Looks like meat, but this is Fistulina hepatica, the beefsteak fungus.
Beefsteak fungus is one of the most distinctive edible mushrooms. It may look and feel meaty but it has a strong, distinctive, astringent taste all its own.
Below is a photo of a typical specimen in situ, click here for a more remarkable fruiting body.
Fistulina hepatica - beefsteak fungus. Typical fruiting body exuding clear red liquid.
It grows out of oak and sweet chestnut trees - and it is probably the tanins in the wood that give the fungus its flavour.
As always, bear in mind that there are plenty of poisonous fungi out there - never eat anything you cannot positively identify as a good edible.
Had a great foray in the heaths and woodland around Worplesdon on Saturday. One of the stars of the show was a broad flush of amethyst deceivers - beautiful colours.
Laccaria amethystea - Amethyst Deceiver
They are often listed as a good edible mushroom, but contain unusually high concentrations of arsenic for a foodstuff. Arsenic is a chemical that accumulates in the body, so ingesting small amounts over a long periodof time can lead to physical and mental degeneration, and while they do add a novel splash of colour to one's plate, they are not so remarkable on the palate.
Laccaria amethystea - Amethyst Deceiver
I met a couple of men with baskets in the woods - they were foraging for mushrooms, but - quite sensibly - were sticking to ceps.
This is an exotic looking little tree, growing in gardens all over England. It originates from eastern north America. The fuzzy, red drupes have a taste rather like sherbet, and can be used to make a kind of pink lemonade.
They are also very useful for dyers - yielding several different pigments and a mordant as well.
A handsome sea anemone from the rockpools of the English Channel. The green colour is actually from symbiotic algae living inside the anemone's tentacles. Wikipedia tells me that they are eaten fried in batter in southern spain, though they are stingy when raw.
This attractive, little winter mushroom is called the velvet shank (the stem is usually velvety in appearance.) It is sold in shops under the name enokitake, but the cultivated mushrooms are forced - kept in the dark so that they look completely different to wild specimens. -> wikipedia!
Velvet Shank - Flammulina velutipes
The ones in the shops have pin-head caps, uniformly white flesh, and very long stems. In the wild they often sprout in the gap between dead elm wood and the bark, and will grow to enormous lengths to find a crack in the bark though which they can emerge.
Morels emerge in the spring, and given how much they sell for, one would hope that they taste delicious. I have found them on a few occasions, but never eaten one.
I first started looking for mushrooms with a set of friends who were (and still are) keen on foraging for wild food. We would go to a nice place and wander round looking for mushrooms, on finding one we would leaf through a field guide, almost always fail to identify it, then move on. Occasionally we would come across something that one of us recognised as a good edible, and we would pick them, go home and prepare a feast!
I always felt dissatisfied at the vast number of mushrooms that we failed to identify, and so, one year I decided to 'learn my mushrooms' I went out several times a week, wandering far and wide, noting particularly mushroomious spots and returning regularly to witness the annual succession of fungi. At first I could identify very little - I would bring specimens home and leaf through guide books for hours, often having to give up without pinpointing what species I had found, but over the weeks I started to recognise some of the more distinctive ones, and the process continues to this day - filling in the gaps, making ever finer distinctions. There are still many that I can't tell apart.
I was identifying more and more edible mushrooms - and finding rarer and less familiar forms. There is always a risk involved in collecting wild mushrooms - every year people die from eating poisonous mushrooms, and most of those people are not idiots: they are smart people who think they know what they're doing - like me! There is also something overly acquisitive about mushroom hunting - you stumble across a beautiful patch of boletes and immediately - whomp! they are plucked and stuffed in your bag, ready for the pot.
These two considerations persuaded me to move from mushroom eating to mushroom photography as my primary form of appreciation - there is such beauty and variety in the textures, forms and colours that I find unending enjoyment from photographing and recording what I find, and pushing myself to improve my identification and seeking skills.
Mushroom hunting is an excellent pastime - it involves spending quality time in some beautiful countryside, gentle exercise, and an almost unending variety of species to find and identify. Every time you go out, you are likely to find something new. You just need to be satisfied with only being able to identify a small proportion what you see, at least at first.
The Fly Agaric - one of the very easiest mushrooms to positively identify.
The down-sides? It is a pretty seasonal activity, and you must always *ALWAYS* be 100% sure of your identifications if you plan on eating anything.
Boletus erythropus - a nice bolette which stains an intense blue when the flesh is cut. Disappointingly, the blue fades to nothing upon cooking, leaving you with a fairly ordinary looking mushroom dish.
Does that count as blue food? When it comes to blueness, raspberry flavoured Slush-Puppies are still hard to beat.
