A Medicinal Mummy Mushroom 2020

what's going on guys so i am out on the blue ridge parkway right now my wife and i were looking for mushrooms it's actually a mushroom that i call a mummy mushroom in light of it being uh october uh with halloween right around the corner i think it's an excellent mushroom for us to take a look at so if you're interested stick around [Music] okay check it out right there it is this is the birch polypore and what we're looking at is a birch tree obviously it's dead and dying it's on its way out but what we have here are some birch polypores so why would i refer to this as a mummy mushroom well this mushroom was actually found on a man uh in 1991 in the italian alps and he was mummified he'd been there for 5 300 years roughly something like that and he actually had these birch poly pores on him and that's fantastic when you think about it to think that someone way back then was actually utilizing this mushroom and we're utilizing it today actually i think it's under utilized because of the medicinal value that's actually in this mushroom it's tremendous and the medicinal value that i'm actually talking about is it's antiviral it's it's got its anti-inflammatory anti-tumor it's actually an antiseptic it's been assumed that the the the fella that they found it on the mummy they found it on was using it that way and it's super easy to identify i mean just take a look at it there's really no other mushroom that looks like it here's the thing if you find a mushroom that is growing on a birch tree chances are and it looks like this you you've got it i mean it's gonna be the birch polypore you don't have to worry about poisonous look likes or anything like that okay so let's go ahead and take a little bit off cut this right off the tree here check that out look at the underside of it very cool now this is a young specimen so it hasn't fully developed it is a polypore mushroom right now you can't really see the pores very well at all because it's not fully developed which is perfect this is good now you can harvest them when they get a little older but you don't want this to be all brown in here this has a white spore print but you really don't need to take a spore print like i said super easy to identify let me get this other one down here if i can very tough it's very very tough this mushroom is full of kittens just like all the other medicinal mushrooms out there full of chitin awesome all right i think there there's one more there it is you're gonna stay here you coming got my mushroom babies okay i found some more but what i wanted to show you was this right here this is one that is clearly past its prime i wouldn't harvest that but if we come over here and we take a look at this guy i'm just going to pull them off i'm not even going to cut him or just pull that right off look you can see the underside looks good nice and white awesome okay and the last one yeah look at that awesome we'll put that in with the rest of these yeah right on okay so one haircut and a day later here i am let's clean these mushrooms now you can dry brush this if you want to it's really simplistic there's not much to it uh if you don't feel like dry brushing it or maybe it's a little more dirty uh then you like just run it on some water real quick uh i wouldn't recommend soaking it but definitely run it under some water clean both sides get the uh get the outside and obviously the poor side and and that's it it's very simplistic okay there is a downside when you're tearing the mushrooms off of the tree you're left with all of that bark still attached very tough and and hard to get off so you're gonna have to cut that off and i mean it's not hard to do i mean you just literally just slice off the back of the mushroom here but if you look closely right in here and this is actually a pretty clean one but a lot of times you'll find a lot of bark in this area right there here even after you you know have trimmed that off um and you know i really don't worry about it let's see here's a slice that's a good example of that you can really see all that bark still in there but i don't worry about it i you know uh if it's relatively clean when it's like this i will utilize those pieces as you know as if they're just all white like something like this you know which is awesome look how clean that is that looks beautiful that's fantastic and just keep on slicing and that's when it starts to get better i mean you keep slicing and it gets whiter and whiter and wider you can see that look at that and if we go back you can still see the bark in there those are not worm holes that's not a wormhole that's bark which is wild you know when the mushroom is growing it's just pulling that bark off the tree as it grows so pretty cool stuff anyway let's keep going okay so once we get the mushrooms cleaned up and sliced up you're going to place them on a cookie sheet and at that point we're going to set our oven at 170 that's fahrenheit that's also the lowest setting i guess for the rest of the planet it's going to be 76 celsius i think i don't know anyway we're going to set it to the lowest setting possible uh place them in there and let them go for one hour after that after an hour kicks off we're going to pull them out flip them over and let them go a whole another hour so two hours total uh after that it should be good and dry should be uh just check it out if it needs to go a little longer obviously go a little longer and that's at about an eighth of an inch on the slices if you go a little thicker obviously your drying time is going to take a little longer okay so while the mushrooms are drying what i like to do is actually make a decoction and so you know it takes two hours to dry the mushrooms in the oven well it takes two hours to uh to make a decoction so what i do is just slice up a few fresh mushrooms of the birch polypore uh put them in a pot and add some water obviously and let that simmer for roughly well two hours uh it's fantastic i mean it really it's it it really is a good tea it's a it's an acquired taste let me tell you that it's an acquired taste there's it's very bitter but uh your system gets used to it after a while uh your taste buds get used to it and it's it's almost as if your body craves it it's pretty interesting but definitely good stuff i mean it really is and when i say good stuff i'm not so much talking about the taste because it is very bitter what i'm talking about is the health benefits man how fantastic i mean right now bringing in all of those polysaccharides into my system good stuff man really good stuff and with the anti-viral end of things i mean good lord where we are in the planet right now it's crazy so uh you need good good stuff like this in your system and uh so i encourage you to give it a shot and it's a great way to kill the time while you're while you're drying the mushrooms okay if bitterness isn't your thing and you really want to you know trim that down or tone it down i should say uh you could add cleavers to this that would definitely change the flavoring of it as well as stinging metal that's another good one orange peels is great and you know with it being halloween and fall i don't know throw in a cinnamon stick or something like that definitely play around with it because uh you certainly can minimize that that bitter flavor okay now that the mushroom is dry and we've talked about the decoction slash tt's really what i call it um it's time to make the tincture now with birch polypore it's super easy to grind it's just like turkey tail which by the way if you haven't seen my turkey tail video where i actually grind it up and we turn it into a t-shirt click on the link right above it'll take you right to it but let me show you how we do this okay so this is super simplistic i mean really all you have to do is break it up into smaller pieces and what you're really trying to do at least this is what i try to do is get them as small as like a coffee bean because i am going to use a coffee grinder to grind this up once you get the right size it just stick them in there and grind away and it works out perfect now why grind i mean why grind the mushroom well the reality is you're trying to increase the surface area as much as possible more exposure to the surface area that's the key to the whole thing because at that point you can extract more of the goodness all of the all of the polysaccharides and the triter beans and all of that is in the cell wall of the mushroom and it's bound by that chitin once you grind it up and open up all those cell walls you are able to extract more of all that goodness and love and ingest it so it's it's fantastic now speaking of ingestion that didn't sound right anyway don't eat it you don't eat this mushroom i mean it's just not a mushroom that you're gonna eat uh can you eat it yeah you can but you might as well just go ahead and take a fiber pill because that's all you're doing you will not extract any of the medicinal value from the mushroom just by consuming it now if you put it into like a soup yeah at that point and you let it simmer for two hours uh you're gonna it's going to draw out all the goodness by doing it that way now i guess if you want to eat it go right ahead gobble that sucker up but uh you'll be on the express lane to the bathroom i mean remember there's really only two ways to get all of that goodness out that's through water-soluble compounds pulling those compounds out through a hot water extraction or a tincture which is an alcohol extraction where obviously we're pulling out those tri terpenes the hot water is going to be polysaccharides the alcohol is going to be drawn out the tri-terpenes that's really only way to get all this goodness into your system all right all we're trying to do is break it up into small little pieces you can see i've already got some here and it's really not hard at all this is also a reason why you wanted remember i was saying an eighth of an inch thick i wouldn't go any larger than that um if you do it that thin when you break it up um first off it's much easier to break but also once you get it into the coffee grinder uh you you don't run the risk of damaging the coffee grinder once you get it that thin so any of the larger pieces you know i'm not legalistic about it i mean i've got some heavier pieces than when i was cutting you know but i just set those off to the side you know we'll just focus on those thin pieces right now see how small they are now obviously i've got a mortar and pestle here you can just grind it this way too now it does take a little extra work but it does work just fine i mean it'll grind up if you don't have a coffee grinder this one this way works just as good but let's use a coffee grinder all right check it out you can see not too big small pieces let's go ahead and grind this sucker up there you have it don't want to get it too powdery look at that look at all that goodness yeah now when you grind it keep in mind uh you're actually getting a lot of mushrooms in here i mean obviously the more we feel it the more we're gonna have you're gonna have far more in here than you would if you did slices so definitely grind it because it's really going to increase the potency all right and just to show look that's my milk jug right well that ain't milk in there it's actually moonshine and the last time i did a video i had several comments on how it wasn't moonshine well that's his moonshine [Music] definitely is moonshine hope you can see that light up or not ow that's hot oh yes lit but you just can't see the flame okay so i had to actually turn out the lights so you could see the blue flame that's good stuff all right don't want to waste any so i'll go ahead and pour that in there let's just go ahead and probably get just a little bit over where it was as far as height just fill it up right up over the top of of all the mushroom that i've grinded up there and then swirl make sure it's all down in there good all right and that is it i mean we're gonna let that sit marinate for about six months let it fall in love let all that goodness come out of it and you're gonna shake this i would say every other day maybe every three days don't be legalistic about it just remember to shake it put it in a nice cool spot nice dark cool spot and let her go after six weeks strain it you got your tincture you got your alcohol extraction awesome now you don't have to use moonshine i mean i guess i'm kind of nostalgic about it i mean i just think it's super cool that back in the 1800s and early 1900s they were using tinctures as medicine back then and they were using it with moonshine with green alcohol so i mean it wasn't like they could go out to you know the liquor store or wherever and buy you know organic vodka now you can use that i don't have any problems with that i just i don't know there's something cool about doing it the old school way all right the birch polypore man fantastic medicinal mushroom so definitely if you get an opportunity go harvest some try it out make a tincture maybe make some tea i hope you enjoyed it hey thanks for spending your time with me please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already slap that like button i'll talk to you you

Channel: Wild Meat Let's Eat

Views: 4,647

Keywords: birch polypore, birch polypore tincture, birch polypore tea, decoction, tinctures, find, clean and make a birch polypore tea, birch polypore tea plus a tincture, make a mushroom a decoction, Birch polypore 2020, Birch polypore mushrooms, Birch polypore mushrooms 2020, Birch polypore tea 2020, Birch polypore tea 2020 recipe, Birch polypore tincture 2020, Birch polypore tincture, Medicinal Birch polypore, birch polypore benefits, wild meat let's eat, A Medicinal Mummy Mushroom 2020

Id: yAypGEZaIB0

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020