Mountain Mushroom Foraging- King Bolete!

[Music] hey guys it is crazy to talk about rainy weather and cool conditions when half the west is on fire but here in the colorado mountains we are having one of the most verdant summers i've ever remembered the last four years this is the greenest it's ever been it the grass is the tallest it's ever been we have more flowers than we've ever seen and so i'm going to take you into the woods and show you what's coming up as a result of all of this rain colorado the mountains of colorado are known for mushrooms in particular the king belique style porcini mushrooms and i've noticed after taking vigo for a walk that we've had a lot of these mushrooms popping up and they are safe to eat the other thing i want to point out to you guys got to show you this i'm going to get closer but right on the other side of our property fence here i don't know if you can see in the background all of these white all these white flower globes that's osha root and i've done some videos in the past about osha root i've talked about the health benefits of osha root and we have a literal field of osha actually we have three locations of osha right around our property and it's more than i've ever seen in the last four years since we've been here it's the most i've ever ever seen i'm standing next to osha ruth that is shoulder high to me okay look at this osha route well this is the route right this is the osha plant and the osha plant has uh what are these called flower brocks that flower bracks that are circular and they kind of remind you of queen anne's lace a little bit they are also very similar to poisonous hemlock but if you know your plants and you know where they grow osha grows at 9000 feet in elevation and it grows within aspen trees in aspen groves and when you pick off a piece of osha root and you smell it it smells like parsley so that's how you know it's osha root and it's not a poisonous hemlock so now is not the time to harvest osha root you're supposed to do is harvest the root in the fall the fall is when all the nutrients from the flowers and the leaves but once the plant dies and all the nutrients go into the root that's when you want to harvest the root so we're not doing any osha harvesting today we're just letting the plants grow come on vigo oh he wants to play with a toy come on let's go for walkies come on let's go you don't need to bring your toy okay maybe he wants to bring his toy it's a little tricky to find the mushrooms this time of year because there's so much grass we've had so much rain everything is overgrown that it's actually been really tricky to find mushrooms where i saw them was along the side of the path so i'm gonna get those first because after last night's rain i'm sure we have even more all right i found one of the locations of our mushrooms so here is the this king bleak mushroom i just had to pull off some of the uh some of the some of the uh the dirt here was just kind of busting out this is one of the biggest mushrooms i've ever seen for the king blake you can see where it gets its name but it is a porcini the porcini family it's edible and i mean i just pulled it right from the ground here i mean it is huge it is huge so gosh that's a lucky find guys i think this mushroom was twice as big as it was yesterday when i saw it it was half buried under the ground but um wow that's a real score i think it's gonna be almost too big for my bucket it is okay well i did see another one let me go let's go see if we can find the other ones oh here it is it was right next door okay yeah it's definitely bigger all of that rain that we got last night i think these mushrooms doubled in size so i saw the coloring and i saw that it was kind of pushing its way out of the ground oh i got rose bushes here this is got to be careful with your hands but look at how it's just busting right out of the ground and i mean if you're if you're walking you don't really necessarily notice it unless you know what you're looking for the coloring is what you're looking for and well let's kind of get this get this ground out of the way i might be able to just rock this one out another beauty so you can see king baleek mushroom it is quite a hefty mushroom definitely it's good to get them when they're fresh like this before the cups the caps start to turn upward that means they're drying out they probably are infested with some bugs and larvae and stuff so this is definitely a fresh one would be good to cook it up tonight instead of leaving it so wow another good score i cannot believe it i mean how amazing is i just found a mushroom the size of my head an edible mushroom i think the mushroom season this year is going to be crazy because of all this rain we've had so two nice sized king beliks it kind of makes me feel motivated just to look around a little bit more since i'm in the area where i just found two about about 10 feet apart so let's see what else i can find well i'm definitely in the right location because here's another one now this one's just a baby this one's just coming up whoops so here's a rock and then there's one coming up right here so this is a really good patch it looks like for the mushrooms but this one's too small to harvest so we'll give that one a few days but uh yeah i think we'll just look around here just a little bit more all right i found the spot and there's two mushrooms one's the kind you eat and one's the kind you don't so on the side of the trail here i believe this one is a muscaria it's not as red but it's got that white mottled look and that's not the kind that you want to eat but right next door is one of the king blitz the coloring is the brownish the reddish brown it's definitely a brown color it's a golden almost looks like bread so that's what it makes me think of a loaf of bread that's the coloring of the king bullet mushroom and we'll leave this one be this is the pretty sure that's a musk area even though it's not quite red yet but amanita or whatever you want to call it so that's the kind you do not eat well they go i think we picked all our mushrooms for today the first time i ever discovered a king belt mushroom was in telluride i was on vacation uh and my friend pointed them out to me and so i found a gigantic king bullet mushroom and that was in august i think it was like maybe the second week of august but given the conditions of all the moisture we've had they're just springing out of the ground right now a month early so you know that's been good news for us and if we really love them that's a good eats right there so we'll see what kind of what kind of recipe i can come up with tonight to make use of some of these mushrooms we go he forged something too he's got a souvenir okay gonna try to cook up these mushrooms this is crazy so there's anyhow they're huge so i don't know if i'm going to cook them all but i feel like i should just to get them get them cooked so i got to clean off some of this and there's definitely a difference between the smaller ones i've got two smaller ones and then the larger one so look at the the inside of the caps they're pretty white and creamy and then the larger one is a lot more yellow on the inside oops well i just separated it so the mushroom cap on this one gigantic and then so you can see how the inside of this uh the porous side is yellowy so i'm gonna take all that off and i'm not gonna cook that part now they say there's definitely a risk for fungal maggots because it's summertime and they're better to pick in the fall when you have those frosts and they don't get in there but i don't see anything crawling around yet but as i as i clean it out we'll see if i see anything moving i'll probably gonna skip eating it i'm definitely doing a close inspection to see if i can see any kind of larva because you know any kind of food you get out in the woods who knows what's in it okay so i did find the larva in this mushroom this is the large mushroom it kind of looked like it because it looks like there are little pinholes in the stem and then after cutting i see some crawling out so i'm gonna skip this one but completely different looking look at the difference in the stem on the smaller one it's totally solid there's no pin holes in it so i'm willing to cook this one up this one although some people might like the protein i'm gonna pass so the question is can you be confident that there's no larva in these other two mushrooms so there is the tiniest of holes i see like the tiniest little tiny larva on here so i don't know i think i want to stick with the caps just themselves they don't have any holes in them so i'm going to fry up the caps in this one section of stem that doesn't have any kind of pinholes in it but the the tiny little pinholes that you do see are pretty much tunnels from the larva so i'm gonna just chuck these pieces back in the woods i'm just not feeling that brave anyhow a little bit i'll fry up all this stuff with some butter just to get the flavor of it put a good amount of butter in the pan [Music] a little pepper salt okay let's have our first bite yummy oh my gosh and they're so silky like not rubbery not a rubbery mushroom yum definitely going to look for more of these when it's not hot summer buggy season we're trying to find the young ones these are delicious so i'm going to take out a small portion so brian can taste them fresh but then i'm going to turn the rest of it into a mushroom gravy sauce the best way to deglaze a pan with mushrooms is with red wine so that's what it tastes good a little bit of chicken broth and then a little bit of this beef flavored bouillon get that beefy flavor because beef and mushrooms that's perfect okay all right how does that look mushroom gravy nothing better than mushroom gravy on a baked potato [Music] you

Channel: Colorado Mountain Living

Views: 33,293

Keywords: mushrooming, mountains, king bolete, mushroom harvest, mushroom, porcini, king bolete mushroom, king bolete mushroom identification, king bolete identification, king boletes, king bolete vs porcini, king bolete edible, king bolete colorado, rocky mountain, rocky mountain mushrooms, osha root, osha identification

Id: oOKxwigQklo

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021