Author Archives: Geoff Dann

About Geoff Dann

Foraging teacher and author

Hazel Boletes going nuts

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03/09/2015

Hazel Boletes, early September 2015

Mushroom season is now well underway, at least in more open areas. I came across my first Penny Bun of the autumn today, as well as my first Fly Agaric. Plenty of other stuff is also just starting to appear. And one species in particular is going bonkers, at least in my corner of the south-east.

Every year is different for fungi – some species do well, others do poorly, and its usually not obvious why. This year, at least at this early point in the season, it is the turn of a mushroom

Brown Birch Bolete

that’s normally rather scarce and very frequently misidentified by foragers, even though a big clue in the name ought to make it easier to get right.

One of the first edible species most mushroom foragers learn and go looking for is a rather squidgy and tasteless brown bolete called Leccinum scabrum – the Brown Birch Bolete. It is popular with beginners not because it is any sort of delicacy, but because it is widespread, common and completely impossible to confuse with anything poisonous. I haven’t seen any of

Hazel Bolete – mature specimen from 2014

them at all so far this year, but I have seen a vast number of one of its relatives. There are several similar species, all of them brown-capped members of the same genus, and for many years I just called all of them “brown birch boletes” and paid little attention to the fact that not all of them were growing with birch trees (in fact, not even all of the brown Leccinums found under birch trees are actually L. scabrum, but let’s keep this simple…)

The species that’s going bonkers is called a Hazel Bolete (Leccinum pseudoscabrum), and it

Hazel Bolete, final colour after 20 minutes exposed to the air

grows under (you guessed it) Hazels, and also Hornbeam. It differs from the Brown Birch Bolete in two other obvious ways – firstly it has a cap that is noticeably dented or wrinkled when young, and eventually darkens and cracks. And secondly when you cut it open and expose the flesh to air it slowly turns brown, then dark purple, ending up almost black.

From a foraging point of view it’s not a delicacy either, although it is better than the Brown Birch Bolete when young and firm. Can be rescued with a bit of butter, garlic and parsley, and right now there’s so many of them about that you needn’t feel guilty about picking them for the pot.

Happy hunting and keep safe,

Geoff

…and they’re off!

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Oak Bolete, August 2015

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25/08/2015

It’s that time of year again. The last two weeks have seen quite a bit of activity from the late summer species, especially the boletes, but also Brittlegills, Parasols and Agaricuses. In the last two days that activity has ratcheted up a notch, and that’s before the effect of the torrential rain and dropping temperatures starts to kick in. So it’s all looking good for the start of September. The forecast for next weekend is for more wet weather, but after that the long term forecast is looking better, and those conditions should be pretty much perfect for the start of the main show this year.

One of the three species known until recently as “Shaggy Parasols” (Chlorophyllum rhacodes), late August 2015. This picture shows Chlorophyllum brunneum, which is one of the species to be given a new English common name in my forthcoming book (Brown Parasol).

I also have some news about my forthcoming book. The publisher is now going to be Green Books, who are the UK’s largest and leading independent publisher of books in a very broad category of “environmentalism”. The release date is likely to be at the end of 2016, and the book itself is going to be even more comprehensive than originally planned, featuring over 300 species and extending the geographical range to cover important European species that are not yet recorded in the UK.

In response to Sara Cadbury’s attack on John Wright

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30/07/2015

It’s nearly mushroom season, and the argument between mycologists and foragers is in the news again, this time because mycologist Sara Cadbury has attacked the activities of John Wright and other “celebrity foragers” in the New Forest, as reported by the Daily Mail.

QUOTE:

All these TV programmes about the ‘wild food’ craze and foraging in the forest merely serve to popularise the idea of mushroom picking. People now come from all over the country to pick mushrooms in the New Forest and that just shouldn’t be happening. There are more and more courses in mushroom picking being run and the hotels in the area are jumping on the bandwagon too. The Forestry Commission needs to be brought into line because they are giving out the wrong message. The forest suffers as a result of all the picking local people are fed up with it. Fungus is a central part to the web of life – nearly all plants and trees rely on them for their growth, as do many invertebrates. The only answer is to take the same measures as Epping Forest does and ban the picking of mushrooms entirely. A blanket ban is the only way to ensure mushrooms are not picked for commercial purposes.

END QUOTE

Here we go again.

It is quite clear that there is a cultural change going on in the UK. Having been a mycophobic culture since forever, we are becoming a mycophyllic culture.

And it does lead to an obvious question. There are many European countries which have been mycophyllic for generations – Italy, Poland, Russia etc… Every year in these countries, a significant proportion of the population descends on the forests and take whatever fungi they can find that are good to eat. And oddly enough, the fungi in those countries seem to be doing just fine. So the question is this: why do mycologists in the UK fear that something terrible is going to happen to British fungal populations because foraging has become popular, when nothing especially terrible has happened in Italy or Poland? Do they think our fungi are different in some way? Or that some other factor makes a decisive difference?

People don’t like change, especially conservative people (with a small “c”). And it is not that surprising that people who have been recording fungi for many years, and who not so long ago had those fungi pretty much to themselves because almost nobody foraged in the UK, don’t like this cultural change. However, trying to stop it happening is like trying to stop the tide coming in. It’s part of a much wider cultural trend towards re-learning lost skills/knowledge, reconnecting with the natural world and eating more natural and interesting food. You might argue that you can do these things without foraging for fungi, but that won’t make any difference to the people who are interested in learning to forage for fungi.

What is her actual argument?

Firstly she complains that “people are making money” and “the forest is being exploited.” Well, people were already thoroughly “exploiting” almost all of the woodland in Britain when the Romans invaded, and have been doing so ever since. This claim has nothing to do with conservation or ecology. Coppicers “exploit” woodland, and their activity is widely understood to increase biodiversity, so “exploitation” is not necessarily bad for ecology/conservation. It depends on exactly what is being done.

She also says that “people now come from all over the country to pick mushrooms in the New Forest and that just shouldn’t be happening.” She’s right. That shouldn’t be happening, and it is rather daft, because there’s plenty of woodland in other places. But it certainly isn’t an argument against fungi foraging in general, just that the New Forest is being inundated, rather pointlessly, by too many people from other parts of the country.

Then she says “The forest suffers as a result of all the picking, local people are fed up with it.”

“The forest suffers”? How does the forest suffer? She left that bit out.

“Local people are fed up with it” makes what is going on a bit clearer. If people were coming from all over the UK to a small area in my bit of Sussex then I’d be pretty fed up about it too.

The ecological argument offered is this:

“Fungus is a central part to the web of life – nearly all plants and trees rely on them for their growth, as do many invertebrates.”

And the problem with this claim is that, as John Wright points out, picking fruiting bodies doesn’t actually harm the fungus. Even if you pick every single penny bun beneath an oak tree, the tree is not harmed in any way, and neither is the fungus. It’s ecologically no different to picking apples or blackberries. The only bit of the argument that actually works is the bit about the invertebrates. Yes, if you take all of the fungi in a particular area and if there are local populations of insects that are dependent on fungi to feed their grubs, then the population of those invertebrates will suffer. But I am not sure that a local decline in population of a few obscure species of beetle and fly which are either unthreatened or ecologically irrelevant warrants this level of outrage.

Slow-cooked pork belly with sea-purslane and wild fennel

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26/05/2015

This creation is very loosely based on a dish by Lukas Pfaff. I couldn’t afford a suckling pig, so I re-invented it (today) using a much cheaper cut of meat.

Sea Kale

The key foraged ingredients are sea-purslane, which can be found by the ton on just about any salt marsh or river estuary in the country, and wild fennel, which is a bit harder to track down but can be locally quite abundant, especially in coastal areas. I accompanied it with some sea kale which just happened to be in area I was foraging.

Main Ingredients (for 4 people):

Pork belly joint 1.5 to 2kg.
Several generous handfuls of fresh, tender, new-growth sea-purslane.
The top two-thirds of 6 or 7 wild fennel plants.

Sea-purslane

1) Wash the sea-purslane. Take half of it and spread it at the base of a casserole dish.

2) Separate the fluffy top leaves of the fennel and the smaller bits of stem from the thicker bits at the base. You don’t want any really tough bits of stem – nothing much wider than the diameter of a pencil. Reserve the stems for later. Put the fluffy leaves and the smaller stems in a layer on top of the sea-purslane.

3) The belly joint will usually come rolled in string, which makes the first part of the process easier: use a sharp knife to cut the joint into 4 strips. Remove the string, unroll the strips and place them on top of the fennel, skin side up.

Wild fennel

4) Put the casserole dish (lid on) in an oven and cook for three hours at 165° (or fan 150°).

5) Pick the leaves off the stems of the other half of the sea-purslane. Keep for later.

6) Just before the three hours are up, start steaming the fennel stems, and put the potatoes on if you want to serve with mash. Add the sea kale a little bit later if you’re serving that too.

7) Take the belly strips out of the casserole dish, put in another dish and return to the oven to keep warm (turn the oven down low).

8) Take the layer of fennel out of the casserole dish (doesn’t matter if some bits escape). If you can get any juices out of the fennel, then add them back into the dish.

9) The dish will now contain the meat juices, including plenty of oil, and some very well-cooked sea-purslane. Use the back of a wooden spoon to mash the sea-purslane into a pulp, in the oils and juices from the meat, to make a sauce (you may want to remove some of the oil first, if there’s too much). Put the sauce in a jug and put the jug in the oven to keep warm.

Slow-cooked pork belly with sea-purslane and wild fennel, with sea kale and mashed potato and mushrooms.

Slow-cooked pork belly with sea-purslane and wild fennel, served with sea kale, mashed potato and mushrooms.

10) Heat some butter and olive oil, and plenty of freshly ground sea or rock salt, in a frying pan and then fry the belly strips, skin-side down. This is purely to make the skin go crackling-like and should take about 4 minutes.

11) Meanwhile, in another pan, sauté the second half of the sea-purslane for a couple of minutes in butter and/or olive oil. I also fried some mushrooms to go with the dish.

12) To serve, place the belly strips with their crackling side sideways, and drizzle the sea-purslane sauce over the top. Serve with the sautéed sea-purslane, mashed potato, steamed wild fennel stems (with plenty of butter) and optional sea kale (with plenty of lemon juice).

Sorry about the poor quality photo – I was in a bit of a rush to try my new creation!

Mixed Foraged Spring Salad

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24/04/2015

One day after their traditional appearance-time of St George’s Day, there is no sign of St George’s Mushrooms in their usual spots in Sussex, although I’ve heard one or two reports of their arrival elsewhere in the country. There is, however, no shortage of luxuriant spring plant growth, and it is the perfect time to put together a foraged woodland/streamside mixed salad.

April 23rd 2015: edible woodland plants

Every now and then you’ll come across a location that’s got it all – well, almost. There are multiple edible species in this picture: Ramsons (Wild Garlic), Lady’s Smock, Alternate-leaved Saxifrage, Orpine (top left), Lesser Celandine and Nettles – although those won’t be going in a salad! In fact, the only plants in the picture that you can’t eat are the grasses and the Hemlock Water Dropwort (bottom left corner). Unfortunately for the unwary forager, if you eat Hemlock Water Dropwort then you will die. Within a few tens of metres of where this photo was taken there were two other edible salad species (water mint and primrose), as well as loads of pignuts (the edible tubers of which are illegal to dig up). On my way home I stopped on a quiet country lane and collected the rest of the ingredients, apart from the ivy-leaved toadflax, which grows on the walls in my garden.

A selection of edible spring plants

On the board, starting top left and going down in columns: Garlic Mustard, Primrose flowers, Lesser Celandine leaves, Water Mint, Lady’s Smock flowers, Alternate-Leaved Golden Saxifrage, Wild Chervil (AKA Cow Parsley), Orpine, Three-cornered Leek (with flowers), Ivy-leaved Toadflax, Hairy Bittercress, Ramsons (with flowers). Beware if you’re foraging for Cow Parsley, because it is very easily confused with Hemlock, which is deadly.

All sorts of other things might have made it into a spring salad – these just happened to be the things I came across yesterday. There’s a real mixture of flavours in here – garlicky, minty, seriously aromatic, sweet and hot, as well as some milder things to bulk it up without blowing your head off. To make the salad, first wash everything and dry, then finely chop the Garlic Mustard and Wild Chervil. Roughly chop everything else, then mix it up well.

Foraged mixed spring salad, washed and chopped.

I like to serve it with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing, either with or without lemon juice depending on whether there are any lemon-flavoured plants (e.g. the various sorrels) in the salad. To make the dressing mix extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar and light soy sauce in proportions 6:2:1:1, and then add freshly ground salt and pepper.

This fresh spring growth will be available for about the next month before summer takes over and many of these plants aren’t so good to eat.

Groundbreaking book on British Fungi Foraging on its way

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30/01/2015

I am pleased to be able to announce that I am now working on a book that will set a new standard for British fungi foraging guides. It is due to be published next September, and will provide information on over 350 fungi recorded as present in the British Isles and the temperate and montane areas of Europe. Detailed information and high quality photographs will be provided on over 300 of the most important edible, toxic and very common species, plus a few that are of interest for other reasons.

The book will be published by Green Books.

The pictures shown here are examples of the quality of the photography to expect from this book. An extract of the text follows.

British fungi foraging: from mycophobia to mycomania

Deathcap: the most dangerous toxic mushroom in the world.

Not so long ago the only wild fungus that the British even thought about picking was the humble field mushroom, and most people were so scared of eating something dangerous that they wouldn’t even touch those. It wasn’t always like that. I have a book published in 1941 – “Wild Foods Of Britain” by Jason Hill – that features another five. But even if we reached a particularly low ebb in the late 20^th century, the people of these islands have always been rather mycophobic compared to the majority of other European nations. We can only guess at the reasons for this. One theory is that the druids were the only class of people allowed knowledge of fungi in ancient Britain, and everybody else was taught to fear them. It is certainly the case that we’ve historically associated “toadstools” with witches, bats, spiders and…toads. The word “toadstool” has no meaning beyond “like a mushroom, but you wouldn’t want to eat it” and is liable to be applied to any sort of mushroom that isn’t an Agaricus (the genus to which the field mushroom and cultivated mushroom belong). Whatever the reason for this historical mycophobia, we are currently in the midst of a dramatic cultural change of heart. Foraging, especially foraging for fungi, has never been more popular in Britain, and interest is rapidly growing.

The Deceiver: surprising edible, but surprisingly good at fooling you it is actually something else.

Why has this happened? Why now? There are two main reasons. The first is a widespread food revolution: no longer is Britain the land of fried breakfasts, fish and chips, roast beef and not much else. We now have a massive diversity of restaurants, serving food from all around the world. Pubs have become gastro-pubs. Cookery competitions dominate prime-time television. No surprise then that the foodies among us are taking a greater interest in the possibility of finding, fresh and for free, delicacies that cost a small fortune and are often only available dried – if you can buy them at all. The other strand is a broad cultural trend towards sustainability, self-sufficiency and a desire to reconnect with the landscape and the natural world. There is a sense that our civilisation is an out-of-control monster, heading towards catastrophe, both economic and ecological. And we’ve responded with a desire to re-learn ancient and forgotten skills, from growing our own food, to making essential items using pre-industrial technologies, knitting and mending old clothes, right back to knowing how to track animals and start fires without matches. Foraging for wild food fits very well into this cultural backdrop.

Crimson Waxcaps : arguably the most beautiful edible mushroom in the British Isles.

There’s still a lingering fear of eating the wrong fungus and ending up in hospital – or worse. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. In some European nations where gathering fungi has always been a national pastime, cases of poisoning caused by wild fungi are counted in their tens of thousands annually. Fear, leading to caution, can sometimes be a life-saver. Foraging for fungi can be done safely though. One just has to exercise a certain amount of common sense, and follow a few rules.

There’s another advantage to our mycophobic history: we come at this with no pre-existing ideas of what is edible and what isn’t. Most of my foraging students start off knowing absolutely nothing about fungi. Contrast that with the Russian family who hired me because they wanted to introduce their five-year old daughter to foraging. All they actually wanted from me was to show them somewhere they could find some of the things they knew from back home. When I tried to teach them about other edible species – good ones – they said, “We don’t eat those in Russia.” “But you hired me to teach you about edible fungi, and I’m telling you those are good to eat!”, I said, but they were having none of it. Each country has its own idiosyncrasies – its own selection of things traditionally eaten and things traditionally rejected. Lacking any tradition (apart from rejecting almost everything), we in Britain have the chance to approach this topic with an open mind, and that can only be a good thing.

Dawn forage with Radio Kent wraps up mushroom season 2014

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04/12/2014

The Panthercap (Amanita pantherina) probably won’t kill you, but it is likely to put you in hospital. This species is normally quite scarce, but it found the unusual weather conditions in 2014 to its liking and was almost as common this autumn as its bright red relative the fly agaric (A. muscaria) (which had a rare bad year).

Well, apart from a few scattered stragglers, mushroom season is all over for another year. 2014 has certainly been a weird one. Unless December gets very cold very soon, this year will go down as the warmest since records began, both in the UK and globally, and while we haven’t had any heatwave, we did have unusual autumn weather. The result was that a lot of normally-common species never really turned up, but quite a few uncommon species had a bumper year. I’ve never seen so many Panthercaps, for example- it’s a shame you can’t eat them. It bodes well for 2015 though, because when fungi take a year off they do tend to bounce back spectacularly the following year.

Anyway, my mushroom season ended with an appearance on Radio Kent, who asked me to take a reporter foraging somewhere in that county. Unfortunately, my map-based instructions involving roads and junctions had been turned into a satnav-friendly postcode by the time they reached the reporter and since car parks in the middle of forests don’t tend to have postal codes, and since there was almost no mobile phone signal, it nearly didn’t happen. Luckily the reporter did eventually find his way to the meeting spot just as dawn was breaking, and we headed off into a nearby stand of conifers.

I had brought a foraging student along with me, and he was kind enough to record the proceedings on his iPad, so you can see a fifteen minute video of the foraging, cook-up and interview here. Thanks to Paul Crosland for doing that.

Terracotta Hedgehog (Hydnum rufescens)

This one little patch of woodland defied the general trend and produced more finds than I would have expected if we’d spent the whole day walking round the 380 hectare forest that surrounds it. I have no idea what makes that patch so special, but something does, so it’s precise location remains top secret. We found plenty of hedgehog fungi and a patch of their smaller terracotta relatives, several large troops of winter chanterelles, a penny bun (I don’t recall ever seeing one of those in December before), a couple of bay boletes and some shaggy parasols and wood blewits. We didn’t bother picking any of the ochre brittlegills that were liberally scattered all over the place, and I left the solitary charcoal burner (very late for that species too). Not a bad selection in December for a chunk of woodland about 3 acres in size.

Tricholoma saponaceum

One other edible species was abundant, and it warrants a special mention. This is the fungus with perhaps the most unfortunate name of all (dog vomit slime mould isn’t actually a fungus). The Tricholomas have been given the common name “Knight”, and this one, because it supposedly smells of “institutional washrooms”, has the specific epithet “saponaceum”, meaning “soap”. Put those together and you end up with the name “Soapy Knight”. Most sources list this mushroom as either inedible or mildly toxic (who’d want to eat soap, after all?). However, a little bit more research will reveal that there is no information on the toxins supposedly involved, or their effects, and, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, it’s been traditionally eaten (although I don’t know where). I’ve eaten it many times, and this year decided to try it on my other half, having not told her beforehand that it allegedly smells/tastes of soap. “Mmmm, I like that. Strong taste! Smoky…meaty…a bit like salami!”, she said. It is indeed edible, but I can’t bring myself to call it by its ludicrous common name, so I think I’ll just stick to Tricholoma saponaceum.

My prices for 2015 and event schedule as currently known are now on this website (see menu at the top of this page). Vouchers are available if you want to give somebody an interesting Christmas gift.

I’ll be blogging again in the new year. I’m planning on making 2015 the year I really get to grips with cooking with wild plants.

Happy holidays,

Geoff

November foraging: beauty in a basket

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11/11/2014

November collection

After a stupidly dry September and a stupidly warm October, the weather has finally returned to something resembling normal, and the fungi are now also back to something resembling normal. And in November, that means a riot of spectacular colour. It’s as if the fungi are competing with the deciduous trees: “So you think you’re putting on a bit of a show, do you? Well, see what we can do!” With the exception of some very large and rather ancient (but still edible) chanterelles and hedgehogs, all the species in this basket are typical November species. Well, the prince and the blusher can appear at any time from late summer right through until now, but the rest are late season specialists. The winter chanterelles were a couple of weeks later than normal and are only just coming through strongly in the last few days, those are the first decent crop of blewits I’ve seen south of Northamptonshire this year, there’s a solitary trooping funnel in there and a couple of bay boletes (not a good year for either of those two species, which are both normally abundant in November). The pistachio-coloured orange and green things are saffron milkcaps, but even their rather striking colour scheme cannot compete with the most beautiful of all the edible fungi: the waxcaps (snowy, crimson, scarlet and golden).

I am expecting the next fortnight to be very good for fungi, after the main part of the season was disappointing at best, and largely dismal.

Late autumn messes with the mushrooms

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29/10/2014

I have been putting off blogging, waiting for the autumn that still hasn’t come. We are now two days away from November, and I am still walking around in not much more than a T-shirt. And it has been a weird year for fungi.

Penny Bun, Larch Bolete and masses of The Miller, bucking the general trend for this autumn.

The end of August and start of September were superb – plenty of boletes around, including some rare ones, as well as russulas and amanitas and all manner of late summer and early autumn species. Then it all went wrong. After the driest September on record, by early October there was very little in the way of fungi to be found, and I was praying for rain. But the rains, when they finally came at the start of October, did not bring a glut of fungi. In fact for two weeks it seemed to make no difference at all – still no mushrooms, just a bit more mud. Then finally, a couple of weeks ago, there was some sort of recovery, although it is incredibly patchy, both in terms of locations and selection of species. This photo of one small area where several species were fruiting in abundance was the exception to the rule, and may have been partly caused by the fact the nearby larch trees were dying – apparently sometimes symbiotic fungi go a bit crazy if they their partner trees are dying. (Although The Miller (Clitopilus prunulus) is one of the few species that has been doing better than normal.) Anyway, as things stand, with temperatures still considerably higher than normal for this time of year, there are still great swathes of woodland where there are almost no fungi at all. In some other locations there is quite a lot of stuff to be found, but even in those places there are all sorts of things that are still missing, or doing very badly indeed.

Macrolepiota konradii, fruiting abundantly in October 2014

One group that is doing very well indeed are the parasols – all of them. There has been a second flush of “normal” parasol mushrooms (Macrolepiota procera), including some very large specimens, the shaggy parasols (Chlorophyllum rhacodes) are doing well, and their more obscure relatives such as Macrolepiota konradii, with its distinctive star-patterned cap, are all having their best year in a long time. Other exceptions to the general malaise are the Suillus species, especially the Larch Bolete (S. grevellei).

Only in the last two days have I begun to see a more general improvement, although I say these words with trepidation and wouldn’t be remotely surprised if it’s just another blip. I have, however, seen winter chanterelles (Craterellus tubaeformis) and Jersey Cow Boletes (Suillus bovinus) starting to come through in some places. These are later-season fruiters.

What is going to happen next? I wish I knew. I’m hoping that once the temperature drops – as it must surely do some time very soon – we are going to have a massive glut of fungi, as loads of species that have been waiting for their moment all go for it at the same time. But since predicting what the fungi are going to do is a mug’s game, I’m not going to predict that. 2014 might yet just turn out to be a poor year for fungi. We will see. Soon, hopefully…

Dark Penny Bun, Take Two

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25/09/2014

I have a confession to make. I had to remove my previous blog entry because it contained an error – and those can be serious in this line of business. However, there’s some lessons here. The first is that not all fungi foraging mistakes are equal – if you’re going to get something wrong then the difference between mistaking a delicacy for another delicacy and mistaking a poisonous species for a delicacy is also the difference between a tasty dinner and your last dinner. It was not good fortune that my mistake was the former rather than the latter, but the result of knowing that even if I got something in this region of fungal taxonomy wrong, I wasn’t going to end up being poisoned. It was a mistake nonetheless, and so this blog post will retrace the steps that led me astray.

I’ve long been aware of the existence of three mushrooms very similar to a penny bun (Boletus edulis, cep, porcino). All three are much rarer, at least in southern England, and all of them highly prized – at least as much as their more famous relative, and one case even more so. The three in question are the Summer Bolete (B. reticulatus), the Dark Penny Bun (or Dark Cep, B. aereus) and the Pine Bolete (B. pinophilus). As the years marched on and I continued to never find any of them, I started to wonder whether maybe I’d seen them many times and had been mistaking them for a Penny Bun. I mean…exactly how similar where they?

Penny Bun (Boletus edulis)

Then two things led to my first mistake. The Summer Bolete does not always fruit in the summer, and its name comes from the reticulations on its stem – a network of raised lines. I came across a couple of pictures on the internet claiming to be B. reticulatus, showing a clear, white network of lines on a mushroom that otherwise looked exactly like a bog-standard penny bun. “Ah”, I thought, “so I’ve been picking these up and just not realising what they were. Now I know what a Summer Bolete is.” Except I didn’t. My picture (left) is not of B. reticulatus. It’s just a penny bun with a particularly noticeable network of reticulations on its stem.

And when you’re working by a process of elimination – which is sometimes a legitimate strategy when identifying fungi – then one mistake can lead to another. When, two weeks ago, I found a mushroom with a light brown, suede-like cap, and white pores, I ended up concluding that it had to be B. aereus – it didn’t look dark enough, but then again some of the pictures I could find of that species had caps as light, especially when they were quite small. So I blogged about Dark Penny Buns.

Summer Bolete (Boletus reticulatus)

Then a few days later I found lots more of them – outside a pub where the landlord had taken a dislike and dumped a load of earth on them, in a futile attempt to stop them popping up on his land. At this point, with more specimens as examples, it dawned on me what had happened. These couldn’t be B. aereus because they were the wrong colour. Dark Penny Buns have to be Dark. So they had to be B. reticulatus, and what I’d thought was that species were Penny Buns. The network on their stems is much finer, and brown rather white.

Dark Penny Bun, or Dark Cep (Boletus aereus)

Then, in a twist so typical of mushroom foraging, something else turned up. Yesterday I visited a site where hedgehog fungi grow in great profusion every year, collecting for two foraging workshops in Northamptonshire. They were there as usual, but this time they had a friend – a solitary, dark-capped mushroom that otherwise looked remarkably like a penny bun. And by now you will have guessed where this story is going: this really was a dark penny bun. And it really was delicious.

As for the fourth member of this quartet – the Pine Bolete? That remains on the “to find” list, but the way this autumn is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns up next week.

27/11/2015: UPDATE

The fourth member of the quartet has turned up. Where? On the banner at the top of my main page, of course! I’ve been mistaking Pine Boletes for Penny Buns, it seems.