Bumpin’ Boletes
Disclaimer: The number 1 rule of foraging–don’t eat anything you’re not 200% sure in identification. If you can’t be sure, it might as well be fatally toxic. I’ll get into how I identified these but make sure you do your own research as well.
I’ve been wanting to cut down the oaks in my front lawn because other than dropping large quantities of acorns, leaves, and tree sperm which basically means a lot of yardwork without any reward, I didn’t think they provided anything as far as an edible landscape went–I wanted space, lots of it, to put in more fruit trees, berry bushes, and other edibles and they were in the way. I’ve been wanting to cut them down since I moved in, but now I’m glad I didn’t have the finances or time to because they’ve been hiding something amazing in their root network underground: Bolete mushrooms.
The prized porcini mushrooms are part of the boletus group–with strong mushroom flavor, almost bordering on truffle-like, there’s no surprise that it fetches a hefty price in the culinary market. The boletes I get on my lawn are also very fragrant, and I could understand why they’re considered choice mushrooms for even the experienced mushroom hunter.
Unlike other mushrooms, the collective boletus mushrooms have pores instead of gills, and therefore are quite easy to identify as part of that group. Not all boletus are edible though, and a few are toxic enough to warrant exercising caution. I stay away from any, and I mean any that bruises blue/slate and any that have red or orange pores/spores.
One of the main issues with boletes is that maggots love them, and any of the bigger ones will have been infested by the time you get to them. Nothing is worse than picking up a beautiful bolete only to have it collapse into a mass of tiny wiggling grubs. Some people shrug and say it’s extra protein, but I’m not that hard up for them that I would eat them. Once I realized I had them on my lawn, I do periodic sweeps throughout the day to beat the maggots and collect them as soon as they pop up out of the ground. This means many of them are small, but if I’m not using them immediately, I freeze them just in case any eggs had been laid in their stems–the maggots seem to work from the bottom up and even if you think you collected one maggot free, if kept longer than a few hours, there might be unwelcomed guests munching down on them. You can usually tell if it’s been infested by maggots just by the feel of them–if they feel spongy, you’ll inevitably open them up to find a network of tunnels throughout them, and if you follow the tunnels you’ll find the perpetrators happily digging in. If they’re firm with very little give, you’ve got a good one!
The one issue I find with mushrooms of this sort is that they all call for rich and creamy carb heavy recipes–while they do wonderfully in pasta, risotto, arancini, julienne, polenta, cream stews, I do wish there was something more I could create. Alas, my waistline will suffer as I try and discover other ways to play with them…
Anyway, the moral of this story is that even something that seems like a nuisance (my oak trees in this case) could actually be a blessing in disguise. I’m hoping that they’ll provide much in the years to come.