IT’S THE SEASON FOR GOING WILD!
The much-anticipated mushroom season has finally arrived. Freshly picked wild mushrooms, such as boletus, matsutakes and Collybia albuminosa, are at their best throughout the rest of the summer.
The majority of wild mushrooms come from the remote mountain forests of Yunnan Province in southwest China during the rainy season. You can find more than 250 species of edible fungi in Yunnan, about two-thirds of the total in China and half of the world’s.
People in Yunnan eat a lot of mushrooms, not even leaving out some of the slightly poisonous species like
that can cause hallucinations and gastrointestinal poisoning if consumed raw or undercooked. They even joke about seeing small people in their heads after eating the wild mushrooms. For the locals, not eating mushrooms in the summer is living in vain for the entire year, and the delicacy is worth the risk.
Today, you don’t have to travel to Yunnan to enjoy precious mushroom delicacies. Modern airfreight has enabled fresh batches of wild mushrooms to arrive in big cities like Shanghai every day.
In addition to sampling the seasonal mushroom menus in restaurants, supermarkets and online grocery services are also selling unique fresh and wild mushrooms that cannot be found at other times.
The season’s best
The mushrooms started to enter the markets in Yunnan in May, and the months of July, August and September are the peak time to enjoy the best mushrooms. The amount of both wild and artificially cultivated mushrooms harvested in Yunnan this season is enormous.
The king of mushrooms today is no doubt the or matsutake mushroom. With a distinct aroma and flavor, is a true celebration of the mushroom season.
It takes five to six years for to grow, and their requirement from the environment is very specific and demanding. The mushrooms can only be picked from the wild, and they are quite hard to find in the forest. Artificial cultivation of the species has not met with success.
But a few decades ago, didn’t even have a proper name. It was ignored by mushroom pickers, who called it stinky
and didn’t bother to pick up these mushrooms from the soil.
A lot of Chinese people learned about
through the 2012 food documentary “A Bite of China.” It was featured in the first episode through a very ceremonial narration that traced how made its way from the remote mountains to the dinner table. The documentary sparked a craze in China.
The price of varies according to size. The bigger ones, with a length over 10 centimeters are three times more expensive than smaller ones of 5 centimeters. August is the best time to enjoy because the price is at the lowest.