Got some already. It doesn’t look pretty, but it tastes good.
Eatmore T.
http://www.wildfermentation.com has lots of information and help with your wild fermentation.
Eatmore T.
This post got lost in the pile. I stayed at Michael’s house in Greene CO, PA after Morel Madness and before I went north to McKean CO. Michael had morels in his backyard. Pretty much the only morels I picked all season. Thanks, Michael.
Eatmore T
Once situated at a motel in Kane, I called the lovely Cat (http://www.thecatseye.biz) with whom I had made plans to go foraging. We agreed to meet at her house the next day and she would take me to some of her sites.
So I drove to her house the next morning, where I was fed a great breakfast and then I was taken to dig leeks and wild onions, and pick fiddlehead ferns. The fiddleheads do not taste quite as good as the ones that grow farther north. However, the wild onions were a great surprise. They were mild and tender, albeit a lot of work because they are so small and hard to clean. Cat fed me supper, using some of the woodland treasures we harvested.
We also looked for chaga and investigated a few small apple “orchards” for morels. I have never seen a morel in McKean CO, PA, and I probably never will.
Cat picking ramps.
Eatmore T. picking fiddleheads.
Eatmore T., posting more than a month after the fact.
Think twice about going here:
Definitely go here:
While driving from Greene CO to McKean CO, PA, I stopped at a small grocer in a small town to buy some homemade sauerkraut. I asked the guy behind the counter if I could use his bathroom. He started yelling and cursing at me. I then brought the food up to pay for it and I told him I’d buy it even though he wasn’t very hospitable. He yelled and cursed at me again. So I left without buying anything. Maybe he has Tourette’s, maybe the owner is doing a good deed by hiring the handicapped. But I don’t need that kind of disrespect.
I proceeded down the road, stopping at the Allegheny National Forest Ranger Station. I inquired about morels. The ranger in charge told me he had never seen any in those woods and he was from a part of PA where they are reasonably common. So much for morels in this part of PA, where I have searched in vain for decades.
I then drove to Kane, PA, where I stopped at Jack Bell’s store (http://www.jackbellsmeats.com). Jack is a pro fisherman turned shop owner and is a genuinely nice guy. The only quarrel I have with him is he recommended a motel that had pretty much non-existent internet service, which is why I am still catching up with blog entries. But the other choices may have had similar problems, and the one he recommended was definitely clean. I have had trouble with hotel/motel WiFi throughout my travels in recent years, as sometimes noted in this blog.
Jack also told me where to dig plenty of ramps. I never got there because Cat (next blog entry) took me to some of her locations. Maybe next time.
Eatmore T.
http://eatmoretoadstools.com
Continuing my search for morels, I headed for Mingo Creek Park in Washington County, PA on May Day. There the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club, together with the Washington CO park staff, hosts a weekend morel program with camping in the park. Mingo Creek Park is loaded with dying elms, a favorite morel habitat. Some years they find Avogadro’s number of morels. But some years it is just madness. Like this year when it was too dry to bring forth quantities, yet some of us were mad enough to walk for hours in the woods in the pouring rain on Sunday for very few mushrooms. I guess we shoulda been there last week and shoulda been there the next week. This is not to say that nobody found any. Some trees had pounds of morels beneath them, but these trees were few and far between. However, the club’s program was excellent, especially for beginning mushroomers. Put it on your calendar for next year.
A lucky picker.
John Plischke III with a handful of choice edibles. Oh wait! Maybe not! Not everything that looks like a morel is edible and some will even make you sick. Can you identify these mushrooms? If not, be very careful out there. The stomach you save may be your own.
Eatmore T.
http://eatmoretoadstools.com
Note: I do not always give full names of those people I mention on this site. But John is a well known amateur mycologist and mushroom photographer. If you look hard enough online you can find photos of him with bushels of morels.
Well, not a formal recipe. But a process.
I like to use Napa cabbage. It's cheap, tastes good and is easy to work with. But other Oriental cabbage will work also. Slice up a 2-3 lb cabbage and put into a bowl or crock. Add 1 tbsp salt per lb (pure salt - no iodine or anti-caking chemicals). Fill the bowl/crock with water past the level of the cabbage, put a plate on the cabbage and weight it down so that all the cabbage is underwater. Try to get all the air out under the plate. I'll be making some this weekend and I can email you a photo if this is at all confusing. I let my cabbage stand like this for 4-5 days to get a good lactic fermentation. I usually cover it with a cloth to keep bugs out, but fruit flies don't seem to like lactic fermentation. I skim the muck off as necessary. It's harmless. Then I drain and rinse the cabbage, keeping it soggy so I'll have juice to cover it when I put it in jars. Then I chop the cabbage a bit more, add 1 tbsp good salt, 1 tbsp brown sugar, chopped hot peppers to taste, garlic, leeks or other Allium genus to taste (regular onion doesn't seem right). Garlic shoots might be available right now and they would work well. Ramps are good if you can get them. Sometimes I add grated ginger, sometimes I don't. I also use 3-4 tbsp fish sauce per jar. It is available at oriental grocers. Daikon radish is good, and I might even add carrots. Then press into jars (you'll be surprised how that big Napa became so small when you do this). I let it sit with the cap loose for 3-4 days before I eat it, but if I have more than what will take to fill my jars, I eat it fresh. The optimum temperature for further fermentation is around 55 F, but that might be difficult to achieve. I'd alternatively refrigerate and leave out (don't tighten the lid past the ability for CO2 to escape). I think the lactic fermentation keeps the bad bugs out, but if it gets too hot and the vegetables aren't completely submerged, you might get scum forming and mushiness of the exposed vegetables. If you need to add something with preservatives or vinegar (I can get fresh fish sauce at a Vietnamese store, but you might only get it with preservatives), then add it after letting the rest of the mixture sit for 3-4 days for optimum lactic fermentation. But the main thing is the cabbage fermentation. Everything else is according to taste. Here's what my fermenting Napa looks like. Cabbage held down by a plate with a heavy bowl and a can of peaches. Not really pretty, but it works.Eatmore T.
http://eatmoretoadstools.com
I support the National Forest Service’s program of requiring permits to harvest certain plants, especially if they are resold commercially. But I really wish Pisgah National Forest would step into the last decade of the 20th century and use the internet. There is simply no reason why people should need to travel to one office to buy a permit from the one person who handles permit sales, who is not always available. Everybody else knows how to sell things online. I can buy a driver’s license, a fishing license, pay taxes and do most other transactions with state, local, and federal agencies online. But I can’t even get a free permit to harvest a few pounds of ramps for my own consumption from Pisgah without driving to their headquarters.
Also, I would advise them to give up any starry-eyed dreams of selling permits for the commercial harvest of wild mushrooms. It works well in Western national forests. But the East is an inconsistent producer of commercially valuable mushrooms.
It had been bone dry all spring when I arrived in the Asheville area. It rained all night before Jim and I went out to look the morning of April 25. We climbed up and down through some beautiful tulip poplar groves. There were Mayapple, cohosh, bloodroot, trillium and other plants one might expect to find in woods where morels normally grow. But not here, not now.
Eatmore T.
http://eatmoretoadstools.com
I am writing these blog posts almost a month late. Better late than never, I guess.
I next went to Valdosta, GA, where I was raised, and met George, a lawyer and one of my oldest childhood friends, for a few hours of riding around in the country to see what we could see. We were looking for deer tongue, among other things, but neither of us could remember what it looks like. We found weeds that neither of us could identify. Zephyr lilies that I had never noticed as a child. An old pecan orchard that may have pecan truffles in the fall. We shall see. But no fungus of any kind. Too dry.
What is this?
Zephyr lilies
Old pecan orchard.
George gave me access to his farm west of Macon, GA, which I visited the next day. He said he had seen morels there before, but could not identify them at the time. The woods seemed perfect for morels. Yellow poplar rising 30-40 feet up a slope to a stream. But the leaves crackled beneath my feet. Too dry.
Buckeye on George’s farm.
I drove up the western side of GA to Dalton, spent the night and then drove across to the east along the edges of the Chatahoochie National Forest. I got directions to a poplar grove at the Ranger Station, but it was so hot and dry I didn’t bother to look. I drove on to NC and then home the next day. No morels or other fungi for the entire trip
Eatmore T.
http://eatmoretoadstools.com