Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Perfection in a penny bun
Nothing compares to the king of wild mushrooms, says John Wright — just make sure you cook it right
Arrive in the New Forest at eight o’clock on an October morning and there is every chance that you will spot a mushroom hunter leaving with a basket of penny bun mushrooms. One does not see this so often these days as for the past five years or so, Forestry England has plastered every car park with notices saying that people should not pick any mushrooms, but people still do.
The penny bun, also known as the cep, steinpilz, porcino and any number of other names, is the king of the mushrooms, its intensely mushroom flavour and excellent texture making it the most soughtafter of them all. Somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 tonnes are collected annually worldwide, the variation due to natural irregularities, principally of the weather.
There is big money to be made, albeit highly irregularly, with wholesale prices ranging from £20 to £60 a kilogram. In 2019, one of the best penny bun years I have known, I saw a couple of men loading baskets of perfect, small (and thus high value) penny buns into the boot of their car. As it happened, I saw them in four different places that October, picking every specimen they encountered. To be fair, this was only the second time in 40 years that I have seen such scurrilous behaviour.
Identity parade
For the personal forager, who is legally allowed to pick mushrooms from almost anywhere, finding these treasures is a great joy. I collect a few every year, leaving the very small ones to grow and the mature ones to carry on with their raison d’etre, to produce billions of spores, plus their secondary job of providing a habitat for numerous dependent invertebrates (maggots). They are easy to identify with just a few lookalikes, none dangerous to health.
The penny bun, Boletus edulis, is a substantial mushroom when fully grown, at up to 30cm across. In youth its cap is hemispherical, and the stem swollen at the base and as wide as (or wider than) the cap. The cap is a warm brown, dry and dimpled, looking just like a soft bread roll. The stem is white/greyish, sometimes brown in old specimens, and the tubes beneath the cap white/greyish when young and firm, yellow green with maturity. Other helpful details include the fine, pale, reticulating and slightly raised pattern at the top of the stem, the faintly pink coloration of the otherwise white flesh seen just below the skin of the cap when cut, and a slightly greasy feel to the cap. It is found with oak, beech, pine, spruce and a handful of other trees with which its underground mycelium can form a mycorrhizal relationship.
The only lookalike that might cause problems for the careless forager is the bitter bolete Tylopilus felleus. This has a duller cap with a felty texture, white tubes which turn pink on maturity and dark reticulations at the top of the stem.
pan in addition to the butter/oil and cover with a lid. After 10 minutes, remove the lid and reduce the water until the mushrooms can be fried. The alternative method, one I have experienced on too many occasions, is to cook them for four minutes and serve the tasteless result in a watery gruel. Whether or not to eat the soft and slimy tubes on mature specimens is often debated in restaurants and among foragers. I say eat them.
My friend Thomas, a Danish forager, once gave me a bag of these tubes that he had dried — they were pleasantly crunchy and tasty. Penny buns are easy to dry at home once sliced. An electric drier set at 50°C, on racks on a warm window sill or strung above the Aga works well. Don’t put them in the airing cupboard as they will fester horrifically in the humidity. As with many such dried comestibles, I make a powder from these dried slices for use throughout the year.
Other boletes worth eating include the common bay bolete, Imleria badia, which should be picked while still young and firm. It has a lightbrown and yellow cylindrical stem, dark-brown cap and yellow tubes that bruise instantly blue.
It’s also worth mentioning the common but scary scarletina bolete, Neoboletus luridiformis, a species
“Don’t put them in the airing cupboard as they will fester horrifically in the humidity”
that eats well but must be cooked well to destroy some toxins. Foragers ignore it out of sheer cowardice. In size and form it is almost identical to the penny bun, but the cap is felty and dark brown, the stem is a riot of reds, oranges and yellows with fine red dots at the top rather than reticulations
(if you see red reticulations then it is the lurid bolete, I luridus, which is poisonous, though not deadly). The pores are a lurid red. The flesh and the tubes above the red pores are yellow, but turn a startling inky-blue within seven seconds when cut. Be brave.