten not a bite.
Fly agaric isn't bad news like that. I don't believe in gods or other deities, but among fungi, it is IMO one of the most sacred, treated wrongly it'll poison you and teach you a lesson why not to fuck with it without respect, but respectfully used, it can be made medicine, in particular conferring resistance to the discomfort (but not to hypothermia) induced by bitter cold, enabling one to withstand what physiologically they can take without bodily harm, without coming to discomfort,
I've walked miles in a blizzard, topless, wearing just a trenchcoat above the waist to go to a shop, whilst using the tonic tea I make from the slowly, gently heat-cured at minimum oven heat overnight until cracker-dry and they snap rather than bend, but retain the golden coloration, the caps only, being the part taken, the rest is not somehow worse for one than the caps, its just they are the creme de la creme of the mushroom, best bits to be had, so the gills I scrape off and return to, if I can, under silver birch trees, so the spores can hopefully come to fruition for further harvests, they can help boost endurance, give pains and aches the heave-ho, return the vigour sapped by colds and similar winter ailments, banish fatigue, in larger quantities, can be a very unusual psychedelic-dissociative, operating as a GABAa agonist at the orthosteric GABA binding site, peculiar dream-inducing action, puts one under a deep, deep trance state,
during which one experiences vivid and sometimes very profound, ineffable visions and emotional states, very, very different to psilocybin mushrooms,
And if given a twice-boiling cook, replacing the water to leach the actives or toxins depending on whether you are writing a mushroom guidebook for inexperienced foragers, or have been one of the latter for a good long time and have picked up various little tricks, insider knowhow in the ways of affairs fungoid etc., and come to know the mushroom 'personally' if that makes sense, cultivating a fruitful and beneficial relationship with the species (Amanita muscaria/fly agaric), not just to know what is done with them, but to get a feel for doing the things to be done with them; then they can be thence cooked after the leaching, to divest them of psychotropic properties or toxic ones (actually, the toxin in fresh specimens BECOMES the psychotropic principle, ibotenic acid, a neurotoxin decarboxylates, losing CO2 under heat treatment and also to an extent drying, not sure how much dessication alone would suffice in a percentage wise manner however, ibotenic acid isn't stable stuff, which is good, because the principle it turns to, an isoxazole called muscimol upon decarboxylation is much less a toxin, much more a beneficial useful substance.
And if eating larger quantities of pre-cooked then cooked leached ones doesn't appeal, smaller amounts make a WONDERFUL meat spice, especially red meat and beef in particular. Its like nature's own MSG, coaxes and teases out the flavour and savoriness to be found lurking as yet un-lured from the meat, enhancing it with a honeyed-sweet yet meaty taste of it's own. Its one of my absolute favourite of spices and seasonings of all, for things based on dead animal flesh, to the extent that I wouldn't even contemplate making chili con carne without any.
It just wouldn't be right at all to my tastes, and one of the really good things about it, is there is a parasitic poroid, bolete-type mushroom that also grows under silver birch, as a parasite on fly agaric mycelium, Chalciporus piperatus, the peppery bolete, so where you find fly agaric, you have a nice chance, as long as the host of the fly agaric is silver birch rather than pine, of also finding peppery boletes, no special preparation needed for those, just dry them and divest them of bits of soil, grass, leaf matter etc. before the drying. Stuff into spice tubs, jars or whatever space you can fill, because the two mushrooms grow together and go together, both go into my special steak spice powder, a recipe of my own, a bit of a witch's brew of seeds, seed-pods, leaves, roots and mushrooms and together, blended into fine powder in a spice grinder, as some of the bits and pieces in there are a real shit to grind in a mortar and pestle, leathery peppery boletes especially, but a high speed whizzing blade makes short work of the resistance, and a fine dust results. Sprinkled on steak, a spoonful or two in a pot of chili con carne, in curries, delicious nutritious, and the fly agaric has use as an intoxicant, many uses in the kitchen, more still to be found in the medicinal and healing properties.
hell you can even call reindeer to you, if you live in a country with reindeer, to draw in your herd, because they go apeshit for them, if just sprinkled in the snow apparently, although that I haven't tried, given there being a rather distinct lack of reindeer in england, and me no reason to have a herd of them either. Or inclination to throw the harvest I'll have spent foraging for, taking home in bin liner bags, carrier bags, backpacks, anything and everything to hold a big enough harvest for a coming year, then going out and doing it again, and again, alternating spots so plenty have time to grow, thrive, disperse spores, and me to toss my wastes from the spore-bearing gills, of no value to me as I treasure the caps most of all, but they are of the most value to the fungus, I see it as a trade, its fruiting structure is of value to me, its reproduction is of value to it, so why don't I take what I can use, and return the bits from one population I won't use to sites with other populations, to facilitate genetic diversity, help try to spawn new fruiting grounds, it gets free travel tickets from me, I get what aside from reproduction, once that has done would be a load of flesh, a stick to throw spores higher and have them travel further from the parent mycelium; we both gain that way, and nobody loses. I won't risk depopulating my picking spots, very few others would touch them at all, very, very few, and it gets to maintain as high a genetic diversity as I can assist in; just by throwing out my trash.
I wonder how some would go sprinkled on the pepperoni slices on a pizza. That might work. If I had another pepperoni pizza I'd do it right now in fact but all I have is a cheese feast. I want to try it with pepperoni and stuffed crust, maybe a little sprinkled over pickled black sliced olives tossed on top, followed by a layer of more cheese to sandwich the spices in the middle so it diffuses throughout the cheese.
