Cooking Wild Mushrooms

Article written by naturalist & author at California Center for Natural History, Damon Tighe.

Store Bought < Wild

If you’ve only worked with the limited selection of most store-bought mushrooms, learning to cook wild mushrooms may be an eye-opening introduction to a diversity of textures and flavors. To get the most out of wild mushrooms you will want to recognize each species for its own very different attributes and find recipes that play to its strengths. Traditional American cuisine has a rather limited set of tools for dealing with mushrooms because it was developed around the most produced mushroom in the country: Agaricus bisporus, which you will see sold as the white button mushroom, crimini, and portobello. Leaning on cooking techniques from afar and understanding a little bit about the biology of the mushrooms can go a long way towards getting the most out of the diversity of mushrooms you may collect.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi and occur to propagate spores that help the fungi travel to new growth locations. The majority of the fungus is usually out of sight as mycelium running through its preferred substrate, such as a decaying log or wrapping around the roots of a tree where it exchanges nutrients it picks up from the soil for sugar from the plant. Fungal cell walls contain chitin which is the same macromolecule that makes crab, lobster, and insect exoskeletons tough. In order to get access to the nutrients inside the cells, mushrooms need to be cooked to disrupt the cell walls. Cooking also liberates the β-glucan from the cell walls which is the major polysaccharide in mushrooms that has health benefits. 

Most importantly though, cooking drives off and degrades compounds that are dangerous to ingest. Many wild and cultivated mushrooms produce compounds to keep them from being eaten, and lucky for us a good majority of these can be removed by cooking them thoroughly. The Agaricus bisporous mushrooms at your local store contain a carcinogenic group of compounds known as hydrazines, the majority of which can be degraded or pushed out by thorough cooking. Eating a few raw isn’t going to kill you, but you likely wouldn’t feel well if you ate a bowl of them. Morel mushrooms have a number of reported mushroom poisonings every year because people don’t cook them enough. It is really difficult to overcook most mushrooms and thorough cooking decreases the chance of getting stomach upset from edible species while increasing their flavor. 

A myth that has been propagated by American cooks for years is that you should not wash mushrooms. It is completely okay to wash mushrooms thoroughly before cooking with them. Many of the mushrooms you will harvest from the wild can be so dirty that a scrub brush and a high powered hose might be your first tools to prepare them for the table. Most mushrooms will readily absorb water and that is likely why the taboo of washing them appears to have come about. If you wash them and then set them up on a rack to dry before working with them you will have gritless mushrooms that aren’t saturated with water when they hit the pan. After air-drying mushrooms, you can store them in paper bags in the fridge for a couple of days or dehydrate them for long term storage. If you dehydrate them it is important to get them completely dry and store them in airtight solid containers, as household insects will eat through plastic bags to get to your mushrooms. 

Pan Fry for First Timers

Most people are used to slicing and pan-frying fresh mushrooms, but this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cooking techniques. Frying is popular because it enables you to quickly create crispy edges that can accentuate the flavor of Agaricus, Boletes and other mushrooms. When I am eating a new species for the first time I usually approach them in this way to generate a baseline for flavor and texture. I will heat a pan to medium heat, add a neutral oil like avocado oil, slice the mushroom into about the thickness of my pinky, dust it with a little bit of large granular salt, and then pan-fry until the slices are golden brown on both sides. I remove the mushroom from the pan and let it cool for a minute before biting in. While trying a new mushroom, draw a half breath into your mouth and swish it around in the same way you would do with wine. The added air will allow you to taste some of the notes that might otherwise be obscured. I will reflect on what I taste to see what vegetables or meats I think it would pair with. If the texture is odd when fried (which many will be) I will also reflect on what other techniques might fit that texture. 

Softer, Gooey Mushrooms

For mushrooms that are unusually soft or sort of gooey from a pan-fry, I double down on the softness in the cooking technique or look to fortify the texture if I still want to pan-fry them. The slippery jack mushrooms in the genus Suillus are the most common mushrooms that fit this bill. They can be prolific, and often line the baskets of new hunters that are looking for porcini (Boletus edulis) as they share some similar attributes in terms of habitat and spore pads instead of gills. Many people that just pan fry every mushroom they find toss them as soon as they realize they are slippery jacks, which is a shame because they can have incredible flavor if you play to their strengths. If you are set on pan-frying them, your best bet is to dehydrate them, let them age a little bit to intensify their flavor and rehydrate them with minimal water before frying. To play towards their soft texture I will often make them into sauces or soups by chopping them, lightly salting them, and then just barely covering them with water in a saucepan. Cook them just barely at a boil and reduce the heat as they get saucey. A long cook of this goopy sauce will give you incredibly rich earthy tones that you don’t get from a pan fry. Add water and vegetables to scale this into a soup base or turn up the heat, add oil and some onions to turn this into a great sauce for meats. Russian cuisine plays towards their soft texture by making pickles of them that are to be spread on rye bread. 

Crunchy or Chalky

For mushrooms that are unusually crunchy or chalky in the pan fry, as Russula and Lactarius mushrooms can be, you can play towards the texture in a number of ways. There are plenty of Russian recipes for pickling them, which celebrates their crunchiness rather than hiding it. These mushrooms pick up an herbal brine nicely, but cold, crunchy, aged mushrooms might be too adventurous for some palates. Yunnan province, the epicenter of China’s mushroom culture, is where I seek recipes for mushrooms of this texture type. My favorite approach learned from these recipes is to chop the mushrooms, brown them in a pan with minimal oil, and then use them in a wet stir fry with cucumbers, zucchini or other vegetables that soften when cooked. The mushrooms provide a wonderful crunchy texture contrast to the rest of the dish, and their usually light flavor wonderfully compliments vegetarian plates. 

Dehydration

There are a number of mushrooms that benefit greatly from dehydration. Boletes and Suillus grow more earthy and savory after being dehydrated and stored for a few months. Yellowfeet chanterelles can develop cheese like notes after about 6 months of storage and are one of the mushrooms I enjoy much more dried and aged then fresh. One of the most unique mushrooms in our Northern California area gains sweet notes as it dries and is often used in pastries to give them a maple syrup-like essence: the candy cap (Lactarius rubidus). The biggest trick with the candy cap is to dehydrate it and not store it in an airtight container, as it needs access to water in the air in order to sweeten up over a month or so. You can try to speed this process up by dehydrating them, placing them in a glass jar and adding a bit of steam every few days. You want to be careful not to overdo it though, as if you get them wet things can grow.   

A few mushrooms in our area like the California golden chanterelle benefit greatly from a dry saute. The mushrooms you’ll want to parse out for this prep tend to have dense flesh, and if you attempted a normal pan-fry of them they become slobbery wet in the pan and difficult to brown. Tear or cut the mushrooms into pieces and add to a medium-hot pan, continually stirring them. Over the course of a few minutes, the mushrooms will begin to drop enough moisture that your pieces are now swimming in a bit of liquid. Continue to cook them down, boiling the liquid off. The flavor from the liquid will stick to the mushrooms and as the moisture cooks off the mushrooms will start to brown. You can add salt at this point, stir, then add just a little of your favorite fat to the pan to help brown them further. This technique will make their flavor pop. They are now ready to be combined into other dishes, or you can drop the heat and add cream to make a wonderfully thick, flavorful sauce. 

Parboiling

There are a handful of wonderful tasting mushrooms that require a parboil before working with. Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sp.) and Amanita muscaria (the fly agaric mushroom) are two that I commonly parboil to eat. I’ll usually cut chicken of the woods into long strips, drop them in a pot of boiling water for 10 minutes, fish them out and then pan fry them directly in butter, sometimes after breading them. Many people eat chicken of the woods without the parboil, but it is definitely a mushroom that will leave you in bad shape if undercooked, and giving it the pre-boil doesn’t take away much of its flavor. Amanita muscaria on the other hand needs to be parboiled to be safe to eat. It is the iconic red mushroom with white dots. If it is not parboiled it contains muscarine and ibotenic acid, both of which can be very unpleasant, leading to nausea and delirium. This mushroom I will boil three times, changing the water each time. Surprisingly, it has a firm texture after boiling and can be pan-fried afterward to produce nice nutty tones. It should be noted though that two of the most deadly mushrooms in California are in the Amanita genus and parboiling will not remove their toxins, so before you ever consider eating an Amanita you want to be able to identify the deadly Amanita phalloides and Amanita ocreata confidently.

Roasting

The last technique that I think really brings certain mushrooms’ flavor to a new level is roasting them on an open fire. My favorite mushrooms for cooking over an open fire are the true boletes and matsutake. The essential move for both of these is to make sure you are working with cuts thin enough that you can cook them thoroughly. I tend to work with cuts that are half an inch thick at the most. For the boletes add granular salt, allow them to sit for a few minutes, then brush with olive oil. Cook them until the edges are brown, dust them with some more salt and black pepper and you’ll have one of the simplest, most flavorful dishes of your life. I usually brush matsuakes with olive oil and soy sauce, then roast them until the edges are crispy. The soy accentuates the distinct tones of the mushroom without overpowering it. 

The number of ways to cook mushrooms is almost as diverse as the number of mushrooms in our forests. I really encourage trying to assess a new mushroom with a basic pan-fry and then using your own impression of it to try some of these other cooking techniques. If you feel more comfortable with recipes there are a number of books that cover classic wild mushroom dishes, including The Wild Table by Connie Greene. If you really want to test yourself as a mushroom chef it is hard to find a better book than Chad Hyatt’s The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen as it proposes novel ways to go about cooking classic edibles and gives solid recipes on how to tackle mushroom species you won’t find in any other cookbook.

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