Tom Weipert of Savannah, also known as the Mushroom King, entertained audience members last Tuesday with his war stories about mushroom hunting. It is now March, which means that it is the perfect time of year to start thinking about mushroom hunting. He hunts mushrooms for a living, working with farmers markets and restaurants; he still buys and sells mushrooms.
There are around 5000 species of mushrooms in the US, 60 of them are toxic, and 40 are edible. Morel mushrooms are toxic raw and must been cooked before they can be eaten. There are some that have natural antibiotics and others which were used by Native Americans which can fight cancer.
Morel mushrooms attach themselves to trees; they can attach themselves to almost any kind of tree and exchange photosynthesis for sugar. They have a deep root system and when a tree dies, that is when mushrooms spring up so that they can find another host. Mushrooms have what is known as a symbiotic relationship with trees. Another event that can trigger mushrooms is a bulldozer nearby, which forces the mushroom to restore its communication system with the trees. They are frequently found along rivers, where trees are washed away all the time and mushrooms have to regularly find new hosts. A mushroom plant can release as many as 7 million sports. They are also frequently found after a major forest fire; Weipert travels to the western US all the time to retrieve hosts of mushrooms that spring up after a forest fire the year before.
Their biggest enemies are plastic and sunlight. Weipert said that the number one enemy of mushroom is heat; they eventually wither away in the sunlight. He said that it was not a good idea to pull a mushroom up by its roots because they would not grow back. The ideal temperature for mushrooms is between 43 and 60 degrees ground temperature; if the temperature gets above 80 degrees, then they will not grow any bigger or spring out of the ground in the first place. Weipert said that in ideal conditions, around 78 degrees and frequent rains, that he had watched some mushrooms grow right out of the soil.
Weipert takes a pair of scissors or a knife, cuts the mushrooms that he wants, and puts them in a mesh bag or basket and puts them in an ice cooler stored in a brown paper bag, where they will stay cool. He never puts more than 5 or 10 pounds at a time in a container; they will crush under their own weight if he does. It is not a good idea to soak them in water before cooking. He said that it was never a good idea to store mushrooms in a ziplock plastic bag because then they would soak up too much moisture.
Weipert said that he starts on the southeast corner of slopes and works his way elsewhere. The earliest types of mushrooms are black morels, then yellow, grey, and green in that order. He said that the latest ones were the toughest and that he could even throw them against a wall without breaking them.
Regarding poison mushrooms, he said that when in doubt, leave them alone. He said there was a case out in California of a nursing home resident getting poisoned by a mushroom.
As the snow retreats up mountains and up north during spring, Weipert said that the morels spread with them. They try to be the first to a tree. They are even more common in Alaska than they are in the Pacific Northwest, but Weipert said that it was not economical to fly them out given the distance. He can get up to $10 a pound for mushrooms with some exotic types paying as much as $45 a pound. He said that growing them involves sun, water, and humidity like everything else. Controlled burns were another way of growing mushrooms. But even under ideal conditions, mushrooms will eventually peter out. The year after the Great Flood of 1993 and the Ice Storm were good years to find morel mushrooms because of the damage to trees that those weather events caused.
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