Spring Mushrooms of Connecticut--Morels and Pheasant Backs

Spring is a great time to get out and forage for greens and sprouts, but a lean time for most mushrooms. Only a few edible fungi dare to show up in our area of southern New England; the hunting doesn't get *really* exciting until July or so. While we are grateful to finally get outside and for the snow to be gone, we do still cast our eyes downwards in the eternal search for dinner.
The springtime mushroom most people know and are desperately hunting for is the morel, one of the Morchella species. We mostly find the larger yellows, Morchella americana, sometimes the smaller Morchella diminutiva that are associated with tulip trees, and we have personally never found any of the earlier black morels. It is important to distinguish true morels from false morels--true morels will be completely hollow when sliced in half, while false morels will have many convoluted chambers in the top and stem. False morels do contain a fatal toxin that accumulate in your body over time if you do not remove it with thorough cooking, and we just have better things to do than chance our lives to things like that rather than argue with folks who insist they have been eating them their whole lives with no problems. True morels also need to be cooked well to prevent stomach upset, and they dry well to concentrate their flavor for use later. They pair well with a a splash of marsala or white wine, a touch of salt, allow the excess liquid in the mushrooms to cook off, and add a knob of butter at the end. (there shouldn't be bugs, and if there are specks of dirt, brush them off or spray them with the hose on your sink, never soak your mushrooms in salt water!!).

Cornmeal and ramps waffles with marsala and morel gravy

Biscuits made with ramps greens and morel butter

We just don't have as many morels here in New England as the lucky folks in the Midwest have, it is a fact. The soil, the trees, and the the climate is different. We also don't follow forest fires like they do in the Pacific Northwest or California, the species of morels are different. So what are we looking for? Our northeastern morels are often associated with elms, ash trees, tulip poplars, or apple trees. Many of our elms and ash trees are dying from diseases and insect infestations, so I don't know if the morels prefer the trees sick. Unfortunately, the old apple orchards were treated with fairly toxic pesticides until fairly recently and fungi are really good bio-accumulators, so morels found in old orchard may be high in toxic elements, so eaters beware. Or, like all life forms, they can grow wherever they want to, flaunting all rules and confounding all predictions anyone wants to make! Just get out in the woods and walk the miles! Morels are members of the ascomycota, meaning they have a different way of spreading their spores than most other fungi. The cap portion will be yellow or light brown, pitted or look like a honeycomb, and hollow when sliced in half, The stem will be light cream colored and hollow when sliced in half. Morels grow on the ground.

On to the second common edible wild mushroom of spring, sometimes thought of as inedible or as the consolation prize when your morel hunt doesn't go well--the pheasant back or the dryad's saddle, Cerioporus squamosus. A lot of people think of them as inedible because they are collecting them in the wrong stage, when they are far too large! If it has shelved out and you can see the pores easily, and it is difficult to run your knife through the edge, it is too late. The mushroom will be the consistency of shoe leather and taste fairly bad at this point and actually IS inedible. If you find the pheasant backs when they are in their "pig's nose" stage, the pores are almost too small to see and you knife should cut through like a hot knife through butter, they will be incredibly tender. The flavor is very light and almost sweet and meaty at the same time, and it can stand up to any strong flavor you choose to throw at it. At this tender stage, you can cut the mushroom into any shape; slices, strips, cubes, grind it, then cook it several ways and season it several ways to utilize it as a meat substitute in any dish--very versatile!

Breaded and deep fried with some yellow tomato sauce

Pheasant backs are polypores, so they have many pores on their undersides. The tops of the caps look like the wings of a pheasant, I suppose, with slightly hairy tufts. They are saprobic, growing on dying or dead trees, and in our area, seem to love maples especially. The fruiting bodies will often hang around on the trees all year, getting tougher, and sometimes some newer growth will show up again as the weather cools back down in the fall. In older guide books, they are listed as Polyporus squamosus.

"pigs nose" stage, perfect for collection

finely chopped and cooked in a spicy sauce, then serve in Japanese temaki rolls

sliced, sauteed with sweet potao noodles and flavored with gochujang sauce

Spring Edibles - Greens and Mushrooms

After the cold winter the spring greens and shoots are a bit slow to emerge. We find ourselves turning our faces up towards the sun on the nice days, warming our cheeks. Looking down at the ground for signs of life is second nature for us as we take short walks along muddy trails, and we are even taking note of the swelling buds of the trees. Not long now before we begin another year of enjoying our scavenger hunt for edible plants and fungi, where the prizes are delicious!

 Those pesky yard onions, Allium vineale! Use them like chives, in potato salad, on baked potatoes, in a savory quick bread, in soups, grill the small bulbs until they sweeten, just use them up!

Hairy bittercress, Cardamine hirisuta, a small plant in the mustard family. The leaves and flowers are peppery and bright in salads.

 Ostrich fern fiddleheads, Matteuccia struthiopteris, are the only species of fern fiddleheads we eat. They are growing more scarce in our area of southern New England due to habitat loss, so we only collect enough for a single meal each season. Further north into eastern Canada, they thrive in the wide open river floodplains. Sustainability is key- only collect half of the fiddles per crown, and never more than you need.

Tender and mild chickweed, Stellaria media. These have been out for awhile, ad they'll be good eating until it gets too warm and they go leggy. Eat raw and add to smoothies, or add last minute to soups to keep the green color.
 

Common daylily shoots, Hemerocallis fulva. Sautee these with a toucg of sesame oil and soy sauce for a quick side dish of greens. The tubers are good to collect in spring as well, and we can look forward to the edible flower buds, flowers, and wilted flowers later in the season.
 

Stinging nettle shoots, Urtica species, packed full of iron. These are my personal spring tonic, and we collect them for soups and to add to smoothies raw, dry some for a seasoning powder, and dry some for tisanes.

Dryad's saddle mushrooms, Cerioporus squamosus, a wood rotting polypore of spring that can be delicious when collected young. Look for them on big, old maples and make sure your knife cuts through them easily, otherwise it will be too tough for the plate. They are well flavored with just a sautee and a touch of salt, but meaty enough to stand up to stronger spices like Korean gochujang.
 

Invasive garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, showing the start of the second year's growth almost ready to set up a flower stalk, plus first year's growth of sprouts from the many seeds this plant produces. Eat it all--greens, leaves, roots, flowers, seeds, sprouts.
 

Ramps greens, Allium tricoccum. Collect sustainably--one leaf per plant, don't dig the bulbs! A pungent burst of garlic and onions in a chlorophyll filled green leaf, intense flavor for all dishes and a puree that keeps in the freezer for use all year.
 

Yellow rocket, Barbarea vulgaris, another member of the mustard family. Spring is when the greens are tender, and the flower heads cook up like broccoli rabe. A touch bitter, but a good green for cooking.

Wild Mushrooms for Dinner: Giant Puffball Pizza

We are not among the lucky few who often find giant puffballs (Calvatia gigantea) in the area, usually finding the little pear-shaped ones on wood (Lycoperdon pyriforme), the gem studded ones on the ground (Lycoperdon perlatum), or the medium sized skull shaped ones on the ground (Calvatia craniiformis). When I spotted this giant puffball, I thought it was a forgotten volleyball, it was about 8" wide. Robert grabbed it and brought it home for dinner, thinking we might try a pizza or maybe a lasagna.

Poison Pigskin Puffball, NOT EDIBLE!

 

It is imperative that edible puffballs are completely white when sliced open. If you see any hint of color, it means it is too old, the spores have begun to mature and it is no longer edible. At an even more mature stage, kids will kick puffballs around to see them "puff" out their spores in a big cloud. The poison pigskin puffball is usually deep purple or black when sliced open and while it won't kill you it will make you quite sick. Some very immature Amanita eggs can look like buried puffballs, but once sliced open, you will see the outline of the mushroom and realize it is an Amanita. 

Amanita Egg, NOT EDIBLE!

This puffball was firm and white, like a brick of extra firm tofu. Just like tofu, puffballs can be bland, but can also soak up whatever flavor you give to them. I gently sprayed some 1" thick slices with olive oil spray and grilled them up on the George Forman grill, and they smelled wonderfully nutty. Those slices then became the "crust" for a really simple pizza with some red sauce and cheese. Other grilled slices went into a lasagna as the "noodles", and smaller bits were coated with a light batter and deep fried. Sometimes the outer skin can be a bit tough or dirty and it can be cut off before the interior is sliced up. A giant puffball can provide a lot of food for a single mushroom!

 

 

Giant Puffball, about 8" wide

Small Pear shaped Puffballs on a log, each is only about 1" wide

Wild Cranberry Turnovers

Wild cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) can be found in a few places in Connecticut, but are far more common in the dunes along Cape Cod. On our visit there a few weekends ago, we packed our wild blueberry rake and a bucket to collect a gallon or so to bring home for our freezer and for some fresh cranberry sauce and other treats. They are the same berry found in the grocery store around Thanksgiving, with some imperfections and lots of size and color variation, but found for free out in the wild. They are a small trailing sub-shrub, interconnected underground. The leaves seem comically small in relation to the berries, but cranberries are mostly hollow and light with a few, small scattered seeds inside. They readily float in water and can be cleaned and the bad ones and debris like twigs and leaves are picked away easily using a big bowl and a few changes of clean water.

This time I made some mini turnovers with apples from the local orchard and the wild cranberries, the filling gently simmered together with a touch of sugar and apple cider. The cranberries gel into a thick sauce when cooled, and I spooned the mixture onto puff pastry squares and sealed them with egg wash, and baked them until puffed and crispy. They were tart and very tasty for breakfast!

Here you can see the cranberries cut in half and how they are mostly hollow

To collect wild cranberries or wild blueberries in large quantities in a shorter amount of time, we use a huckleberry rake we purchased from a gentleman in Maine. He makes them from aluminum and it is quite light and rust resistant. The tines allow the berries to be popped right off into the holding reservoir and leave behind the branches and leaves without damaging them. We have had the rake for several years and can recommend it heartily.

Wild Mushrooms for Dinner: Hedgehog Hand Pies with Acorn Crust

Our autumn mushrooms include hedgehogs, in the genus Hydnum. On the underside of the caps these are small teeth, or spines instead of gills or pores. They are cousins of chanterelles in taste, and cook up wonderfully once browned with a bit of butter. We generally refer to the smaller ones with a small central depression in the cap as the bellybutton hedgehogs, Hydnum umbilicatum.The larger ones, up to 10" caps with an offset stem, we call Hydnum redandum. Off course, rumor has it that DNA isn't going to let us get away with it that easily and that there are many, many species lurking around in the mix. The golden hedgehogs that we find in the fall in mixed woods in southern New England all tend to be quite tasty, however. There are some more pale varieties, and some that tend to be a bit bitter, but the buttery-golden ones are good for the plate.

For the ones we collected this past weekend, we decided to go really wild and make a savory hand pie with an acorn pie crust, and added to the filling diced butternut squash, new red potatoes, freshly dug ramps bulbs, thyme, a thick vegetable gravy, and the foraged hedgehogs. The filling was mostly cooked and chilled beforehand, and the rolled acorn crust filled right before cooking. The pie crust was made with ground acorn flour from white oak acorns that we leached, ground, and toasted last year and had kept in the freezer. I dug the ramps bulbs yesterday from a large patch, taking only what I needed and replanting the mature seed heads into the holes I made by removing the fat bulbs. We are both intuitive cooks, so I don't have a recipe, I just cooked with what I thought would taste good!

Acorn flour

Ramps bulbs

Wild Mushrooms for Dinner: Maitake Chili-Stuffed Potatoes

Hen (Grifola frondosa) season is in full swing after a small weather delay in southern New England. Our dehydrators are going day and night, filled with jerky, leaving me with lots of leftover "bits" to cook with. Here I made some meatless chili, with ground hen, poblano and sweet peppers, smoked chilies, onions and garlic, spices, and a bit of tomato sauce, and stuffed it into some baked potatoes with some melted cheese.

 
Hen-of-the-woods are known by several different names depending on your location, we like to call them maitake, the traditional name used by the Japanese which means "the dancing mushroom", because you may dance with joy if you find one. In the midwest they call them sheepshead or ram's head mushrooms. Some Italians call them signorina. They are a type of mild saprobe, rotting the roots of sick or dead hardwoods, 95% of the time it's a red oak in our area of southern New England. They can be cultivated, and if you find small maitake for sale in your local grocery store, they are likely cultivated.

Maitake are one of the safer and easier polypores for beginners to identify and have a definite season from the last week or so in August through November, based on the weather becoming cooler. This has been a very warm autumn, so they have been very late, not showing up in our area until the third week of September. Maitake have many small fronds attached to a main stem or core. Each petal or frond has small pores on the pale, white or cream colored underside. The color of the fronds can vary from a light grey to dark grey and many shades of brown, and other environmental factors matter, like how much sunlight or rain the mushroom has been exposed to. They can be tricky to spot at first, but look like a small chicken resting at the base of a tree, or a small pile of leaves. We use a knife to cut them away from the main stem and trim away any debris. If there is evidence of maggot tunnels, we remove more mushroom stem. If there is a lot of debris embedded in the flesh, we don't bother to take the mushroom home; maitake are so abundant we can afford to be choosy.

Wild Mushrooms for Dinner: Chicken Mushroom Paprikas

Here we have a chicken mushroom paprikas, a traditional Hungarian dish with a tomato base, lots of paprika, onions, garlic, and some sweet peppers. Robert made some fresh nokedli dumplings and served it all with some lacto-fermented pickles on the side for a sour zing.

Very young yellow chicken

Chicken mushrooms (Laetiporus sulphureus) are often on our dinner menu, one of the most versatile wild mushrooms to cook with. They can be found in the spring, summer, and autumn. It's not so much that they taste like chicken, but their firm texture can mimic chicken perfectly, if it is collected at the right stage. Don't be fooled and collect it if it is too dry and old--then you will be eating sawdust, and no amount of cooking can tenderize it. You want the fronds to be thick and oozing juices when you cut them, you want the colors to be bright. Excess chicken stores well if sauteed first then frozen in containers or vacuum packed. It doesn't dry then re-hydrate well, again there is the sawdust factor unless you plan on powdering it as a seasoning. There are two species of chicken mushroom in our area, the yellow chicken, Laetiporus sulphureus, and the white chicken, Laetiporus cincinnatus. The yellow chicken is a heartwood rotter, so you will often find it anywhere on the trunk of a standing or dead and fallen tree. It is bright orange on the top of the fronds, and the pore surface in the underside is bright yellow when fresh. The white chicken is a butt wood rotter, so it will be found at the base of a dying tree, or even out in the yard away from a tree but still attached to the roots or hidden wood. The top of the fronds are a peachy color while the pore surface on the underside of the fronds is white. Most people claim the flavor and texture of the white chicken is superior the the yellow chicken, and it does seem to be more tender. Both should be collected when young and fresh.

Some white chickens cut from a stump