Any mushroom hunters here?

[jjkoestler]

Morel season is coming up so I thought I'd check in with my fellow Brewerfaners to see if anyone else will be out looking for fungi. I typically hunt in the Kettle Moraine around Eagle/Ottawa/Wales.

[bball123h]

I used to go, but this guy always steals my mushrooms:

 

http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2008/11/25/5-SuperMarioBros-Nintendo.png

 

/sarcasm

 

I had never heard of mushroom hunting until just now.

[jjkoestler]

Its a lot of fun, and a chance to get outside and do some hiking. I really got mushroom hunting the last couple of years. Morels in the spring and hen of the woods in the fall. Try a morel (if you haven't already). One of the most delicious things on the planet.

 

I'll probably sell a bunch this summer to local restaurants and folks on craigslist to finance my Brewers habit and my trip to Alaska for grad school.

 

http://i225.photobucket.com/albums/dd264/mumicimo/morel.jpg

[thebruce44]

I used to have a friend in college that did quite well selling mushrooms.

[brewerjamie15]

Wait a minute. You mean to tell me I can make enough money to go to some Brewer games and or take a vacation? I'm gonna go find a mushroom gun and start blowing some of those things away.

 

Seriously though- you can make some cash for that? What kind of mushroom is pictured above? How do you sell them? What to look for? Are they all over the place?

[jjkoestler]

The mushroom above is a Morel. You can make $25-$50 per lb selling them. Check ebay now. Most pre-sales are going for $25-$30 per lb. Otherwise, you can sell them on Craigslist or by calling higher end restaurants. You can find them everywhere. I usually look around dead elm trees.

[phxMILWfan]

I dated a girl in high school who's grandfather did this. I thought he just ate them though I didn't know you could sell them. I looked around a little bit on ebay and they are for sale. I just didn't see many with bids on them. That's pretty cool though. Great idea, go hiking, find some mushrooms, sell them and buy Brewer tickets.

[hawing]

Last spring, I found a handful of mushrooms in our yard that I think might have been morels, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between real and mock morels. Plus, our yard is in the middle of Madison, which does not seem a likely breeding ground. I'll watch again this spring and if they reappear I'll post a photo here.

[SeriesFinale]

All my relatives in Vernon County do this; most of them hold on to them for themselves but a few sell them. My wife and I used to go up one weekend a year just to do it for her own edification, I personally could never stand the taste.

[datrain711]

jjbobblehead...where do you normally go in the Wales area? I work in Delafield so I was curious.

[JumpinMacFlash]

I was hoping to go out in the next couple weeks. My only thing is I'm sometimes not sure when to start. I love getting out, hiking in the woods and frying up morels. Delicious.

[jjkoestler]

DaTrain....I go out near Ottawa Lake and in the Kettle Moraine.

 

Jumpin.... I think the early grays will be popping in 2-3 weeks. Ideally you have a week where the day time temperature is 60-70 and the night time temperature doesn't drop below 40. Check out http://www.morels.com/wisconsin/guestbook.html for reports.

[Bikeage77]

ive never heard of this either...how do you know (while hiking, without pics) whats safe and whats poison? What will be great in a great meal, and what will make you want to listen to Phish. The latter is NOT of any interest to me whatsoever.

[jjkoestler]

I have a few field guides and friends who showed me the ropes along the way. The mushrooms that "make you want to listen to Phish" don't grow near Morels. They grow in cow fields. An old rule of thumb to differentiate morels and false morels is "if its not hollow, don't swallow."

[JoeHova]

I had a biology professor who was a big outdoorsman and he always said that the one thing people should never eat are wild mushrooms. He mentioned many times how some of his friends always tried to get him to join their mushroom club and go on their mushroom hunting trips (because he was an expert on fungi) and he said he would never agree because he didn't think anyone could say with enough certainty which ones were safe to eat. He said he dreaded the day when his friends all turned up dead from eating poisonous mushrooms. This was one of the smartest professors I've ever had, so that always stuck with me.

[twobrewers]

I know a gal with a master's degree in mushrooms. (I don't know what it is technically called - but you get the idea)

 

It's always really interesting being in the woods with her as she points out the various mushrooms. However, there are a lot of poisonous mushrooms as well.

 

She once pointed out a mushroom that will make a man lactate as all of the fluid leaves his body before he dies.

[dadofandrew]

I have never heard of a poisonous mushroom that looks at all like the morel. In the Richland Center area, it used to be easy to find 20-50 pounds a day, perhaps even 75-100 if you had a known spot where they grew every year. They used to sell for $5-10 a pound, but that was the early 80's. It was common for guys to go out for a couple hours after work and collect a plastic bagful (like a grocery store would give you). My uncle would "hunt" from dawn to dusk in years when they were plentiful and/or selling for a high price.

 

I am very allergic to them, so I cannot eat them, but they are far more flavorful than any other mushrooms.

 

My dad would sometimes find them along the fence line when he was out doing field work. They are all over, or at least, they used to be. Not sure if dutch elm disease has affected their availability or not.

[SeriesFinale]

If you go, clean the bugs out of those suckers!

[brewerjamie15]

So. Who in the Milwaukee area wants to take a fellow BF.Net member on a mushroom hunt? I'm curious to try this once.

[sgtcluels]

I'd be all over an actual morel mushroom hunt, they are just toooo expensive store bought. Can we also get truffles?

[jjkoestler]

I've never looked for truffles, but its something I could check into. I'm willing to take a few first timers out.

[tristarscoop]

I hate mushrooms but the boyfriend always talked about morels and one year I worked at a larger corporation that had an in-house electronic bulletin board on which someone sold morels, so I bought some and made them for him. You have to purge them for quite a while, I think it was a salt-water bath and it changes the ph levels and forces all the bugs out of all the crevices.

[lodiness]

Morels are really good, when I was a chef up in Door County we used to buy them off of the hippies. Chantrelles were worth even more money at the time, but they were also a lot harder to find. Think we payed around 50-60/lbs. for chantrelles. Truffles are great, if you can find them.

[brewers4eric]

I'm not a mushroom eater, but hunting morels is very common in NE Iowa. I know a few spots where you can do a "trifecta", which includes turkey hunting, trout fishing, and mushroom hunting.

[SenatorShriv]

I'll probably combine morel hunting with one or two canoe trips this spring along the yaharaa, kickapoo or maybe the Wisconsin.