The Mushroom That Tastes JUST Like Crab | Lion's Mane Foraging

foreign [Music] what's up guys welcome back to another episode of Gleason life I'm Alex glease and today we're doing a little bit of fall mushroom foraging in the woods in North Carolina but we're hoping to find lion's mane or Mitaki or anything of that sort that are fall mushrooms some of them are super hard to find at least accessibly can be difficult with lion's mane but yeah hopefully you guys enjoy tagging along and hopefully we find something tasty to eat and we can cook it up later alright so I think that we found our first mushroom so here we have two little beautiful lion's mane mushrooms parisium arenasius I believe is how you pronounce the scientific name so we're going to go ahead and collect these so these grow on decaying wood and we can just collect it by cutting it off of the wood this one's going to need a good clean up and then there's a second one in here these are both going to be really dirty they're gonna need a good cleanup so you can see that these mushrooms have this tooth-like structure on them so that's why they get their name lion's mane because it almost looks like a lion's mane they are white and they kind of have this almost spongy like texture to them sometimes you can find them and they're really saturated with water and then you just give them a good squeeze when you get home they should still be good the main thing you want to avoid with these is when they get too yellow so this one's starting to Yellow a little bit the issue is when they get too old and yellow they start to get bitter so they really don't taste as great but even if they're too old you can dehydrate them and use them for other purposes so this is a pretty good find so hopefully this is a good sign that we'll find more of these out here you can really tell that it's fall once the acorns start dropping and this is a really great sign for us too because we're actually looking for oak trees and the reason we're looking for oak trees is because grifolo frondoza maitaki or Hen of the Woods they all grow at the base of really I guess maybe not old oak trees but commonly old oak trees and also decaying oak trees I know that anybody who's watching living out on the west coast unfortunately you guys don't get my Taki so hopefully we can find one and you guys can live vicariously through me here we've got another mushroom this big old mushroom is really old but it is a Berkeley's polypore the scientific name on this one is pretty hard to pronounce so I'm not going to attempt that I'll pop it on screen right here for you guys so this is a pretty cool mushroom it's actually edible it gets mistaken a lot for chicken of the woods especially with beginners especially at this stage you can see that it's starting to Yellow a bit it doesn't look like this this yellow when it's yellow so if you're new to foraging just make sure that you double check before you start grabbing something and consuming it because sometimes things do look a little bit alike but you can see that this in fact has a poor surface this one's a bit spored out that's what they do when they get old and mushrooms start to try and reproduce so this one's a little bit too old for consumption but still pretty cool fine nonetheless and I'm coming up on a spot that has had lion's mane in the past so given that the other spot had some hopefully this log will have some too fortunately I'm not seeing any but I might have to come back in a few days to check just to make sure that I don't miss them that's unfortunate but oh well that's how it goes with mushroom foraging so on to the next one now when I'm looking for lion's mane this is the kind of thing I'm looking for you can see this old decayed tree and you want to check in all these little holes and crevices along the tree because they can be growing in there on that Underside just like you saw with that other one that I found so I'll be checking up under all these spots along this log and I know this one has had them in the past but it doesn't have them right now now what the lion's mane which is in the herisium genus there are a couple of other mushrooms namely the uh the bear's tooth head and the oh man I forget the common name of the other one it's the coral herysium and all of the harissium mushrooms are edible so they're very very easy to identify which makes it a super great mushroom for beginners so if you're new to foraging get out and look for it because it's almost impossible to mistake it for anything else just because the way it grows on the tree and it has that shaggy look to it it's really a very easy mushroom to forage except that it is hard to get to sometimes sometimes you'll have to look up in the trees and sometimes you're going to be really disappointed that you won't be able to reach that beautiful mushroom that you found now the reason that you look for lion's mane on dying trees or decaying wood is because they're saprotrophic I believe how that's pronounced I'll leave that on screen for you guys as well but basically what that means is that they feed off of decaying matter so they have to be growing off of some sort of decaying organic matter and in the case of the lion's mane mushroom that would be wood from a dying tree so you're never really gonna find lion's mane growing off the ground unless it's like a really weird situation so that's another little confidence boost if you want to go out and try and find it for yourself oh here are some really really young ones here right here I am going to have to leave these and come back for them because this is not big enough to harvest you can see the teeth on these are not really grown out yet which is I mean if this was bigger I would grab it but that means it still has a lot of growing to do think this may also be one that's coming up and that right there might be one so this is a really nice log and I almost didn't even see this one this is why I'm telling you guys you got to check under the ledges on the dead logs because they'll be hiding out just like this so unfortunately we didn't find any maitaki today I think they're just not ready to come up yet but we did get those two lines Mains it's not quite enough to make a meal out of so I think what we're gonna do is come back in a few days to get those other ones and then we'll have enough to actually cook something fun with it all right we're back to check on the Lions Mains today and boy was it worth it to wait and come back and check look at how big they have gotten this one is like the size of my hand almost and these two as well and then look at all these little baby ones and then check out over here too [Music] that one we couldn't see the other day look how big it's got and there's more here another one here and then look at this there's like seven more little ones that have come up in a time that we've been gone so we're gonna grab the biggest of the bunch here and then we're gonna leave the rest of them come back another day for those but I think we definitely have enough to cook something up now you think so yeah let's grab those big ones and then we're gonna head home kind of as close to the tree as you can without actually pulling any of the wood off because that's just going to make it harder to clean them perfect and it's literally perfect it's just gonna be a little harder to get [Music] oh wow so a lot of that on this one this one's huge Choice get some of it off now um yeah clean up what you can now it's like a lot of that will come off with a brush there's stuff growing under here too yep there's lots of them oh lots of leaves yeah so I would just cut off that part that's like ah maybe you don't have to cut it off I think it can be kind of salvaged all that good for now [Music] crab cakes for dinner tonight I had a viewer comment that they didn't know that they made foraging tools so for those of you that don't know that haven't seen it in my other videos this knife is really great because it has this sickle blade which makes it really easy to cut mushrooms with using your thumb and then the bottom here has a brush which is really great for cleaning your mushrooms on the field which makes your life much easier when you get home and you know once you start putting dirty mushrooms in with clean mushrooms then your clean mushrooms get dirty again and some mushrooms like Bowl leads that have pores and mushrooms that have gills you don't want dirt all up in those so it's better to just get it off and leave it in the wood so let's go ahead and grab the last one here this one's probably going to be pretty dirty because it's underneath of this piece of bark so I'm just going to remove that try to be pretty gentle with it but this one's probably going to come with a lot of dirt you know yeah see this one's Pretty Dirty we're gonna need to do a bit of cleaning on this one at home but I'll take the biggest pieces out here in the woods check that out some beautiful lines Mane I'm surprised it must have gotten rain or something maybe because they feel pretty they're pretty wet yeah that's what I was saying yeah it's like a cauliflower no it's not called father no it just looks like a vegetable cauliflower yeah at this stage it does before it actually has like the the hairs this is how you want them though why just because this is when they're going to be the most tender and have the best flavor the best texture once they get a little bit older like the ones we found a few days ago those can start to get a little bit bitter like once they start to go yellow it's okay if they start to dry out a little bit because you can rehydrate them that's not the biggest issue but once they start to go yellow they get a little bit tough and bitter not that great but you can use them for other stuff too dehydrate them use them as a powder whatever you want so they could still be salvageable but if you're going to cook with them just fresh you want them to look like this all right guys we are back in the kitchen it's been a few days things got a little crazy around here so we haven't had time to mess with these yet but fortunately they keep really well in the fridge if you just throw them in a bag with some paper towels they can keep for quite a while so I already trimmed a lot of it off but we're gonna need to wash these as well which is not something that I typically recommend with mushrooms to each their own but typically I don't wash mine but these are so dirty that we're gonna need to but I want to go ahead and break this open for you guys to show you what it actually looks on the inside so if you come over here I can give you guys a closer look so you can see it's still a little bit dirty but if I break it open you guys are going to get to see the texture of this mushroom [Music] so you guys can see that it's very sponge-like almost some people would say it's even Seafood like or crab like and that's actually what we're going to be doing today is making a um [Music] we're going to be washing them so that's okay but what we're going to be making is a Chinese style crab dish but we're going to be replacing the crab with the lion's mane and what this dish is it's a ginger scallion stir-fry dish and yeah we're just going to use the mushrooms instead of crabs so let's first clean up the mushrooms and then we can start cooking so you can see that it's still pretty dirty even though I cleaned it off with a brush and trimmed off like a large portion of this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn the water on and I'm just gonna kind of scrub at it and you can see some of this stuff is not coming off so I'm gonna have to cut at it again but at least get the worst of it off and with lines mean it's pretty okay um just because you can actually squeeze them out so now that it's all wet lines mean it's like kind of like a sponge so we can just squeeze all that out so with these it's okay with other mushrooms I I would say skip the water but yeah so I'm just going to clean up the rest of them and then get to the next step in dirt tonight all right so now that I've got everything cleaned up and trimmed up I'm gonna start to shred these apart into more uh crab like pieces so you can really start to see why some people think this really is a good imitation uh crab and I prefer to shred the mushrooms over chopping them because I think it just gives them more of like an organic kind of feel when you're eating them which is nice I think that chopping them gives them kind of like a unnatural feel and texture I'm gonna prepare some of the other things now just to get them ready so we're going to take some scallions I'm gonna cut the ends off on them throw those away compost if you have a composter we don't we do actually we're just gonna cut them into relatively large pieces and separate the uh the white portion so just cut these in half because that's going to help to make them cook down a little bit nicer [Music] [Music] all right so those are separated then we're going to take some garlic I have four cloves here and we're just gonna cut it into some slices [Music] [Music] foreign and then Ginger I'm gonna remove the end there because that's mostly skin and we're going to cut these thin slices as well we're gonna do about say five or so of these and now I'm gonna take and trim the sides on these and then I think that I'll also cut them in half yeah just like that [Music] like that so what we're going to do to kind of get rid of some of that water is we're going to dry saute these first so Pan's not quite hot enough yet oh it's getting there but all this is going to do is draw out some of this water for us just to make them a little less moist like if you come a little closer you can see that these are still super saturated with water and we just want to draw like a little bit of that out doing this process [Music] [Music] now that we've dry sauteed a lot of the moisture out of it I want to leave a little bit of moisture but most of it's out so I'm going to take it off the pan now and then I'm gonna put a little bit of cornstarch on it just coat them in cornstarch basically that's just going to help to give them like a little bit of a crispy coating once we get to actually putting them in the oil so pretty good amount of oil is what we're gonna put in there wait is that actually a good amount of oil that's like what I usually put in when I cook something I'm like actually not joking there you go yes I do that's a pretty healthy amount of oil well healthy there you go I know the oh our oil was nice and hot we're gonna start throwing some of these aromatics in I'm gonna throw in the ginger and the garlic and the chilies we'll give those a second and then we'll throw in the scallions this really should be done in a wok but I don't have a wall so we're gonna make it work [Music] all right foreign [Music] with our mushrooms all right now that our mushrooms have cooked a bit we're going to add the stuff that's kind of going to build a sauce around it so we're going to add a little bit of soy sauce probably two or three tablespoons then we're gonna add a little bit of oyster sauce probably a tablespoon or two some white pepper maybe a teaspoon and then some sugar which I forgot to take out so we're gonna add a tablespoon and a half of sugar I think that's two tablespoons I don't think so [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thanks thanks for dinner all right well let's give it a taste what see what we think thanks for thanks for dinner so what the why are you ignoring me thanks for dinner you haven't tried it yet don't say thanks to you okay we would speak what is happening right now we've had it before cheers but not like this not like this it did okay so he lines man yeah tastes like crab people say crab I think it has more of like a scallop like texture than crab but it's good you need me a whole pepper you don't have to eat the pepper you can eat around it should I eat this I've been devouring this whole thing yeah you did is this spicy spice yeah spicy all right sheets oh no you did me dirty I told you not to eat it you just said eat it you just said yeah eat it what I said don't eat it and then you're like should I eat it should I eat it no you should yeah eat it you well we'll let Katie sit and suffer we wrap up our our meal here but thank you guys so much for watching hopefully you guys enjoyed uh coming along with me and watching us cook this up if you guys really like this video don't forget to hit subscribe and also check out my other videos I'll leave those linked somewhere up here as well as down in the description um we've got quite a few mushroom foraging videos so if that's what you're into then go check those out I would really appreciate that um if it's not what you're into we also have other videos so check those out too that's true but again thank you guys so much for watching and we'll catch you in the next one oh hot oh peace foreign [Music] not gonna be that spicy that's so good what I saw that wow

Channel: Gliese On Life

Views: 9,673

Keywords: Foraging, Wild food, Mushroom foraging, Mycology, Mushrooms, Opinel, Wild mushrooms, Exploring, Fungi, Fungus, Edible fungi, Edible wild mushrooms, Eastern US Foraging, How to forage mushrooms, Foraging walk, How to forage lions mane mushroom, How to identify Lions Mane mushroom, Lions mane

Id: tLMTIgjcsAU

Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022