When I come across, say, a patch of chanterelles, my first thought is how they will taste when I get home, sauté them in butter with some garlic, onions and herbs and take that first delicious bite. But then I also like to try to remember that these beautiful little golden mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of a species that spends most of its life as thin strands of mycelial networks beneath the surface. These unseen webs of fungal threads connect trees to trees, ferrying nutrients where needed in an unseen symbiotic transit system. Or like the conductors of an underground symphony. This is why you can’t easily grow chanterelles commercially. And what makes it so special to stumble across them in the woods.
Chanterelles were my introduction to mushroom foraging two years ago. On a hike in North Georgia not long after a rain, I found the bright yellow fungi sprouting like wildflowers just off the path. I’d seen enough photos to be fairly sure of what they were and a quick exchange with a more knowledgeable friend gave me the confidence to bring them home. “Two questions,” I texted, along with some photos. “1. Can you confirm these mushrooms we saw hiking near Dawsonville are chanterelles? 2. What’s the best way to cook them?”
“Definitely 100% chanterelles,” he responded. “Sauté them with butter, fresh herbs, garlic, and some white wine. Toss them with linguini. Chanterelles can also be red, yellow, and deep brown. Looks like you found a great patch. They will re-emerge there every year so once you find some good patches you are set!”
They were delicious, and I was hooked. I’ve never been a hunter, but there’s something deep within my gatherer soul that turned those first bites of mushrooms I’d found a particularly special meal. I’d always loved picking berries in the wild, making jams or syrups or just nibbling straight off the vine. Blackberries, serviceberries, apples, blueberries, plums. Atlantans are blessed with our own map from the amazing nonprofit Concrete Jungle to help find wild fruits on public lands.
But mushrooms long seemed unapproachable. Even with my newfound confidence in identifying chanterelles, the rest of the fungi kingdom seemed ominous and overwhelming. Too many stories of ruined dinner parties where a little knowledge proved to be a truly dangerous thing.
So chanterelles it was until a few months ago. After a stretch of rain that lasted days and days this summer, I’d had great luck finding the golden treasures on my regular walks in the woods around town. I’d even discovered a small patch in my tiny backyard. And I’d started taking photos of other mushrooms I was seeing. The oysters were easy enough to identify—I’d been buying bunches at the farmer’s market and cooking them with nearly everything.
But what about those tall ones with the red caps that looked like the beginnings of a Smurf village? Those had to be poisonous, right? Could they really be Amanita jacksonii like my iNaturalist app was telling me? Named by a Canadian mycologist presumably after a self-taught painter and environmentalist who shares my surname—Henry Alexander Carmichael Jackson—Jackson’s slender amanita or the American Slender Caeser has a bright red and yellow cap that spreads wide when it’s ready to release its spores and spread to new patches of forest.
For a few days, they seemed to pop up everywhere. And though they can sometimes be confused with their toxic-yet-hallucinogenic cousins, Amanita muscaria, I read enough and looked at enough photos and double-checked with enough Facebook groups to be sure what I was about to eat was the “choice edible” and not the “choice edible.” It was tasty and my menu of foraged mushrooms expanded to three.
I quickly expanded to the impossibly blue Lactarius indigo or indigo milkcap, one of those crazy-looking fungi that had you wondering what human was hungry enough to experiment with which of these weird things growing out of the forest floor might be food. It also proved to be the first edible mushroom that my own digestive system gave a big “Nope!” to. And this is why you should always taste a small bit of a new cooked mushroom before digging in too deeply. Not everyone processes every species the same.
For a while, I thought, “Mushroom hunting is so easy—they’re everywhere!” Then Atlanta, and my gathering, hit a long dry spell, where the only fungi I saw on my walks were dry, crusty shelf mushrooms like turkey tail—great for turning into teas but not so good topping a burger.
But here we are in fall, and I’m learning that like the birds I love to photograph, mushrooms have their own seasons. And this may be my favorite. On a recent camping trip, two friends joined me on a hike in the woods, and I told them what to look for. While I didn’t find a thing, one of them spotted a small lion’s mane and some oysters that I could identify. We cooked them up the next morning with our breakfast, delighting our whole camping crew.
Since then, another friend brought me some bear’s tooth (Hericium americanum) he found, and I made a spread for a small gathering that night. Since then I’ve found a giant puffball (Calvatia gigantea) the size of my head, colorful, fanning chicken of the woods, delicate-looking coral tooth (Hericium coralloides), the bizarre shrimp of the woods (Entoloma abortivum) and more lion’s mane. The first two were busts—the puffball cooked up like tofu but didn’t sit well with my stomach, and the chicken proved to be too old and tough (sorry to my friends who shared it with). But the coral tooth was delicious, and the shrimp of the woods is my absolute favorite so far—even better than the chanterelles.
I’m still learning and haven’t had the courage to try any of the notoriously hard-to-identify boletes I’ve found (there’s a whole website devoted to helping you identify these stout mushrooms based on combinations of cap color, stem color, texture and nearly a dozen more traits including “spore print”). But I’m loving this ongoing treasure hunt and learning new ways to cook what I find (though, can you really beat sautéing in butter, garlic, onions and herbs?).
Having recently read Merlin Sheldrake’s excellent Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Future, there’s a sense of connection I feel to nature when foraging—and when eating what I’ve foraged. If this sounds interesting but daunting, look for a local group of mushroom foragers. One thing I’ve learned that transcends all my nerdy nature interests: experts are eager to share their knowledge with people who share their passion.
Josh Jackson is the founder and president of Paste Media Group. You can follow him on Blueskey and see his bird photography on Instagram, @atl_birds.