Chanterelle?

A few of my bounty turned purple. I threw them out but…Never saw that before. Anyone have any insight? Thanks.

 

Not sure what it is but it doesn't look like any Chantrelle I have ever seen. Missing the Trumpet Shape all together.

 

Stay away from wild mushrooms -wife worked ER had girl come in ate wild mushrooms died of liver failure

 

I’ve picked thousands of Chanterelles and this was a first. These were with the same group of “normal” ones. Weird.

 

I like mushrooms,, and always wanted to be able to walk out in the wild and pick'em ,, but ,, I just never trusted my judgment on the topic enough to risk my life on something I could have done without in the 1st place .
But I'd surely like to get the knowledge from someone that actually has it .

 

Could be a Jack O Lantern

 

I’ve been doing some reading and you might be right. (Although these weren’t in clumps) Looked almost identical in the woods but slightly different in my kitchen. Thank you.

 

My advice to new shroom foragers is to stick with the braindead safe varieties. And if you have any doubts about it just leave it in the woods.

Right now locally Oyster Mushrooms are going wild in the wild. I have 3 varieties that grow here. These are the King Oyster Variety. They get BIG like dinner plate big. Like eating mushroom steaks. These were to far gone to use when I found them




Next Variety I have are the little Pearl/Grey ones These ended up in the fridge and will be on the menu in the next day or two.


And my personal favorite of the three the light brown/Brown variety.


They were on the menu a hour after picking them


Anything that even comes close to resembling a Oyster is either too hard to eat and doesn't have gills.

Chicken of the Woods, Sheep Heads and Hen of the woods are big meaty giants and super safe as there is not anything else that resembles them and they are generally BIG. Can Google research them for pics, I am too lazy to dig through my HD looking for my shroom folder right now

Morel Mushrooms are generally very safe as long as you can tell the difference between Morel and Peckerheads. Morel GOOD, Peckerhead BAD.

Chantrelle is another generally safe one with the only look alike being the Jack O Lantern. Jacks have true gills and usually grow in clumps and lack the true trumpet shape and a lot of their species will glow in the dark...... Thus the name. Chantys grow individually have a more egg yolk color to light orange, have the pronounced trumpet shape and have veins and not true gills.

Giant Puff Balls LOL the ones we stomped on as kids to make the big clouds of spores If you get them young and slice them and sautee them in butter they are very tasty.

Straw Mushrooms like to grow on or around rotting straw or hay. They are a very delicate Mushroom and not very tasty IMO unless you like very earthy moldy straw tasting shrooms. A couple of other not so safe varieties also love to grow in the rotting straw, manure and compost........ Like the Blue Caps that will send you into a different reality and make you see things that don't exist, blue caps are also a very delicate mushroom and I guess could be mistaken for Straw Shrooms.

Beyond those I don't mess with wild mushrooms anymore. Used to be very into foraging, finding and Identifying every shroom I could find Now days I have wild Oysters that grow year round, not uncommon to find Kings growing on dead trees on the West Side in 20 degrees and snow blowing. Late Summer through November the Sheep heads, Chicken and Hen of the woods are a common find, and the Chantrells pop here in June/July thy love to grow on the disturbed soil of the woods trails. I don't have enough Morel Mushrooms that pop up to even waste my time searching out Yeah I tried the blue caps just to see...... I ain't gonna do that again after that giant possum as big as a house chased me around the farm for a hour

 

That's what I'm afraid of,, seeing stuff that ain't really there ,, and dying a painful gut wrenching death .
I bought a little laminated folder ,, like them ones you get at the beach , showing you what the fish you're catching are . This one was of Mushrooms,, can't remember where I put it .
I did run across an app you could put on your phone where you could take a Pic of the shroom, and it would identify it for you . I couldn't figure out how to download to the phone .
One of these days I'll figure it out .

 

The only mushrooms I pick are Reishi and Turkeytails. They are very distinctive.

I'm a coward.

 

I pick mine up in the produce section ,for 4$/lb . Browns ,, taste great

 

Buy my mushrooms and stay away from picking them wild. Grew up looking at pictures and hearing stories of one of my uncle's friends. In the very late 1930's he had a good friend his age that ived next door to their family out in California. My grandfather was working for Lockheed on the P 38, but that is another story. His friend and the rest of the family ate some mushrooms that they had picked in the wild and all died a horrible death, vomiting for a few hours, then dying of liver failure in about a week.

From a survival perspective mushrooms are a low calorie food and while rich in vitamins and minerals, I would not eat any that I wasn't very sure of. Fact is I was raised to be afraid of them and still am.

 

I have a friend at work who is very good with mushrooms and hunts them to eat but I am not that brave. He grew up hunting them with his grandparents .

 

In the early 70s I was stationed on the QCI (Queen Charlotte Islands) Now called Haida Gwaii
A lot of natives and young folks would go "Magic" Mushroom picking up there. Seen a few dead body's at the airport being flown back where they came from, and the natives would have there morning for weeks. In the 60s-late 70s no hospital on the island , you screw up , your going to die if its bad. 3 hrs by the time an aircraft can come for you.
I don't do drugs or squat so I can keep my licenses when I get pulled for the random drug checks in the airport pilot sections.
Sloth

 

A few yrs back ,,around 1990 era ,, GA got some major rain ,, flooded a lot of areas south of Atlanta,, friends of mine , that I used to visit when I was passing thru town when I was trucking ,,, they said the cops were busting folks coming out of the cow pastures , as the sun started rising , with bags full of them funky shrooms ,,
I sure as hell didn't need to be pushing 80,000 lbs across the country in a funky mushroom utopia. ,,,

 

And that is the way to properly learn about foraging shrooms In person in the field with someone that has been doing it for decades. I would very much discourage apps, field guides, internet pictures and Youtube videos for wild foraging in general. Mushrooms most of all! Heck look how many neophyte foragers ate some tasty Hemlock thinking they had harvested some wild carrot or queen Ann's Lace..... Or Dogs Bane or or or lot of things that will kill you or make your very sick growing out there, and going by pictures and internet Identification is NOT the way I would go about learning what is what. Had a couple croak locally from eating Poke Weed, which is very tasty if prepared properly (Boil and pour off, then boil again and pour off again to remove the toxins) Still pretty tasty when not prepared properly but also not very healthy

I often wonder how many people through history died in the process of discovering what was edible and safe and what left you spewing your guts out or taking a nap and not waking up from.

What I personally dislike about the cultivated shrooms in the store is like just about everything else that is mass produced for the stores. It is pretty much flavorless and nutrient deficient. A oyster mushroom for example growing on dead tree's, logs and stumps picks up flavors from what they grow on. The longer dead and rotten the wood the more neutral the flavor except the more earthy flavor. The ones in my pics are growing on 5-6 year old dead Post Oak stumps. and if someone else had picked them and I ate them I could probably tell you that they grew on the remains of a member or the white oak family, just on the flavor alone. Same with Chicken of the woods (Totally Different than Hen of the Woods) Chicken of the woods grows on the dead trees or from the dead roots as a shelf type mushroom and picks up hints of flavor from what they grow on. The Store mushrooms on the other hand are grown in or on sterile mediums like sterilized straw logs for example.

 

That is where I'm at on the foraging part,, I don't trust my judgment enough to risk it .
The pic you posted of the Chantrelle and the Jack ,, I can't really see much of a difference between the 2 ,, so I'd have a 50/50 chance killing myself there .

 

LOL the differences are pretty obvious once the eye is trained to them. Best way again is find someone very familiar with foraging the local flora and learn from them. Also good to learn what is most common in your area and get familiar and comfortable foraging the easy to ID and plentiful things. My area Lambs Quarters, Tiger Lillies, Poke Weed, cattails, nuts, nettles, Oyster, Chantrelle and Sheeps Heads and Chicken of the Woods are plentiful and common. Most Common Toxic things are the Hemlock and Dogs Bane Patches. But even the Deadly things have uses like refining the Hemlock into a powder to add to grain to kill the Mice.