Tag Archives: dark cep

Dark Penny Bun Bonanza!

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Email: geoff@geoffdann.co.uk

30/08/2018

An update is required! Having blogged a couple of days ago about finding lots of large boletes but no Dark Penny Buns (Boletus aereus), today I came across a bonanza of them. I also saw quite a lot of the other things I described as “missing” in that post – plenty of Brittlegills and Milkcaps, Leccinums and Suillus coming through, as well as a lot of poisonous Livid Pinkgills (Entoloma sinuatum). And gazillions of Blushers.

Pretty good ID shot

I had originally tried a spot I’ve seen them before. I found one specimen, rolling around loose having been knocked over by an animal. So I decided to check somewhere else that I’ve previously seen Chestnut Boletes. There were none (but quite a lot of other stuff). Then I headed off home via a different route and was really excited to find about 15 Dark Penny Buns – more than I’d ever found in one place before, and in good enough condition to get a much better ID photo than my existing best one. I was very happy with my afternoon’s work.

Not worth taking these. Much better left to spread their spores around.

Then about 50 metres away I came across the motherlode. Well over 200 of them growing under a row of oaks I have passed countless times before, but never seen any of this species. I do sometimes criticise people for irresponsible “over-picking”, but this was one of those situations where this was almost impossible. Firstly, there was no shortage of large, old specimens which weren’t worth picking, because they were too soft and grub-infested.

So I was only interested in the youngsters, and most of these were at the early stages of infection with “Bolete Eater” mould, which means that within a day or two they were destined to become both inedible and infertile.

Dark Penny Buns being attacked by “Bolete Eater” mould, but still edible at this point

And since nobody else forages in this location (almost nobody else even goes there – it is rather inaccessible, the footpath into it is poorly marked and doesn’t go anywhere sensible. I’ve never even seen a dog-walker there, just the occasional horse rider) I figured I’d take as many as I could carry!

Dark Penny Bun Bonanza

This is the biggest mass-fruiting of one of the big edible prized boletes I have ever seen in one place at one time.

It’s looking good. Let’s hope it stays this way, and 2018 could be a classic mushroom year.

Edit: I found another huge flush a few days later, video here.

Dark Penny Bun, Take Two

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Email: geoffdann@hotmail.com
Phone: 07964 569715

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)

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)

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)

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.