Yesterday was a sunny, fresh autumn day that had immediately followed a wet day. Those are the ideal conditions for a bit of mushrooming. You can tell when mushroom conditions are perfect: lots of waterlogged cow pats, preferably with a shiny little pool of water on top. This is not where mushrooms are found but watery cowpats are a good omen.
So, with such perfect conditions, the Sous Chef and I decided to go out and see what we could find for our mushroom risotto. He was particularly keen to find some Penny Bun Boletes (Ceps or Porcini mushrooms) but other boletes would be fine, too. Boletes are not like the mushrooms with ridges or gills underneath their caps, a bolete’s underside looks like a sponge, with lots of pores. We tend to find beech and birch boletes, and slippery jack (another good ‘un), but it’s ceps that are the best. When it comes to other mushrooms, the gilled sort, we have a few set favourites that we can recognise with confidence but we also took along two books on mushrooms to help with identification on some borderline cases. These gilled types are the ones that contain the deadly-poisonous varieties so while boletes are pretty safe, with the others you have to be sure. Really sure. (some make you feel unwell, others can kill you without warning. Kidney failure). So you have to be sure.
Through the first half of the walk we found lots of interesting but sadly inedible mushrooms and a few poisonous ones, too. We collected some unknown ones to check the sporeprint (place the cap on a sheet of paper, check an hour later what colour spores it drop. This can help narrow it down a bit) but that was just for scientific curiosity, not for eating. It was getting late and still no ceps. The Sous Chef was getting increasingly anxious to find some ceps (“you’re ceps mad, you are”)and eventually we were not disappointed. We found four remarkable specimens and felt extremely pleased with our find. Woodland wildlife likes a penny bun bolete as much as we do, so they often get pretty nibbled but we found some in good condition.
It was some time later we bumped into a group of 6 walkers who had a basket chock FULL of boletes. It put our meagre find into the shade. But hey – we had three large boletes and a small one, enough for our risotto and any more would just be greedy.
A train ride home and a hot bath followed by a creamy wild mushroom risotto, cooked with the day’s find. Delicious! I flippin’ love autumn.
