The Addictive World of Foraging Mushrooms

a couple of years ago i started learning about mushrooms in particular how to identify edible ones that i could take home and eat i wouldn't say mushrooms are my favorite food to eat but when i started going out and foraging for them i became addicted to the process of looking for mushrooms years of my life went by without even noticing these fruiting bodies that appear every autumn but when i started actually learning a bit more about them i couldn't stop seeing them they're literally everywhere they appear in pretty much every shape and color imaginable and my mind is often blown by the surreal formations that fungi produce [Music] i wanted to learn more so i got myself some books on mushroom identification but seeing as there's some 15 000 species of mushroom here in the uk as you can imagine it was quite hard to know where to start i realized there were a number of more common mushrooms that foragers look for and so that helped narrow things down i sort of tried to learn maybe five or so different species but but i tried to learn them quite well because mushroom id is something that you want to be 100 sure on and over the past couple of years of foraging i've managed to find a few different spots near where i live where i'm often quite confident of finding these particular species [Music] welcome to my new home i recently moved into this little flat and i absolutely love it here it's right next to the ashdown forest which means i can go for a walk pretty much every day yeah it's a pretty beautiful area i quite like to walk down the same path most days and now that i live here in the ashdown forest i come here pretty much every day after i finish work or early in the morning it might sound like that would get quite boring but actually i found it's a great way of seeing the smaller details in places and also experiencing the change of seasons the biggest change of course is when summer turns to autumn the deep dark greens turn to a beautiful orangey yellowy color and it might seem like most things are dying but actually something pretty cool is happening as well and that is the masses of mushrooms that start appearing i've just stumbled across a species of mushroom which is quite peculiar this is probably the most common mushroom i found this year and it's called the hedgehog mushroom and it's because instead of having gills on the underside of the cap it's got spines like a hedgehog but these you don't often find dead in the middle of the road you find them in the forest i was first shown these by a friend when i went camping up in scotland and there were so many of them and they they kind of grow in these big rings and often when you find one there's a lot more with it these are also the species of mushroom that i found in a recent video where myself and my brother carl had a foraging and cooking competition and i cook these up for the pro chef daniel clifford pretty cool find and like i say they've just been so many of them around where i live this one doesn't look too bad condition a bit younger they're funny-looking shape aren't they they're sort of not your standard round mushroom they're very irregular these particular hedgehog mushrooms are hanging around birch trees i have also found them up in scotland around pine trees and also down in the valley around beech trees so it seems like they are not too fussy learning about fungi and mushrooms has also led me onto becoming more interested in lots of other things as well such as the wildlife that i see if i see a bird or a deer i want to know what species it is and i've also realized the importance of learning about trees as well now that might sound a bit odd but actually fungi and plants such as all these trees behind me have a mutually beneficial relationship where the trees produce sugars through photosynthesis and give some of those sugars to the fungi and the fungi dig deeper into the ground pull up more nutrients and give some of those nutrients to the trees it's kind of mind-boggling to get your head around and none of that is actually like visible for the naked eye this means something quite interesting for a forager like me certain trees are associated with certain species of mushroom i found that oak trees beech trees and birch trees is where i found most of my edible mushrooms and it's because those fungi species have a symbiotic relationship with these species of tree so it helps a lot for a forager you can look for the big trees before you actually start looking at the ground [Music] when i first found these mushrooms i thought i was seeing things i never thought there was a mushroom of this color but yeah they were almost glowing on the forest floor a massive patch of maybe a 50-100 but i looked them up and they are called amethyst deceivers amethyst because of their color like the amethyst crystal and deceivers because they're part of the deceiver sort of family but yeah there's an abundance of them here in the forest and they're also edible i've found they don't really taste of much there's also not really much to them and not much flesh to them so you don't get much texture either but i put them in my food anyway because they've probably got some sort of health in them yeah they're incredible looking one of the most beautiful mushrooms to find i think amethyst deceivers and beech as well as the mycorrhizal fungi which help the plants and then the plants help them there's also parasitic fungi which are actually no good for the plants whatsoever they attack trees and in lots of cases actually kill them there was a tree that i found which had a nasty looking fungus on it and i've heard that eventually that tree will just die because the fungus will just suck all the strength and life out of it and then there's also sacrifice now saprophytic fungi i don't even know if i'm saying that right live off organic matter that's dying such as this stuff these leaves and twigs on the forest floor they help break that down and recycle the nutrients so there's a number of ways which fungi work and that is just kind of explained very basically i really struggle when it comes to more scientific stuff than that i read a book about fungi by a guy called merlin and he went into quite a bit of detail and my head was just kind of hurting whilst reading that fungi are crazy and really fascinating i'm so glad that i stepped into the world of mushroom foraging as it's opened my eyes to so many incredible things and a walk in the woods now is never boring there's always something to find there's always something to look for and i absolutely love that i also am really grateful for the fact that it's a skill which you can take pretty much anywhere and a few weeks ago i went on holiday to wales went on a little camping trip and even though i wasn't really planning on searching for mushrooms the whole time it ended up that way and i actually stumbled across a pretty sought-after species [Music] if you're like me and you're obsessed with looking for mushrooms you just can't help it and i've just been scanning the forest floor and especially through this beach wood uh there's often a lot of mushrooms around beech trees so i had a good look i found what i thought at first was just one of these mushrooms called pick one up pawn of plenty the horn kind of is because they're hollow and you can kind of blow through them they kind of look like a horn and the plenty is because normally you find them in plentiful masses so when i spotted the first one i thought i'm gonna have a little a closer look and i realized there were thousands of these mushrooms covering the forest floor i'm looking around me and they are everywhere it's ridiculous because these these are kind of black brownie mushrooms so they're not very easy to spot and these are actually prized by my top chefs anyway i'm pretty excited about that only ever found them once before in my life [Music] i've managed to also find some chanterelles and also hedgehog mushrooms so this exact same beach wood has turned out to be full of edible mushrooms that's pretty cool there's nowhere near as many of the golden orangey chanterelles as there are horn of plenty but still nice to find after a great day of walking and foraging i headed to a local campsite but on the way i found a pizzeria and thought maybe they could make me a pizza with my fresh mushrooms can i just have a margarita please my strange request was whether you could put some toppings on what would you like um would you be able to put these mushrooms on it oh those weren't shoes uh i'll have to check the chef hopefully we can get these mushrooms on my pizza they need to be like broken up a bit but okay don't worry about the dirt i don't mind no they're definitely edible so currently they're cooking up the margarita pizza that i ordered and they actually put my mushrooms on it so i'll be able to eat super fresh mushrooms that i picked up yeah that's so cool thank you have a good evening i am genuinely interested to see what it looks like let's have a look oh look at them they look amazing it's just kind of strange you never normally see black food but not bad eh mushrooms picked from the welsh mountains straight onto a pizza that's how we like it now i'm going to go to campsite raspberry slider [Music] one of the most common animals that i see are probably deer we get quite a lot of fallow deer and sometimes they hang around in massive groups as well so it's quite a nice sight seeing loads of them run through the forest when i'm out in the fields you often see the kestrel which has an incredible skill of hovering and you always know it's a kestrel because it's just hovering there on the spot and that is a pretty cool sight i love watching them if i'm out walking early in the morning or quite late in the evening i occasionally also see badges [Music] when people ask me what my favorite mushroom is i can't help but choose the penny bun it's the one on the cover of my favorite mushroom id book by the late roger phillips he inspired so many foragers including myself so i have to thank him for a hobby that has given me so many fun times [Music] anyway the penny bun was the first species of mushroom i ever found and each time i see one i will admit i do get a little over excited these are proper penny by mushrooms they're huge huge huge sorry i can't talk i'm so excited [Music] this year finding them has been really tough and over the past few months i've only found a handful these characterful looking mushrooms resemble a crusty bread roll and actually have pores instead of gills where they release their spores from unfortunately though lots of other animals like eating them too so finding an untouched one can be quite tricky it's been quite a tough morning i've only found two penny bun mushrooms i was hoping to find quite a few more than that there were a number of others which have been completely eaten away by other insects and bugs so i left them there but it's quite interesting because i've just left the deciduous forest of birch trees and beech trees and entered i'm now under a pine forest i've noticed thousands of another species of edible mushroom lining the forest floor and these are called winter chanterelles i first found them last year probably november december time as the name suggests they're normally found more into winter than autumn but these are earlier than last year and there's quite a lot of them they can very easily go unnoticed because they're quite a dark like sort of brownish color they blend into the bracken very well and all the dead leaves on the floor these two here are both winter chanterelle mushrooms but this one is younger and this one on the right is a lot older and you can see the cap is still kind of curled round on this one hasn't opened out yet and this one the older one has properly folded out and we'll be releasing lots of spores i guess but yeah it's interesting how the same mushroom at different stages can look very different after a day of foraging another challenge begins as i attempt to make some food which tastes good now i'm not a very good cook but i try my best and over the course of the mushroom season i've made a variety of meals [Music] just preparing my dinner today and it's pretty self-sufficient i'm going to make a creamy mushroom pasta sauce i've got garlic and shallots that i grew in the garden this year i've got mushrooms i obviously forage today and i've also got a pheasant breast which uh sadly the pheasant got hit on the road outside my house so i picked it up and butchered it and it's gonna be my dinner today let's get cooking [Music] well this is a meal that celebrates all the plentiful lovely produce that i am surrounded by apart from of course the italian pasta and parmesan cheese which is also from italy anyway cheers [Music] the dish that i was most proud of was this mushroom pie that i made and it actually looked and tasted quite good [Music] sometimes when there's an abundance of mushrooms you can actually preserve them i like to do this by drying them out in this cheap food dehydrator that i got the mushrooms are placed inside and left overnight or until they are completely dry they can then be put into jars and kept for a long time [Music] when they are to be used you can simply add hot water to rehydrate them i also like drying mushrooms in my house as it lets off an incredible mushroomy smell that fills the kitchen roasted partridge oh look how cute it is it's so small it's like a chicken but smaller and then over here i've got my mushroom bacon chorizo and cabbage and then here i've made a gravy [Music] looking back over the past two years i feel like i've learned an awful lot i literally knew nothing about mushrooms before but now i spend almost all my spare time especially at this time of year i spend that time outdoors looking for mushrooms and foraging food and it has given me a reason to come outside more get more exercise and it's also given me so much fresh nice food so i have to be thankful for for the trees that live with the fungi and fungi that live in the forests it's been a it's been a fun journey and i'm looking forward to plenty more of it in the future why did i come out for a walk today i need to go home [Music] this isn't fun i'm soaked [Music] you

Channel: Just Alex

Views: 22,229

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Id: XzErrb0d8DE

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 27 2022