Find Those Morel Mushrooms!

we're on the hunt for morels and depending on where you live the strategy for hunting them can be different you might live in a bioregion where morels are so plentiful and abundant that you can basically like trip over them as you walk through the woods here's looking at you minnesota who's state mushroom is a morel well we're not in minnesota we're in washington and here hunting morels is a little more like putting together a thousand piece complicated puzzle where there's a few pieces missing but no matter the bio region the hunt for the morel is always thrilling and exciting especially if you find some so that's what we're gonna do today we're gonna find some morels morels are in the genus morcella and there are over a dozen species of mortalla here in the pacific northwest and there's a little overwhelming as a beginner and you can't even tell them all apart because some of them you need genetic studies done to tell who was who um but it is important to understand and name your morales because if you can name them then you can figure out the best way to find them in the environments they are in because they're all individual species so they each like different types of environments i'm really only going to key in on a few species today the ones that are most common and a little easier to identify to hopefully help you have success as your hunting morels in the pacific northwest i know learning the scientific name of mushrooms feels a little cumbersome and i'm not trying to complicate things right now but let me just explain when you are learning some of the names of different morels different motela you're going to find conflicting information in your literature and your online resources resources because little mushroom drama here for you there are a couple of people who are doing research on mochella at the same time trying to describe new species they were doing this research separately as the research was published it turns out you know they had researched some of the same mortelas each giving them different names and so there's going to be some of these mushrooms i'm gonna have two names up for them and that is the reason why i'm trying to give you that information so if you have a book that has one name and online it's a different name that's a little bit of the reason why right now morels are a master of camouflage because of their honeycomb pitted shape which you will see soon they blend in really well with the leaf litter spotted sunlight and things like that i often will go very slow i'll squat down i'll look around sometimes they can even be covered in the leaf litter as well depending on which species it is so we look carefully i do tend to like to look out not directly down when i'm looking for mushrooms morels as well kind of that scanning scanning and slow then you might still step on them it happens it seems like with morels you almost have to have your eye calibrated too i've heard people talk about how they will like look at photos of morels before going out morel hunting especially early in the season if you haven't seen any yet but once your eye finally sees one for the first time it's like this calibration happens and this you zone in to what you're looking for and you're able to spot them easier but it is it's like a training almost like you have to train your your mind and your eyes to spot these i don't know sometimes you just see a spot through the trees and i really need to go look at it and this zone just feels good so i'm gonna go look [Music] so [Music] so we still haven't spotted any and i know it's been like zero time in film time but in real life time it's been a long time so now it's a competition who's gonna spot the first one rachel or zach vote now i'm just kidding but we'll let you know who wins i win i win i win how long ago did you say that i win how long ago did you make that announcement for the competition the competition was like 60 seconds ago do you see it let's see if you can spot it oh i see two more oh yeah yeah you should stay there but here i will show you i don't think there's any in front of you come on over let me switch sides real quick it's not the species i wanted to find but it's totally fine oh yeah look at that oh there's one right here two what ah i was basically standing on top of some sorry for all the screaming everybody it's so exciting hey there's this one and this one kind of squatties this is the one i saw first it's kind of funny yay okay so i'm going to harvest these um just so you know i am harvesting the whole mushroom because i want to be able to compare the different types of morels that we might find today and i wanted to compare all of them instead of just like the cut off versions of them all right so but when you are harvesting your meals you can cut you can pluck you can do whatever you like oh yeah these ones are pretty buried the lighting's better though yeah i'm gonna pull them up this one looks like it was almost like squooshed yo cute all right this is more chella tridentina or mortella frustrata also known as the mountain blonde you can tell it is blonde so something you might hear there are yellow morels or blonde murals and black morels and those are two kind of just generic ways you can categorize what morels look like i am have my heart set on finding more chalice snyder eye because i really want to be able to compare it to some of these um other species so i'm not going to get into the full detail of how to id a mushroom yet we're going to find some more first and i got to harvest all these that we just found when i do if i do harvest like this i do like to take the butts and either put them back in the hole or bury them or basically hide the evidence and keep things clean get the camera on dude these are awesome look at these over here look at those they're gorgeous so beautiful oh yeah look at these this is so great a little bit of mold on it but it's still good it's so good we have some more morechella tridentina or frustrata the mountain blonde and because these ones are larger i'm going to go through the anatomy of a morel with you real quick all right so this morel you can see morels have honeycomb type caps there are two portions of the cap we would say pits and ridges so pits obviously pits in here and then ridges would be these top parts here just like the ridge on a hill or mountain then you're going to have this stem and i'm going to actually cut this chunk of dirt off there we go the stem the stems are usually in most morels going to be kind of a creamy kind of color in this case this is a mountain blonde we already said that but you're going to learn something very interesting about this mushroom when we compare it to another sun so this portion right here where the cap fuses with the stem this little indent right here this lip is often called the sinus or the rim now not all morels will have that some morels where the cap fuses with the stem and more of a just straight line if that makes sense and next we are gonna cut this mushroom open there we go nice and hollow oh look a little ant the ants love that they do really like these hollow on the inside so even though you did saw see even even though here towards the base of the stem it is there's a lot of folds of tissue the whole thing is still hollow on the inside you can see that very nice and hollow that's the basic anatomy of a morel it's actually pretty straightforward they have this fusion of the cap and stem at the very bottom of the cap portion they are hollow on the inside they have this honeycomb pit in ridge formation on the top of the cap there we are [Music] can you imagine how many mushrooms just go unseen i had a class once where it was like the sixth person in line it was a narrow trail the sixth person in line was like oh there's one that was stepped on oh spider web well julie now oh you do where what whoa jeez good eye oh my goodness it looks like it may have been like squashed under like almost growing up look at it how weird i get my knife oh it just kind of popped out oh my goodness that's a funky one look at that oh my gosh it'll clean up nice [Music] oh oh little buggy never mind ooh yeah when the morel starts to feel kind of crumbly like this bugs got it first you can stay here mushroom [Music] [Music] i think we just found a mochella brunier so let's go take a look we got one here [Music] little small they're both pretty small then underneath this fern look at those guys all right so i'm going to take a closer look at them i'm going to dig them out just with my finger kind of pop them out wink with sound effects of course so this is one of those natural black morales mochella brunier if you can see um closely on the stem it looks a little bit pimply and bumpy that's something that's classic of brunier also you can see that the stem is pretty symmetrical this one kind of enlarges at the base but not really much uh very symmetrical and as with other black morels we'll turn them upside down and you see that it kind of has a little bit of a ridge or a sinus as it's called which is just like a little lip and if you can see the formation of the pits and ridges you can see kind of those parallel type formations so these are typically found in a little more mountain environments but they can be found in lower elevations as well they are in mixed forest situations but they do associate with hardwood trees so leafy trees so those kinds of things they're going to be found in environments that have that which we do have a nice mix of both conifer and hardwoods right here where we are at all right we'll add this to our collection see if we can find anything else oh my gosh it's so beautiful a gyrometre escalenta gyro well you can say gyrometra or you can say gyrometra gyrometra esculenta try and remove it carefully oh look at that hey there we go that's a nice display [Laughter] so gyrometre esculenta this can be categorized as a false morel there are a lot of mushrooms that could be considered false morales but this is one of them i mean with you just looking at this and seeing the other visuals that we've shown you of morel so far today you can see they don't actually look a whole ton of like but people can get really excited and not think through things very well and this is one that you don't want to eat but we will talk about that more a little bit later cool glad we found one we adjusted location slightly because i wanted to be in a slightly different environment i'm looking specifically for marcellus snyder eye is my favorite mural and i want to go over to a specific tree let's see if it's there oh no oh no someone been here but at least i know that the spot still produces every year oh that sucks oh yep here's another cut okay well did they miss any did they miss any dang it [Music] i mean they're so hard to see i'm sure we walk past so many they're so hard to see you see them look at those beautiful bbs oh hello hello oh wow do you see all the pollen on these guys watch how the snyder are so beautiful and even just feeling like the weight of them in my hand and the texture they feel so different it's like a fairy ring of morales oh my gosh this is so cool oh there's more oh my goodness come look i've never seen like it looks like a almost like a ring of my house cozy i'm careful i mean who knows who my stuff also oh my baby just more all over okay let's harvest some of these [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] okay ready so with morels you may hear the terms blonde or yellow and then black morels as well and there are ways that you can tell if yours is a blonde or if yours is a black and you're thinking well doesn't color just make the difference well let me flush it out for you if something is going to be in the yellow or blonde morel family we call it part of the esculenta clade played as in family and then if it's going to be on the black morel family it's considered the elata clade so what makes a black morel a black morel sometimes a black mural when it's really young can look actually quite light colored but what makes it a black morel we're going to give two examples right here so we mentioned earlier ridges and pits so if you look at the ridge of a black morel the ridges are going to be dark colored the ridges in a blonde or yellow morel are going to be light colored another difference is you look below and the black morels are going to have this space here that i mentioned earlier the sinus or the rim so these are part of the elata clade the black morels and i briefly mentioned when we picked the brunier earlier is there's almost a symmetrical way that these pits and ridges are formed where they kind of form these lines they're symmetrical and almost how they go up and down that's also a characteristic of black morels now i'm going to toss a picture up here sorry this is your kind of your classic yellow morel this is a mochella americana if you look closely at this picture you're going to see that the ridges are light colored even though inside the pits it's kind of like a darker brown color the the ridges are still light yellow and if you were to look at the underside of this mushroom it wouldn't have that that sinus or that rim underneath it so this is part of the esculenta clade so we have three types of morels here we have um our morcella brunier we have our marcellus snyder eye we have our moichella tridentina or i always forget fresh strata because it's frustrating it's more chella frestrata oh my word okay so let me tell you a little bit about mortello frustrata okay let's look at it right now look at it um do you notice anything about this morale that's kind of interesting um maybe the fact that it has those same lines and like symmetry with the pits and the ridges like these black morels do maybe that it also has a sinus and a rim like the black morels do what's going on here guess what technically this is genetically and morphologically a black morale so that's the name frustrata and also you can call it ortela tried and tina so again i'm going to toss up this picture of that yellow morel the mochella americana you see the pits they're not like uniform up and down they're just very kind of sporadic and they're open wider they're just very different convoluted that's a great way to put it so even though we did find three different species and morels here they're all part of the elata clade let's talk a little bit more about what makes a snyder eye a snyder eye come and look you can tell they're a little bit beefier and if you look at the base there's a lot of tissue at the base that kind of folds and wrinkles that is very classic of a snyder eye also they tend to grow in groups and clusters other morels don't do that as frequently also the environment so the environment we found them in is very heavily true fur and douglas fir they love that kind of environment they also love more mountain environments so as i said there are different morale species and getting to know what their actual names are so you can tell them apart is going to help you figure out when and where to find them in general when you are looking for morels in the spring you know the snow is melting the spring is coming on and you're going to want to start looking in areas where the daytime temperatures are hitting 60 degrees and the nighttime temperatures are still above freezing maybe you know almost 40 degrees above freezing not quite freezing about two weeks of that pattern and you can start thinking that morels may be coming if you want to get really fancy you can get a soil temperature thermometer and usually when the soil temperature is around 50 degrees is when it's warmed up enough for the morels to start coming up in your search for morels look for slopes that have prolonged sunshine so usually south facing in my area gets a lot of sunshine those areas are going to start producing morels earlier on and also just have more abundance of morels another area to look we haven't even talked about burn morale so after an intense wildfire or a prescribed burn or even a recently logged area the season afterwards generally produces a whole different variety of morels there are a lot of types of burn morels or morels that come up after a disturbance so those areas are great to check as well essentially you want to follow the spring right so the lower elevations in the valley they're going to start producing morels first and then the areas that are maybe logged are going to start producing next because they have a lot of sun exposure and then you can start making your way up the mountains into areas like this where you're going to have maybe the taller older grand firs and douglas furs and you're going to be finding the mountain morels like we found today those are all things you just kind of follow the spring up so i'm going to just list a few of the most common rails that we have in kind of their season and how they go and where you can look for them environmentally one of the first morels to show up in this season is mochella importuna or elata this morale is considered a landscape morale so you're going to want to look for it in mulchy areas bark chips areas that were recently landscaped you're going to find this in urban environments you're going to also find them in areas that are a little lower in elevation so think um in the valley you know the willamette valley type area or really anywhere where you recently threw out wood chips it could be that so they're going to be one of the first ones to show up for the season closely following that is going to be morechela populophyla i think i said that right this is the western half free morel and so you hear that name hafree morel it does actually mean that part of the cap is half free it doesn't fuse right at the base to the stem like the other morels do it kind of fuses about halfway up those you're going to want to look for in maybe sandy soil areas along riverbanks they really love black cottonwood and um i think almost like riparian areas those are going to be coming out next and then we're going to have morechella americana or esculentoides is another name for it this is that yellow morel that i referenced earlier this is also going to be along riverbeds in sandier soils riparian areas and maybe mixed in with cottonwood if you live in the eastern part of the united states you also have this type of morale but you're going to find it around dead and dying elm and also variations of ash so look around those trees after that is when you can start to find the mortela brunier and you can find those in lower elevations but you're going to start seeing them more up as you get into the hills and to the mountains and then followed that with the other ones that we found today the snyder eye and the tridentina and so really as you follow the spring and you go up to the mountains morale season can start you know early spring down in the valley and just an hour drive away you can find morels two or three months later because the spring hits there so much later so really if you know the variety of morales are you can extend your morel season and even up your chances of success as you see what kind of environments they associate with and i do just want to mention a few things that could potentially look like morale so right here we have verpa bohemika and it can be found in a lot of areas along riverbanks and cottonwoods and riparian areas so where you're finding the morels that fit that environment you may find these as well when you slice these verpa open you're going to notice that they have kind of a cottony pith in the middle of the stem you're going to also notice that their cap is completely free it only attaches at the very top almost like a bell so you're able to easily pluck that cap off whereas if you see with these murals the cap's not going to come off it's all fused it's all one piece there we are and then if you look at this picture here there are three mushrooms here we have more cello snyder eye we and then we have two gyrometre species gyrometra esculente and then also gyrometre montana here's the thing which of these morels contains or which of these mushrooms contain toxins all of them they all do yes morels contain toxins whoa and it's so funny because we get so worried about some of these other mushrooms and freaking out about toxins that they might have well morels have toxins too the thing is it is heat libel toxin so when it's heated up or when it's dehydrated very slowly these toxins are removed so you want to cook your morels well i was talking about that verpa earlier and a lot of people will say stay away from the verpa they're toxic well they have the same kind of compounds that the morels do so if you cook them well they're actually going to be okay to eat now when it comes to those gyrometre species we'll throw that picture up again those gyrometres one of them contains a compound called gyrometrin in gyrometrin when it is ingested it hydrolyzes into monomethylhydrazine mmh for short which is also a derivative in rocket fuel you don't want to be eating that again there are ways to try and remove this toxin but from what the research shows parboiling it or dehydrating it really only removes about 50 percent of the toxin so just don't eat it so that's the more um sorry that's the gyrometra escudenta the dark colored one since i didn't clarify that the dark colored one that one contains gyrotron now even though gyrometro montana the light oranger colored one still is in the family gyrometra it doesn't contain the same amounts of gyrometrin as the others do and i think it's still a question whether or not it does at all those are actually edible mushrooms but you again do have to cook them well i don't prefer them i think they taste kind of strangely bitter so i don't enjoy them but other people i know do enjoy them and think they're delicious um but just let this be a lesson in how there are a lot of foods and there are even mushrooms where there are certain preparations makes them perfectly delicious and edible and it's not something we talk a lot about with the morel because most people are familiar with the morel they love it people just naturally cook it before they eat it so it's not really talked about but it is one of those things you have to have caution with so the other question though is i have heard reports and friends with personal experience who have consumed morels and had bad experiences sometimes it's coupled with consumption of alcohol sometimes it's trying a new species of morel sometimes they are eating morels you know their whole life and all of a sudden one time have a bad experience and the reason i just want to express this is because it's true of almost any food sometimes you may develop an allergy to it but for some reason with the morels there tends to be sometimes an allergic reaction that can happen over time with it i think the undercooking of morels also leads to some adverse effects in people that whoops by accident that's what happened this time when they ate them but also maybe it's a difference between eating something in the blonde morale category then eating something in the black morale category and having a different effect on your body no matter what the mushroom or the food if it's something new to you you need to consume it consume it in small amounts at first but if you come across a mother lode it's going to be really easy to want to eat a ton of deep fried morels at night it just makes sense but it's not going to do you very well if by some chance that you have an allergy to it or your tummy just doesn't digest it well also you consuming that much like butter is probably not a good idea so just be cautious and i don't want to make people afraid of morels people have been eating them for years there's one of the most popular mushrooms in the world for consumption with good reason but as an educator i want to give you that information so that if something happens you understand that you know what this is something that happens with morel sometimes so just use caution maybe try and avoid alcohol with them i don't know if there's any science that really proves a correlation between consumption of alcohol and morels but there have been enough personal reports that it seems like there could be something there there you go that's your lesson in being careful while you eat morels so morales how do you take care of them you kind of saw me cleaning them today super easy to clean but if you're going to take them home and you're going to preserve some of them dehydration is the way to go these puppies save so well dehydrated dehydrate them and then you can rehydrate them later and then you can use the water and it's now a wonderful mushroom stock as an ingredient as well as the rehydrated morels and sometimes it even intensifies the flavor of the morel after it's been rehydrated so you can use them that way and there are so many wonderful ways to prepare morels just do a little search online and you're going to find tons of options i would say if it's your first time eating it keep it simple you know do a dry saute add a little butter and salt see what you think and then from there get creative add things do some stuffed morels because they're hollow inside and you can do fun things with them so get creative cook up your morels save some morels just the first time you're eating them don't over consume please thank you for coming along with me on this journey to find morels today i hope the video gives you a little bit of clarity of why sometimes it's hard to find morels or sometimes it seems like well they grow in every single environment because they kind of do just a species dependent maybe it brings a little clarity on too on the seasons and how you have to search for them especially if you live here in the pacific northwest have been hunting them for years with no success if you're wondering a little bit more maybe about the morel or even the spring porcini that i did find here i do have other videos that talk about those mushrooms a little bit more so perhaps take a look at one of those the one with the kids is especially great at identifying trees associated with the spring portini and the snyder eye i think that's it subscribe like put the bell on and we'll see you next time

Channel: Yellow Elanor

Views: 134,137

Keywords: Mushroom, Foraging, Fungi, Yellow, Elanor, Identification, Vlog, Pacific, Northwest

Id: 4tYY7Hs07fA

Length: 35min 15sec (2115 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021