Foraging, Growing, & Cooking Mushrooms by Megan Lowder
M
ushrooms are an excellent source of vitamin D, have wonderful health benefits, a decent shelf life and can be prepared in many ways. Mushrooms can be purchased from a local mushroom grower, grown with a kit or foraged in natural areas near you. Read on for tips about, foraging, growing and cooking mushrooms. San Antonio’s natural areas offer a variety of edible mushrooms that can be foraged seasonally. It is important to note that when foraging for mushrooms, a proper identification must be made by an expert and, even then, should still be approached with caution. Facebook groups such as Texas Mushroom Identification are an excellent resource for learning to identify mushrooms. The admins of the group, such as Jared McRae, have years of experience in identifying mushrooms.
field notes and a set of good pictures. Proper ID requires information on where the mushroom is growing, what it is growing on, and detailed pictures of the mushroom. In order to get a proper identification of a mushroom you must learn to take a good picture of the mushroom. You will need pictures of the top, the side and most importantly the bottom of the mushroom. The Central Texas Mycology website offers more tips on how to capture the perfect picture to best help with identifying a mushroom.
Mushroom identification
re q u i re s an abundance of knowledge that cannot be accomplished through research alone. It requires field experience as well. Through the mushroom walks held by Central Texas Mycology, participants can gain the knowledge and field experience it takes to learn about sustainable foraging and conservation of natural spaces that grow fungi. Andrew Denny and Jared McRae lead mushroom walks in San Antonio to teach the community how to identify wild mushrooms. Sam the Fungi and Angel Schatz lead mushroom walks in the San Marcos and Austin area as well. To find out about a mushroom walk near you, follow Central Texas Mycology and South Texas Seasonals on Facebook and Instagram. To identify mushrooms, you need
54 | Winter 2021
Foraging
instills a curiosity about plant and animal life that can only be tamed with research. Foragers become citizen scientists that become close observers of the ecosystem. There’s something about eating a plant or a fungus that you didn’t have to tend to that gets you looking at your ecosystem differently. From a forager’s perspective, a patch of weeds turns into an abundance of medicine that, without stewardship, will be suffocated by invasive species. Our natural areas promise a plethora of potential that is being paved over. At the rate of development San Antonio is experiencing, we may never know what native medicinal species
Mixed mushroom box with gold, pink, snow and gold oysters with special foraged chicken of the woods
