I’ve been remiss in reporting on our mushroom hauls in recent years. The last report is from four years ago and two weeks earlier in the season. But 2018 has been very different weather-wise than was 2014. The average July temperature in central Stockholm was 20.7 C in 2014. In 2018 it was 22.5 C, the highest seen since measurements began. So it’s no wonder that nature is looking a little odd.
On Sunday’s foray into the woods between the Halvörestorp road junction and Gungviken, we didn’t see many mushrooms except lots of rufous milkcap, pepparriska, Lactarius rufus. You need to be a Finn to eat that. We did get four other kinds though, only one of which we found at my last report: the ubiquitous velvet bolete, sandsopp. The most common one we knew to pick today was a large, bright red brittlegill, storkremla, Russula paludosa, which has never featured in my reports before.
Here’s what we got:
- Brittlegill, Storkremla, Russula paludosa
- Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
- Fårticka, Albatrellus ovinus
- Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
So if we see you walking in circles and quacking like a duck over the next few days, we’ll know you’ve been sampling some of your funny mushrooms…
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Fills me with terror whenever you do that – they all look poisonous to me. But then, I consume all manner of fungus served up to me by Chinese cooks, totally trustingly, while having no clue what I am eating. They haven’t poisoned me yet. Some are delicious and I fight with my Hakka sister in law over who will get the most because we both love them, some are just meh, others I have a real dislike for.
Do Fårticka make you fårt? I need to know.
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The får-ticka makes sheep tick.
In Chinese cooking, I am mainly familiar with tree ears and shiitake. Also to a lesser extent the long thing pale ones, pin mushrooms?
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Oh, lots and lots. No idea what most of them are called. Region-dependent, I guess.
Very familiar with Tremella fuciformis, and have eaten a lot of it. Not my favourite – sort of tasteless. Supposed to be medicinal, but Chinese say that about all sorts of seemingly innocuous and not very good tasting things. It’s like “Yes, I know it tastes like shit, but eat it anyway, it’s good for your health.”
Shiitake, of course. Yum.
Some sort of black, shapeless stuff which is just OK.
My favourite is a sort of regular looking mushroom, black on top and white underneath – absolutely delicious. My Hakka sister in law and I are good buddies, always have been, two ‘outsiders’ banding together against a common enemy who is my wife’s sister’s husband, toxic person that he is. But they are the one thing we will squabble over. Love my wife’s sister, hate her husband. Actually, she hates him too, everyone does, but they put up with him for the sake of family harmony. Hakka sister in law and I don’t.
Lots of others. Not very informative, I know, but I have no clue about what they are.
There’s another one that looks like a regular sort of edible mushroom, sort of brown and splotchy on top, very tough to chew – they taste noxious to me, I hate them. Unfortunately they are my wife’s favourite. Perversely, she doesn’t like the black ones that I love, so she never cooks them. I keep reminding her and she always says oh yeah, OK, I’ll get some, but then forgets again.
If you go to one of the many vegetarian restaurants or eat in the canteen of a Buddhist monastery in HK, you get served a very wide variety of edible fungus. Chinese Buddhists are supposed to be vegetarians, so it’s the Buddhists who have all the good stuff, fungus-wise.
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YUM! I do collect mushrooms when I find them, I did a course and then bought the book the course tutor published on how to identify edible mushrooms safely. It gives you a page on the edible mushroom you may have found, then the facing page has what other mushrooms you might confuse it with, how to tell which is which, whether the aternatives are edible, as well as if they are worth eating. He doesn’t recommend or cover anything that you could easily confuse with something deadly, so eg. no Caesar’s Mushroom because while delicious it is an Aminita and it’s just too easy to confuse with some of it’s toxic relatives if you don’t really know what you are doing.
One of the sad things about moving across from Sheffield is that we had places where we knew we would find tasty mushrooms most years, in particular blewits, sooooo good. We haven’t found any reliable source of any mushroom over here.
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Mad duke Magnus…. we have contemporary scum of a similar ilk.
Check “Dispatches from the Culture Wars”, thread “Why I Believe Christine Blasey Ford”
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