Bear's Head - Hericium abietis (Sister species to Lion's Mane)

[Music] so today I am really excited we're going to go and look for one of probably the most beautiful looking fungus out there um it's a fungus that when you see you probably don't even realize that it's actually a mushroom um it is a tooth fungus it grows on trees and it is called the Lion's man or the Bear's head the one that we're going to be looking for today is most commonly referred to as the Bear's head it's the branched version of this tooth fungi and it grows regularly on Douglas first so we are in an area that has a lot of Douglas first so that's what we're hoping to find um it's said to be somewhat rare but if you find one you'll usually find a group of them so maybe we'll find more than one um but by far one of my most uh favorite to eat so that'll be kind of cool and there are no poisonous lookalikes to this one so that'll be nice this is a kind of a in a sense a no-brainer mushroom uh for you to try and find so let's get looking so as we're walking along through the woods you want to keep your eyes kind of up looking in the trees cuz that's where the are going to be growing but also keep your eyes scanning towards the ground as well I found quite a few of these on trees that have fallen and they're growing you know kind of almost parallel with the ground so scanning up and down up and down a little bit different than your traditional mushroom hunting when you're just staring straight at the ground so we got to keep an eye out all different places they are very bright white usually so hopefully you don't miss them TR [Music] there's a bunch there and there's some here yeah these are uh species of minina orange ones I forget what their technical name is beautiful orange my [Music] it [Music] the half buried chant tras it's like they're super excited for the rain to finally get here and these are white chantra if you're wondering why they aren't the typical kind of golden yellow color that they usually are just a slight variation on the species just as delicious awesome always good to fill your back basket with something so now let's uh get back to that search for our our Li's ve or our Bear's head you see there we've got a red belted conch uh you can see it's got kind of different layers on it the darkest layer that's furthest back closest to the tree that's the oldest layer then you've got the kind of reddish layer the reason it's called a red belted conch uh it's kind of the middle AG AG layer and then the white layer on the outside that's the actively growing layer the underside is all white as well because that is a the pore surface there that's where the spores are coming from the Spore bearing surface fun little mushrooms you'll see all over the [Music] place it's a little baby but it's [Music] okay look at this little guy okay so not even going to pick this one I'll clean off the pine needles though it's so so delicate looking you can see how it's got kind of these little spines on it I know it's so tiny normally they're a little bit larger than that but this is what the Bear's head looks like um kind of hard to describe that to somebody when you're trying to explain what this kind of crazy mushroom looks like but anyways at least were successful successful and finding one this got more they sounded really stupid really massively large CHS oh they're everywhere oh my gosh they're [Music] everywhere I'll love me some chantrell but we're trying to find Ms me man I got to pick just a few of them it's just got like the classic chantrell look the the vase and everything okay so we're going to explore this mushroom right here there's a chance that it might be a Matsui but it could also just be something else um matui season is kind of winding down so I'd be surprised but let's take a look H looks promising one thing about these is they're kind of a little fuzzy on the top compared to just a Rula get underneath all right so it's got some of a lot of the characteristics um it's got the gills it's got the veil it's got the fuzziness it's kind of got um fuzzy stem Stipe but the true test you know what the true test is it's the sniff test oh yeah for sure oh yeah you can you can smell it and you know what this one doesn't even look like oh it does have some worms in it bummer otherwise I would definitely take it home cook it up oh man once you smell the smell of a Matsu Taki you can't forget it it's so indistinguishable like if you're out and you mistake this mushroom for something else you did not do the sniff taste it's kind of like uh I don't know some people say cinnamon and dirty socks but uh my favorite that I've ever heard it smells like dirt spice dirt spice it's Old Spice for hippies yeah it's wonderful delicious smell and I was not expecting to find one of these today actually and it's pretty awesome and uh normally when you do find some if you dig around in the area you'll find some others as well but um doesn't look like anything else is pushing up at the moment but pretty cool little find there one holy cow and look at that huge chant trell but we're going to just ignore that right now because we got better going here oh yeah oh my goodness this is so beautiful this is such a great specimen look at this so fun oh man look at those little spins so tricky part sometimes is getting them off the tree but uh I feel that uh some photos must be taken first because these things are just so unique and so beautiful looking out here in the woods and I can never pass out the photo opportunity anyways so [Music] photogenic all right so here we go some of them can be pretty delicate so you do have to be careful which makes it difficult when they're really far up in a tree and you want to get one down but thankfully this one moves nicely on a log for us so let's see just kind of try and feel underneath where it might be attached do be careful I have cut myself trying to cut these down before so just get really close to the log you can hear that it's got a pretty thick little stem it's attached to one cool thing about these is they will return year after year in the same spot so this is a spot I will most definitely remember and come back to here go oo it's got some good weight to it I know it's been raining so it's probably kind of has some water in it here we are so one thing we will need to do is we'll need to check this log a little bit more just cuz sometimes they do seem to Cluster themselves that might be good ah there's a little baby over there we'll leave that one alone we'll let that one stay but uh Prov that you need to definitely take a look around uh when you find a prize all right so let's talk about this guy a little bit actually let me put my knife away so I don't cut myself here we are so uh called the Bear's head or the Lion's man um the one that is traditionally called the Lion's man is a little bit different looking as you can see this is the kind of the main stem of the mushroom kind of the core of it the one that um is more of a lion's main style as one main spot of connection and all the little spines just Branch off of that one spot where this one you can see there's multiple branches and multiple more branches off those branches and all these spines how do I look got a better beard than my husband does now almost just as gray though so um with these uh by far one of my most favorite mushrooms to eat and not really surprised me when you see something like this you wonder how can it have so much flavor especially when you see just how delicate it is um but I tell you people have said it kind of reminds them of crab it definitely reminds me of crab meat so think of like some of your favorite ways that you like to have crab and then cook this mushroom up to be something similar I did a lot of just dry sautéing you know this has a lot a lot of moisture in there and so you don't want to soak these and you want to just try and keep keep any of the additives that you're going to put um with the mushroom Until the End cuz you really just want it to sauté by itself let it release its water and then um add whatever you would like um I tell you I had some of this last week and uh probably at a size about this big just to myself and one sitting I don't suggest the first time you try a mushroom to eat that much at once cuz you never know how your stomach is going to handle it especially when it's a richer food especially if you're adding butter to it the only thing I did is I dry sauteed it and then I added a little butter just as you know was getting a little stuck to the bottom of the tan to keep it moving um and then it was all browned the whole entire thing was browned then I added a little more butter at the very end just to kind of give it a coating ate it just like that oh my gosh it's like I was just eating like crab dipped in bread butter it was so delicious and then towards the end I did just add a little bit of garlic to just a small portion of it to see what I thought wonderful just fantastic fantastic mushroom so not only is it something that you can enjoy just because it tastes so good a ton of research has been done on this mushroom uh for all its medicinal um benefits um one of the big things that's been researched for is to help people with dementia um you know just healing the body in that way and it's just crazy you just I tell you take the time to just look up this mushroom cuz it's it's beautiful it's tasty and it could be so beneficial and one thing that's really cool is people are actually able to cultivate these so people will get logs and inoculate them and have these growing so if this truly is um what it's looking like to be for the medicine community and for healing uh people with those kind of diseases then you know we could be growing our medicine on trees it would be pretty amazing I just wanted to make a point about um what I was saying about the research being done with this mushroom now the the genus of this mushroom is called the harium so I'm kind of talking about the whole herum species as a whole and not necessarily just the one that I found today the studies that they've been doing have been showing actual proof that the nerve growth factor is being stimulated in people who have mild cognitive impairments so the actual study in the research is showing results for this it's not just something that they think might be helping it is actually already being proven to be helping people with those kinds of issues and so if we've been seeing a little bit of results I can't even imagine the things that we'll be able to see um as they research this mushroom even more so here's my prize for the day I'm so excited to take this home I'll try not to eat the entire thing all by myself this time I'll try and share it [Music]

Channel: Yellow Elanor

Views: 237,758

Keywords: Mushrooms, Bears Head, Yellow Elanor, Hericium (Organism Classification), Hericium Abietis, Food (TV Genre), Lion's Mane, Mushroom

Id: 4GbMzgCCkBc

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2015