late autumn color, late autumn flavor: winter squash, chestnuts and wild mushrooms

Must say I do love a soup that tastes rich and creamy without being heavy – or containing cream. Also nice if it doesn’t require an arsenal of seasonings and is easy and quick to make.

The quick part does assume the squash is already baked, and that you know speedy ways to peel chestnuts, but why not? *

As usual, the ingredient list is pretty much the whole recipe, but given that the beauty shot of the main ingredients promised something a bit more extensive, here’s a rough outline, based on the most recent iteration.

“Rough” and “most recent” are definitely the words for it; this is one of those home style soups that’s infinitely variable.

In other words, almost impossible to screw up.

If we’ve eaten most of  the squash, I just use more mushroom and chestnut. When I have the help of chestnut peelers, I shamelessly take advantage. Don’t have these particular mushrooms ? No problem, there are plenty of alternatives.

That’s “alternative,” as in “it’ll be good, but in a different way.” Recipes that call simply  for wild mushrooms or mixed wild mushrooms drive me nuts.

As though there were no differences! Granted, all of them taste like mushrooms, but anyone who thinks Boletus edulis and Cantharellus cibarius can be interchanged willy-nilly should have their head examined simply isn’t paying attention.

I am tempted to rant at length. Instead will just mildly point out that this soup can be made with almost any pair of mushrooms, wild or domestic, but one of them should be an intensely flavored low moisture variety like hen of the woods or shiitake and the other should be a firm, meaty but tender variety like lactarius or cremini.

AUTUMN SOUP

as measured out in midcoast Maine in Late October 2011

3 tbl. butter

3.5 oz. Lactarius thyinos, cut into half-inch chunks

A large onion in roughly 1/3 inch dice

5 oz Grifola frondosa coarsely chopped

12 chestnuts, roasted, peeled, and coarsely chopped

5 c. light chicken stock

6 oz. baked winter squash, roughly cut into walnut sized chunks

4 good sized springs of fresh thyme – enough to add a hint but not a shout

3 scrapings of nutmeg

1. Melt the butter in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the lactarius chunks and cook, stirring occasionally, until they are lightly browned and completely cooked through. Remove and set aside.

2. Add the onion, cook until golden, then add the frondosus. Keep cooking and stirring until the vegetables are brown and there is no free liquid in the pan. Stir in the chestnuts, add the broth, cover, and simmer over very low heat until everything is falling-apart soft, about an hour, maybe more.

3. Stir in the squash and seasonings, cover and cook until the squash is more or less dissolved, about 20 minutes.

4. Fish out the thyme and puree the soup. Depending on the toughness of the mushrooms, it will come out somewhere between fine applesauce and French Restaurant. This batch was the former and perfectly tasty, but I did put it thorough a strainer to achieve F.R. for its portrait.

5. Reheat, salt to taste and portion out, topping each bowl with a sprinkle of the reserved lactarius. An herb garnish doesn’t help, tastewise, so I resisted the temptation to pretty it up with something green. If you feel you must, a sprig of chervil wouldn’t do much harm.

BAKED WINTER SQUASH

Is more flavorful and less watery than squash that has been boiled, steamed or microwaved. All the same like baked potatoes, including stabbing here and there to prevent explosions. Unlike potatoes, squash leaks sweet juice, so you do have to put it on a pan. At 375 degrees, it’ll take anywhere from one hour to two, depending on the squash variety, size and age. (They cook more quickly after they’ve been stored for a while.)

That’s my preferred method, but when I’m in a hurry I halve the squash, remove the seeds, rub the cut surfaces with olive oil and roast the halves face down. Seed removal is a bit more of a chore, but you do get those delicious caramelized cut surfaces.

* Frozen partially cooked peeled chestnuts are quite tasty and an enormous time-saver, as I learned some years ago when a chef friend sent me some. Being as they’re not a money saver (unless you’re a chef with labor costs) and are not sold at any stores nearby, I have never bought any. But they are available retail, from Chestnut Growers Inc., a Michigan farmer’s co-op, among others. If you decide to go for it, please come back and let us all know how it worked out.

Ingredients for autumn soup: chestnuts from a farmers market, Lactarius thyinos (no common name), hen of the woods, Queen of Smyrna squash

I took this picture to run with the recipe – not yet written – because I was about to roast the squash and chestnuts, making them less photogenic.

But then I realized the picture itself is a massive seasonal alert. So:

Bill’s detailed hen of the woods hunting advice is here.

The post where I roll all over in delight about the squash, after a timely reminder that the window of specialty squashes is both small and right now, is here.

And really a lot about roasting and peeling chestnuts is here.

Further refinements:

THE SQUASH

This is the first Queen of Smyrna I’ve had this year, and I tasted it with considerable apprehension. Last year’s song of praise was so effusive the possibility of embarrassing disappointment seemed larger than the possibility of confirmatory delight. No worries! It was amazing.

Right now, Queen of Smyrna is being grown only on the farm in Northern Maine where it originated. I got it at Fresh off the Farm, in midcoast Rockport. But that just makes it the poster squash for “eat local.” Wherever you live it’s likely there’s something equally rare and fabulous at a farm stand or farmers market near you.

THE CHESTNUTS

I bought them a couple of weeks ago at the Poughkeepsie, NY farmers market, from a vendor who warmed my heart by clearly being not a professional farmer but just some guy who happened to have a (Chinese, not American) chestnut tree in his yard. Also a couple of apple and pear trees, from the looks of his stand. There was not a lot of anything – a few small boxes of apples and pears, I think maybe three pints of chestnuts.

It was the end of the day, but he couldn’t have started out with a whole lot more.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m profoundly grateful to and admiring of the professional farmers who day in, day out make local food a reality. But I’m also glad this kind of neighborly exchange is not yet dead (and not yet priced out of a place in the marketplace).

The chestnuts themselves, I regret to say, were only so-so compared to those grown by the pros. But being very fresh they were quite wonderfully easy to peel.

THE MUSHROOMS

The hen of the woods is amply covered in the article linked up top.

The L. thyinos isn’t exactly uncommon but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it offered for sale. Some experts rate them uninteresting or even unpleasant. A mystery, that, except for being another reminder that taste is in the mouth of the taster and that mushrooms can vary a lot depending on where they grow.

We have a few reliable spots and the thyinos we harvest there rate quite highly with us. Although the taste is on the delicate side, sort of mushroomy and sort of floral; the texture is outstanding: delightfully firm, not tough but crisp, and it remains so even after thorough cooking.

Thyinos is hard to miss because when cut it exudes quantities of orange milk. The closely related L. deliciosus group has the same milk but turns green when handled. It too is edible, although “deliciosus” is pushing it.

THE APPLES

Not in the picture and not in the soup, but this very Sunday is Great Maine Apple Day and I wanted to give all within driving distance a heads up.

I probably should have titled this “Harvesting Wild Mushrooms;” there are all kinds of them just about everywhere (or at least everywhere in the Northeast). Our vegetable gardens may be soggy – even without Irene this has been a mighty rainy summer – but in the silver lining department there’s a bumper crop in the woods and fields.

Oddly, we haven’t found too many Cantharellus cibarius, the chanterelles usually sold under that name. Instead, we’re getting boatloads of the smaller sorts, including the Craterellus tubaeformis, aka Cantharellus infundibuliformis in Bill’s picture and the ever-popular black trumpet (Craterellus fallax).

Also lobster mushrooms (scroll down for collecting and cleaning tips) and a great many boletes.

This includes Boletus edulus, or king bolete , the species called Porcino in Italy. Friends familiar with both insist our kings are not as royal as true Italian porcini. In my opinion, they’re plenty delicious enough – far better than other common boletes – and absent the genuine article it’s difficult to compare.

Being married to an expert mycologist puts me next to a grand assortment of less-well-known edibles, about which I will not speak just now since you really need to know what you’re doing before it’s safe to eat them.

Actually, you should know what you’re doing before you eat any wild mushroom. After all this cheerleading I’m sorry to be the ghost at the banquet, but I keep reading about wild mushroom feasts where a grand variety is served to people who have not tried them all before and it’s making me nervous.

Most of the time, no problem; the combination of good will and a healthy fear of legal retribution seems to be working pretty well. The scary part is the chance of trouble; sooner or later, it’s pretty much inevitable. The more different mushrooms consumed, the more likely it is that one of them will provoke discomfort – or worse – in at least one of the consumers, and if you’ve served a whole bunch of different species it’s going to be near-impossible to figure out which one’s to blame.

Even mushrooms long classified as the safest of the safe can cause bad stomach upsets. Sulfur shelf, for instance, has long been classed as one of the “foolproof four” because it’s so easy to recognize, yet there are many (myself among them) who cannot eat any of what has turned out to be a whole class of related mushrooms.

Short version: persnickety as they may appear, Bill’s Long Lived Mushroom Eaters Golden Rules are worth following.

This festival of links is just a taste of our blog entries over the years. There are many more of Bill’s expert collecting tips and a few of my favorite recipes in the mushroom section. It’s not logically organized( time for an upgrade!), so scrolling can take a while. If you know what you’re looking for, try the index first.

* Michael Kuo, in themushroomexpert.com.

Photo by Bill Bakaitis

Not sure if I’m bragging or confessing; but either way we did pretty well morelling this year, at the expense of working on the new evergreen garden, up-potting the last batch of tomato seedlings, giving the raspberries their second weeding…

Morels Part 1: The All American Fried Morel Experiment

Although many delicious varieties of wild mushrooms grow in the US, almost all are collected and eaten by only a few, primarily mycology nuts and gastronomic sophisticates with plenty of disposable income.

But morels are different, small d democratic, hunted and loved by a huge diversity of country dwellers who put them in the same “well of course” mental basket as berries, ramps and dandelions. To my way of thinking this makes them the all-American mushroom.

Thus it follows as night the day (or vice versa, the Rapture having fizzled again) that – I hope I’m not offending anyone – they should be cooked at least once per season the classic American way: breaded and fried.

Actually, cracker-crumbed and fried. Saltines are the most common, but Ritz crackers and pre-seasoned cracker crumbs also have advocates.

Plain flour has many adherents, too, most of them on the scornful side when it comes to cracker crumbs.

So when Bill brought in a good supply of  specimens large enough to cut in cutlets I decided to give them a – limited, unscientific, not obsessivecompulsive Cooks Illustrated style – side by side comparison.

I chose 4 coatings, none of them crackers which have already over the years been tried and found overbearing.

1. Flour seasoned only with salt and white pepper

2. Flour seasoned with salt, white pepper and a few shreds of lemon zest

3. Fine cornmeal, seasoned with salt, white pepper and skepticism, but corn and morels is one of the great combos and cornmeal is great with fried green tomatoes, so…

4. Crushed shredded wheat. Mighty close to crackers, but I was curious because Bill had been reading to me – from his vast collection – about a recipe that nestled a morel preparation in nests of kadief, none of which we happened to have in the house.

The winner was the lemon zest flour. Bill rated the plain flour a distant second and the others “don’t feed me this again.” I thought the cereal had possibilities; the wheat flavor accented the meatiness of the mushrooms, and if I’d crushed it a bit finer…but he remained unpersuaded.

All-American Fried Morels

1. Choose large, grit-free, symmetrical morels. Cut off the stems and halve the caps the long way. If necessary, clean the inside surfaces – by wiping, not washing.

2. Prepare a shallow bowl of beaten egg thinned with a little milk. Set out a plate with the coating of choice.

2. Heat a generous 1/3rd inch layer of peanut or corn oil in a deepish skillet wide enough to hold the morel halves without crowding. When the oil is hot but not smoking, add enough unsalted butter to raise the fat level to 1/2 inch or so. Keep the mixture warm over low heat.

3. Coat the slices with the egg, pressing the honeycombed side down firmly so the egg gets into the holes and the slice flattens out a bit if it wasn’t flat already. Dip them in the coating, covering both sides of the slice with a thin layer. Set the slices aside on a rack.

4. Reheat the fat to @ 360 degrees. (A torn-off bit of morel should sizzle and slowly start to turn color.) Fry the slices, turning once, until they are richly browned. Drain on absorbent paper and serve as soon as possible.

Serving Suggestions: You can just put them on a plate and pass it around – assuming everything hasn’t already been snatched off the draining paper – but fried morels and mashed potatoes, with steamed asparagus on the side, is a favorite around here. They’re also nice with green salad (hooray for garden lettuce at last!) Or you can just keep going toward fried chicken: pour off almost all of the fat, make a roux – with the lemon flour if you used that – and make cream gravy.

There will be trees and flowers and food and garden design and some eeks of the week and a great deal more. But as it happens we are starting out with the wild mushrooms that appear here so frequently, because, as Bill said yesterday,

“ A January Thaw: What could be nicer? Today at noon it was 56 F on our front porch.The sun was shining, our  bees were out for their first cleansing flights of the winter, the odd songbird or two could be heard rehearsing spring calls, and on our new year’s walk this shining bit of cheer and promise: ”

No, they’re not edible; just a reminder that there’s always something growing (and always something to share).

Roll and cut Pepparkakor, the quintessential Solstice gingerbread cookie (animals, birds and stars belong to everyone, regardless of religion or lack of same.)

To cope this year, I’m going to try a 180 from the time honored “one dough, many  cookies” strategy. As soon as I get this posted I’m going to shrink the list and use the dough for spicy walnut ginger fingers to make the fancy cut out shapes necessary to a proper assortment. They’re only a distant cousin of pepparkakor , but under the circumstances I’ve decided they’re close enough.

Bill, meanwhile, has none of these problems. He just keeps going out mushrooming and will with luck bring home winter oysters, about which ( and a few others) he has written another guest post

The delicious Winter Oyster Mushroom can withstand repeated freezing and thawing cycles and can be found through the Fall, Winter, and Spring in the Hudson Valley of New York.

FRIGID FUNGI: A GUIDE TO THE FLESHY MUSHROOMS OF WINTER, from First Rate (Winter Oysters) to Fatal (Autumn gallerina)

By Bill Bakaitis

Almost any walk through the Northeastern Forests in winter will reveal a wide assemblage of hard conks or leathery fans decorating the fallen logs and standing timber of the area. Among these tough woody fungi will be a few that are fleshy and pliant. Some will have been nibbled upon by squirrels and deer, suggesting edibility. Here is a primer on a few of the most common: one is deadly, the others, to some degree or other, are edible, even choice.

Galerina autumnalis is the deadly one, and it can be found year round in the Hudson Valley. Although it grows on wood, most commonly on punky downed logs, this small butterscotch brown fungus contains the same toxin found in the Destroying Angel Amanitas. There is an Old Wives Tale that all mushrooms sprouting from wood are edible, but as this mushroom indicates that bit of Folk Wisdom is a myth, a deadly myth!

A full description of this “Autumn Galerina” can be found on Page 620 of Lincoff’s The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, the reference most often turned to in the Northeast for authoritative information.  Or see this  more detailed description.  Be absolutely sure you can identify this mushroom before you consider eating any that even remotely resembles it!

I have found it in the Hudson Valley fruiting in every month of the year.  At times it is mistakenly collected by young adults seeking a psychoactive experience. It also can be mistaken for Flammulina velutipes, the following edible species.

Flammulina is another small butterscotch colored mushroom. It has a number of names in various field guides, ‘Velvet Foot’ or ‘Velvet Footed Collybia’, being ones which seem to have staying power, even though the genus Collybia has been radically eviscerated by taxonomic redistribution. Lincoff’s description (p. 759) correctly points out that Flammulina typically grows on sound standing wood – most commonly Elm in my experience.

The stem is often covered with a yellowish to brownish velvety covering (the ‘Velvet Foot’). Galerina usually has a ring on the stalk, although the ring quite often will have fallen off. Flammulina has no ring.  Another important distinction is that whereas the spores of the deadly Galerina will be rusty-brown, the spores of the edible Flammulina will be white. Michael Kuo’s detailed description of the mushroom is here , and his useful guide to finding spore color by making spore prints is here

Most collectors who eat mushrooms seem to rate Flammulina as ‘edible’ but not ‘choice’. I have eaten it in the past, either fried up in butter and garlic or as an addition to soups or stews. Leslie, with the more refined palate, prefers to keep it in the woods rather than in our refrigerator.

This brings us to the two Winter Oyster Mushrooms, one of which, Panellus (or Pleurotus) serotinus is like Flammulina  ‘edible but not choice’.

Panellus is often referred to as the Late Fall Oyster. I usually find it from first frost in mid-October to hard freeze mid-December, although in the Catskills I would often find it as early as September on fallen Beech logs at high elevations. Before I knew better, I would even leave the more balmy lowlands to seek it out.  It is quite distinctive, often bluish or greenish yellow with yellowish gills and a well defined stub-like stalk.

It is also quite tough, and would easily escape damage tucked into my rucksack, withstanding the climb up, over and then down the mountainside. It also dried well, and provides a decidedly chewy experience incorporated into hearty stews. Shall we say that its bitter flavor lends itself well to robust sauces, like burgundy or tomato, or both!  For more see Lincoff (p 789), or  this detailed description, bearing in mind that P. serotinus is another one that Leslie has banned from the fridge.

She has no quarrel with Pleurotus ostreatus, the flagship species in the Oyster Mushroom complex, and the one from which its name derives. This is truly a ‘choice’ mushroom, a delicious candidate for the table. As the name implies, ostreatus often has a distinctly delicate oyster or anise like aroma, a quality that comes, at least in part, from its enhanced protein content. This mushroom not only feeds on the cellulose and sugars found in the tree, but also sets out a specialized mycelial network designed to trap and feed upon nematodes which live within the fibers of the host tree.

Unlike the thinner fleshed Oysters of summer, the Winter Oyster is usually large, each leaf like cap may be up to eight inches wide and an inch or more thick. They grow in overlapping clusters and it is not unusual to find a clump that approaches a cubic foot in size, weighing several pounds.

Nearly a cubic foot of oyster mushrooms.

Also, unlike the summer oysters that are usually riddled with white grubs – the larval stage of the red and black beetles which scurry between the gills – ostreatus found in winter are clean of such infestations. When I come upon a good fruiting of them I can pick only what I need for the next day or so, confident that I can return days or even weeks later and harvest the rest (assuming of course that they are out of reach of deer and rodents, which also seem to relish this choice edible).

Several companies have developed commercial species of Oysters, with differing colors, shapes, tastes and aromas, depending upon the strain and upon the substrate used to grow them . None I have tried, however, can compete with the wild ones for the table.

One cooking technique that has worked well for me is to incorporate a bit of anise flavored liquor somewhere in the recipe; Pernod is the one I most often use. A few drops seem to highlight and enhance the anise/oyster flavor component of the mushroom..

Oysters are very easy to cultivate. The simplest method is to cut up sections of the fruiting tree and bring them into a domestic location. All that remains is to water, watch and harvest.  Only a bit more sophistication is needed to inoculate virgin material; oysters are often the first mushrooms attempted in mycology labs. Straw, leaves, newspapers, corn stalks, and a host of other materials have been used as substrates. In graduate school at SUNY New Paltz we had great success growing oysters on rolls of toilet paper.

But be forewarned, Oyster mushrooms can easily escape the substrate for which they are intended and take over the house, growing on the walls, beams, and even toilet seats! In the 1980′s members of our local mushroom association were able to purchase fresh Oysters grown in a nearby greenhouse by an innocent organic farmer. Two years later I heard that he had to abandon his house after the invading Oysters had moved in.  In another case, this summer I was asked for advice by a team of Wood Scientists on a similar case on the west coast.

Greg Marley, of Mushrooms for Health, found and photographed this cluster this summer in Maine.

Lincoff describes the Oyster Mushroom on p 793, and Kuo has a good  description, with multiple links, here.

ONE FINAL CAVEAT

One final caveat: Pleurocybella (Pleurotus) porrigens, commonly called Angel’s Wings, is one of the Oyster species which has long been considered edible and safe. But recently it has been associated with a number of deaths in Japan of people who had chronic kidney diseases.

All mushroom photos by Bill Bakaitis unless otherwise credited

Bill, being an honest and trusting soul, set up this photo without remembering that people have been known to stuff baskets with filler and put a layer of mushrooms on top. So just for the record that IS four pounds and nine and three-eighths ounces of black trumpets and the only reason it isn’t more is that we left the littler ones to grow larger for later.

Now what?

Trumpet brie is one of the easiest, tastiest things to do with black trumpets and you don’t need many, either

Trumpet and caramelized onion pizza is also quick and delicious.

Jackpot, bonanza, mother lode… all descriptive enough in their ways, but the inescapable conclusion is that the thesaurus, never having gone mushrooming and found hillsides blanketed with black trumpets, is simply not up to the task.

Look closely, then imagine this coverage going on for a considerable distance in all directions

We’ve had good years before – 2009 was among the more noteworthy – but this one is already off the charts and it’s only August. Other things being suitably propitious, they’ll keep coming until the end of September or later.

And not just for us. Reports of abundance are widespread and local greengrocers are selling them for around $20.00 a pound.

Useful things to know about Black Trumpets (Craterellus fallax)

1. They’re notoriously hard to find because they blend so well with the forest floor. Plus they’re small; a couple of inches tall and about an inch wide at the top is par for the course. The largest one we found the day of the basket was a bit more than 4 inches tall and 2 inches or so across at the flare.

Plus they’re frequently under ferns

2. They’re unusually durable, in the field and in the ‘fridge, because of a two part cell structure that makes them less watery than most common mushrooms.

Store loosely wrapped in waxed paper – not plastic! – and as long as they were dry when put away most of them will last indefinitely, gradually becoming rather wan-flavored dried mushrooms. Which brings us to

3. Black trumpets are good candidates for drying. The thin flesh desiccates quickly and the woodsy, smoky flavor is pretty well retained.

Reconstitute simply by adding to whatever preparation; doing the soak in boiling water/save liquid routine is unnecessary.

4. Dried trumpets reduced to powder are an excellent seasoning. Try a spoonful or two in the ground meat for hamburgers; add to pan sauces for steaks and chops; incorporate in pasta dough; add a pinch to punch up the flavor of  just about any mushroom dish.

ALL PURPOSE COOKED BLACK TRUMPETS

Trumpets should be cooked thoroughly, but are delicious used as though they were raw – in sandwiches (great with avocado!), salads and things like the stuffing for devilled eggs. To cook without diluting flavor or adding the flavor of fat, just spread in a single layer on a plate and microwave on high for 45 – 90 seconds, depending on the size of the mushrooms and power of your microwave. They’re done as soon as they’re wilted and evenly black.

TRUMPET BRIE

The better the brie the better the finished product, of course, but don’t hesitate to make this with the standard industrial triple cream sold in better supermarkets from coast to coast.

All you do is sandwich a layer – or two – of chopped cooked trumpets in a split wedge of cheese, wrap tightly in plastic and refrigerate to let the flavors mingle. The longer the better (within reason) but give it at least a day. Allow to come to room temperature a couple of hours before serving.

Historic image showing all-purpose cooked black trumpets. I used to make this with whole split mushrooms. Beautiful but otherwise not so good; you get more flavor – and more mushroom – if you chop them and the cheese is easier to cut and spread.

For best results, split the cheese in half (or thirds, if you’re going for triple decker) while it’s still cold, then let it warm up and soften before pressing on the mushrooms and reassembling.

TRUMPET PIZZA WITH CARAMELIZED ONIONS AND TWO CHEESES

The mushroom flavor is strongest when the pizza is lukewarm, rather than burn-your-mouth-on-the-cheese hot.

For one 14-inch pie:

2 tbl. butter

1 large onion, cut in 6 wedges, the wedges sliced across to make strips

1 lb. pizza dough

4-5 oz. black trumpet mushrooms, cooked as described above

2 generous tbl. fresh thyme leaves (omit if unavailable)

3 oz. Gruyere, the drier and nuttier the better, shredded

8 oz. Mozzarella, shredded

1. Melt the butter in a heavy skillet over low heat, add the onions and cook, stirring often, until they’re reduced to golden brown threads, about 20 minutes. Season with salt after they’re cooked. Heat the oven to 450.

2. Roll the dough very thin and fit it into a 14  inch pizza pan, leaving about 1 1/2 inches of overlap for the rim.

3. Spread the mushrooms over the dough in an even layer and sprinkle on the thyme. Spread the cooked onions over the mushrooms. Loosely, gently roll up the rim.

4. Bake until the dough has risen and is starting to set and brown, about 5 minutes. Working quickly, take the pizza out of the oven, sprinkle on the gruyere, then the mozzarella. Return to the oven and keep baking until the cheese is bubbling and browned and the dough rim looks well toasted.

Photographs of basket and trumpets in the wild by Bill Bakaitis.

Maine crab and lobster mushrooms inside that crunchy crust

At the risk of jinxing things I have to say this is shaping up as a boffo mushroom year (in Midcoast Maine, anyway.) We haven’t had much chance to go out, but when we do we are finding things, including lobster mushrooms, which seem to be unusually abundant.

I am of the school that feels they get their name from their brilliant color. To me, the flavor is meaty, not fishy. But others claim they also taste faintly crustaceanlike. This isn’t as farfetched as it sounds; mushroom cell walls are primarily composed of chitin, the same material that makes crab and lobster shells.

Either way, they have a great affinity for Maine crabmeat, one of the world’s greatest seafoods.

Those bright red bits are the mushroom

Maine Crab and Lobster Mushroom Cakes

For 4 roughly 3-inch cakes, rich enough to be dinner for 4 if there’s something else fairly substantial on the menu:

4oz. lobster mushrooms, weighed after cleaning (see below), enough to make  @1 cup cooked and chopped*

8 oz. Maine crabmeat

2 tbl. thick homemade mayonnaise, half olive oil and half peanut oil*

½ tsp. chopped capers, or more to taste

½ tsp. minced lovage, or more to taste – omit if you don’t have any

1 cup panko

1 lemon

1 egg

2 tbl. butter

peanut oil for shallow frying

1. Put the pieces of cleaned lobster mushroom in a shallow pan just large enough to hold them in one layer. Pour in water to come up a scant ¼ inch. Bring to a simmer, cover the pan and cook until the mushrooms are fully cooked; they will look translucent.

2. There will be some liquid in the pan, how much depending on mushrooms, pan shape etc. Remove mushrooms with a slotted spoon, boil liquid until it’s reduced to thick syrup, then lower heat, replace mushrooms and cook, stirring, until there is no free liquid. Turn off the heat. Let the mushrooms cool in the pan.

lobster mushrooms ready to be cooked

cooked lobster mushrooms being chopped (I forgot to shoot them when they were still in large pieces).

3. Chop the mushrooms into roughly quarter-inch chunks, big enough to taste , small enough to blend with the crabmeat. Mix with crabmeat, mayonnaise, herbs and a pinch of salt. Taste and adjust seasonings.

4. Put the panko on a plate and grate the lemon zest over it. Toss with your fingertips to mix. Beat the egg in a shallow bowl. Set out a wire rack to hold the cakes.

5. Divide the mixture in 4 parts and form each into a patty about ½ inch thick. Pressing firmly should be enough to have it (barely) hold together. If necessary, bind with a bit more mayonnaise.

6. As each patty is formed, put it in the beaten egg and turn – gently! – to coat. Place it on the panko. When all the cakes have been formed, coat each heavily with the panko, turning and pressing to get a thick, even covering.

As each is completed, put it on the rack, then let them sit at least half an hour to firm up. (Refrigerate if you must hold them longer than about 75 minutes, then let come back to room temperature before cooking.)

7. Melt the butter over medium heat in a shallow pan  large enough to hold the cakes without crowding. Add enough oil to make a layer @ ¼ inch thick. When the oil is hot, add the cakes and fry, turning once, until both sides are richly browned, about 5 minutes a side. Drain briefly on paper towel or newspaper, then serve with

Cilantro Nectarine Sauce for Crabcakes

For about 1 3/4  cups:

1 cup thick thick homemade mayonnaise, half olive oil and half peanut oil*

2/3 cup finely minced cilantro

1 very ripe small white nectarine, peeled and chopped to pulp, @ 1/2 c. pulp

1 tsp. lemon juice, or more to taste

pinch of salt

Mix thoroughly, taste. Adjust lemon and salt.

*Substitutions:

Actual lobster can be used instead of the mushrooms, but it will of course elbow aside the more delicate crab.

Commercial mayo – Hellman’s, please – is ok, but it’s thinner, sweeter and more aggressively flavored than the homemade kind. This will make more difference in the sauce than in the crab cakes themselves. Be ready to correct with more lemon juice and maybe choose a slightly less ripe nectarine.

Preparing Lobster Mushrooms

The first thing to know is that lobster mushrooms (Hypomyces lactifluorum) are really lobsterized mushrooms. The color, flavor and texture are all created when a parasitic mushroom – the Hypomyces – colonizes another mushroom.

The host may be any of several species of Russula or Lactarius, but their individual traits are overwhelmed by the lobsterization. From the culinary point of view, all that’s left is the shape and sometimes not even that.

As the process proceeds, the host becomes yellowish, then orange, then flaming red, then flaming red with burgundy weepings. Flavor and texture are best at the orange stage. Red is alright if and only if the mushroom is firm and the inside is white when you cut into it. Anything soft or discolored ( brown or grey) is decaying and should be discarded. **

left to right: Just starting; Just right; Just gorgeous, but probably over the hill

The next thing to know is that lobster mushrooms are often extremely dirty.

Freshly picked lobster mushrooms. Notice the dirt. Know that there is a lot more dirt inside the funnels and inside the inside creases.

So step one is wash the mushrooms. We’ll save the discussion of whether one should wash mushrooms for another day. Suffice it to say there are some mushrooms that must be washed and if you don’t think lobsters are among them please don’t invite me to dinner.

The most flavor conservative way to wash is to cut the mushrooms as necessary to expose the dirt, brush off all that can be brushed off, then immerse the pieces one by one in a bowl of tepid water and gently rub off what remains.

Now you have a bunch of wet mushroom parts. Put them on paper towel and let them dry for an hour or two. You can use them damp in recipes where they will be immersed in liquid; let them dry thoroughly if they will be sautéed.

Washed lobster mushrooms set out to dry off

Loosely wrapped in waxed paper, lobster mushrooms keep well refrigerated, both before and after washing – IF you let the washed ones dry thoroughly before putting them away. Don’t be alarmed by white bloom that forms on the surface or shows up on the waxed paper; that’s just the spores, reminding you that the mushrooms are rapidly maturing and should be used up promptly.

** To be absolutely safe, you should know what the host species is, in the unlikely case it’s one that should not be eaten. Out here in reality, once hypomization is well underway, there’s no way to identify the host without lab equipment, so you have to proceed at your own risk, something I have been doing for more than 30 years.

As the authoritative Milk Mushrooms of North America (Bessette, Harris and Bessette, Syracuse University Press, 2009) puts it “Hypomyces lactifluorum is a very popular edible mushroom even though the identity of the host species is usually undetermined.”  The only poisoning Bill has ever dealt with in all his years of consulting came not from the lobster mushrooms per se, but from the fact that the mushrooms in question were rotten.

Photography note: The first time I tried to photograph the cakes it was at night, with predictably dreadful results. (So far I draw the line at learning about lighting).

But there were serious deficiencies in the styling, too. No matter what I did, here were these intractable dark brown disks with pale, light-reflecting sauce. Mayo on top – no good; on the side – better;  underneath – probably the best solution but then there was this naked hockey puck that looked very silly crowned with a spring of cilantro.

So before trying again in daylight I googled crab cake images, hoping to kite off some useful ideas and you know what? Nobody can photograph crab cakes, at least nobody in the first 60 offerings, after which I gave up.

Bill didn’t expect much either, but he doesn’t need much; one obscure little poisonous tidbit he hasn’t photographed yet is enough to make his day.

We were right, there wasn’t much – if you don’t count the mosquitoes and one huge honking Boletus bicolor.

Bill with a Boletus bicolor that’s on the big side for a solo specimen

“One swallow doth not a summer make,” as my mother was fond of remarking. But that  swallow reminded me to remind you  to be careful what you swallow. Although bicolors are good edibles, they’re easy to confuse with not good not edibles (B. sensibilis complex).

So. Now that the season’s about to start bigtime, here are two suggestions for happy wild mushroom hunting: check out Bill’s Long Lived Wild Mushroom Eaters Golden Rules – without letting his detailed explanation scare you to death – and start out with the gold standard: Chanterelles.

They’re delicious. In a good year they’re abundant. And they’re right up there with morels for being easy to recognize and safe for amateurs to collect.

Unlike morels, chanterelles have meaty stems too dense to clip with fingernails. Don't leave home without your pocket knife.

Note: My husband, Bill, is an expert mycologist, a consultant to New England Poison Control (there’s a reason he wrote those rules), and a frequent blog contributor whose posts amount to a short course on wild mushroom hunting. They’re gathered – along with some recipes – in the category Wild Mushrooms, under the dropdown menu for In the Wild that appears at the top of each page. Individual species can usually be found through the search and/or the alphabetical index.

Pioneer Winecap mushroom at lower left. They'll come up thickly in this area for the next 6 weeks or so - then keep coming sporadically through summer and fall, if conditions are right.

Winecaps (Stropharia rugosoannulata) are among the tastiest wild mushrooms: firm and meaty, with a taste of the nutty/smoky quality that makes porcini so special. They’re also large, easy to clean and almost as easy to grow as potatoes. Bill wrote a complete how-to last year.

One time-honored part of the procedure is feeding the newly planted bed with a pet food soup. Really. Nutrients galore. We knew it worked, but Bill being Bill, he also set up an experiment. One new bed got the feeding treatment, one didn’t. Results are now in – or more accurately, up.

The cat food bed wins paws down. Big fat winecaps are popping up in it left and right, while the control bed is still mushroom free. You’ll have the food right on hand if you have a cat, which of course you should.