A fun day with a couple of fun guys
The art of finding the best mushrooms
Right now you don’t have to be an especially skilled forager to fill a basket with mushrooms. In fact, in some patches of woods they’re so thick the challenge is to not step on any.
The problem? Nova Scotia is home to two species of mushrooms that will kill you.
“Amanita, also called death angel or destroying angel, and the galerina,” said Daniel Albert, a Bedford dentist who has become an expert on mushrooms in the 15 years he has been foraging, and who has introduced the pastime to more than 50 people.
“I always put a bit of fear in them. I tell them there’s only two types of mushrooms: the one you know, the one you don’t know. Don’t touch the one you don’t know. Be absolutely sure about it.”
If you eat a poison mushroom, he said, you have a 90 per cent chance of it being fatal and you need a liver transplant to save you.
Albert forages all over the Maritimes and is lucky enough to live about a kilometre from a fertile area of woods. He’s often there with his neighbour, Franz Roth, who introduced him to mushroom hunting.
“I started seeing mushrooms on P.E.I. when we were on vacation. We were walking the Confederation Trail and I started seeing chanterelle mushrooms,” he said. “I love cooking so we used those and we just got so much flavour, which spurred me on and I got to know Franz. He said he’d show
me a few things and show me the ones he knows. He’s a busy guy, so his philosophy is he doesn’t mess with anything he doesn’t know and he said, ‘once you know these, it’s like the face of a good friend, you never forget it.’ So he sticks to four or five mushrooms.”
Daniel has researched the topic
so thoroughly — he has 10 books on mushrooms, one that was only published in French — that he’s getting fluent in Latin. Like his one-time mentor, he leaves behind more than he harvests.
“There’s my favourites, probably five that I’m looking for, and that varies depending on the season. Early on it’s the chanterelles and if I can find a good quantity, not all bug infested with good meat to them, that’s great and you can get a basket full in a hurry,” he said.
“Then as the season progresses, the belitis start coming out and there’s different types of belitis, and if I can get them when they’re nice and small and firm that’s great. Later you look for the oyster mushrooms or the lobster mushroom, which is the russula brevipes, which by itself is just a plain mushroom that you wouldn’t bother eating. But if this parasite mushroom comes on top of it, it’s like a skin condition. It turns it red, changes the whole look of the mushroom, makes it dense, changes the gills on it, and one mushroom will give you a meal.”
Albert hasn’t found a lobster mushroom this year but has fond memories of finding one last year in New Brunswick.
Sunday morning, he identified one specimen as a tube chanterelle (“It’s got a hole running right through it and the stem is hollow”) and instructed a newcomer to put it in his basket, then rejected a second (“That’s a waxy cap, very wet, very slimy and brittle”) before discovering a tree stump dotted with fragile but delicious oyster mushrooms.
The hunt picked up steam when Albert and Roth decided to lead their little group down a bank.
“All we’ve done is come down maybe 10 feet into a little more mossy area, a little more humidity. The conditions are a little bit different, the light is dappled and that’s all it took,” said Albert. “You’ll find some mushrooms under a mixed forest, others under a clear floor, depending on the light, the acidity, all sorts of things.”
This year has been Albert’s best to date, both in the quantity of mushrooms he has foraged and the different varieties.
“It was very hot, which meant that nothing came out,” he said. “It was very dry, there were hardly any mushrooms at all and then the rain came and the heat stayed. It just makes them bloom so everything is blooming all at once. So instead of finding one of two here, you’re finding patches.”