Wild Food Farmer
Hedgehog Mushrooms & Sunchokes
Two guests at our dinner party — a Brit and a Yank — had declarations to make as they sat down: “I have an irrational fear of mushrooms,” said one. “Me too,” said the other. “Thank goodness I like a challenge,” said I.
One of my tricks for converting mycophobes is to serve several types of mushrooms in separate bowls.
But each one is cooked the same way with butter, garlic and parsley and served as a mini buffet. Few people can resist the temptation to compare and contrast bite-size pieces of food between courses.
My wife and I were volunteering on a small organic farm in France’s southern Tuscany region. Luisa, the farmer, didn’t believe in letting work get in the way of having a good time. While drinking bottles of local wine over dinner and watching the rest of us — two more Yanks, a Spaniard and three Italians — roaring with pleasure while forking up glistening bits of the mushrooms I’d prepared, our Anglophonic mycophobes began racing to eat their share. At the end of the meal, the Brit asked, “Are there any more of the hedgehogs left?” The hedgehog in question was one of the half-dozen varieties of edible mushrooms we’d harvested the day before with the help of Severino, the local one-eyed forager.
Hedgehogs ( Hydnum repandum) have a sweet, slightly nutty taste and a denser texture than most mushrooms. Noted forager and chef, Alan Bergo has plenty of recipes for this delicious mushroom on his website, www.foragerchef.com.
It’s also an easy mushroom for novices to learn.
There are no poisonous look-alikes for hedgehogs, although you might want to take a nibble to make sure you’re not harvesting a similar species with a slightly bitter taste and darker cap and spines. If you’re in doubt, edible Hedgehogs have a white spore color, but that’s not really considered necessary for field identification.
Hedgehogs have a buff-colored cap that has a similar color range to chanterelles, to which they’re related. The cap will be the size of your palm or smaller and it will have a smooth or sometimes suede-like top surface. Its nearly white stalk — inside and out — will be no longer or wider than your thumb. The underside of the cap will also be white. The mushroom will lightly stain orange or brown where touched.
The clincher is that the underside will be completely covered by tiny teeth that are paler in color than the top of the cap and about 1⁄4- inch inch long — or just the right length for a fairy to use it as a hairbrush. Some think the spikes resemble the fur on hedgehogs, hence the common name. Hedgehogs also go by the name “dentini” in Italy because the spikes resemble tiny teeth.
You can find hedgehogs throughout North America. Foragers in the Rockies may find them in fall. In areas with mild seasons, such as the West Coast, they run through fall and winter. East of the Rockies, they start fruiting in late summer and can keep showing up into early winter. Even in the frosty Northeast, foragers may find them in December.
They belong to a group of mushrooms that I call “the marrying kind,” as they form collaborative relationships with the roots of conifers and deciduous trees; they might be found in almost any kind of forest. Severino had helped us find ours in a forest of mature beech trees with
moss-covered boulders as big as a house. He had been foraging there to put food on his family’s table since boyhood and in his hard-to-understand Tuscan dialect he pointed out places where he had camped in some of the hollows in the boulders while making mushroom soup over a fire.
When we told him that some people from Englishspeaking countries had a fear of mushrooms, he found the concept laughable. If you do any international travel, you’ll find the same odd phenomena: only people in English-speaking countries — U.S., Canada, U.K., New Zealand, Australia — harbor fears about mushrooms. I’ll shed more light on that in a future column.
Harvest Sunchokes
A wild, edible North American plant that most people know as Jerusalem artichoke is not an artichoke at all. And it didn’t come from Jerusalem. The odd name comes from a story of miscommunication that’s too long and boring to relate here.
To get around that silly name some foodie came up “sunchoke” because the plant is in the sunflower family. It still begs the question: Why would any sane person christen any food with the name “choke?” Professional forager Sam Thayer prefers the name sunroot. And given that the Latin name is Helianthus tuberosus, which means “tuberous sunflower,” sunroot seems like the right way to go so I’ll stick with that. Mostly.
Nonetheless, sunchoke, as a name, is still much better than the undeserved middle-school-mentality name of “fartichoke.” If you harvest the tubers of this plant too early, yes, you’ll get gas — enough perhaps to make others choke!
But a smart forager will wait for frost to thoroughly kill the top of the plant to avoid that flatulent faux pas. If you harvest the tubers after that severe change in the weather, you won’t be digging up fartichokes. Instead you’ll be digging up a paleo crop that provided much of the healthy carbohydrates for those original locavores, the Native Americans.
Interestingly, sunroot starch has a sweet flavor, yet evolved in a form that diabetics can safely eat. The tubers are delicious raw and are crispy as water chestnuts. Don’t make the mistake of preparing them like potatoes as some recommend. They make a good pickle or can be steamed or roasted whole and sliced to serve as a side dish. If you don’t have a root cellar, the tubers can stay in the ground through winter or store them in a plastic bag in the fridge for several months.
Sunroots’ striking yellow flowers bloom in early fall on 8- to 10-foot tall, hairy stems. You’ll find them growing wild in sunny fields and at the edge of forests where they spread and shade out other plants. Be aware that other similar but inedible wild perennial sunflower species finish blooming in late summer before sunroots have begun. They also all have smooth stems as opposed to the sunroots’ hairy ones.
Take note of the location while the sunroots are blooming and then come back after a hard frost has killed the tops. The sandpapery hairs on the stems will still be there to reveal this plants secret identity. Bring a shovel to dig them and a bucket to carry them in, as the tubers will be plentiful.
Foraging isn’t the only way to gather sunroots. We can do as the Native Americans did and plant them as a crop. Oikos Tree Nursery sells cultivated varieties of sunroots and other fascinating native crops online. But since they spread, I contain my sunroots in large plastic nursery containers (10- to 20-gallon pots) scavenged from landscapers. Fill them with garden soil but no fertilizer. Mulch the pot and keep it watered during dry spells. To keep these top-heavy plants from tipping over their pot in a strong wind, I snip a few inches off the top when they’re a foot tall to force them into a shorter, bushier shape.
After the stems of the plant have been killed by a hard frost (which is not necessarily the first frost) cut your sunroots to the ground. Then dump out the entire pot onto a tarp. Gather all the tubers except for one or two that get tossed back in with all the soil to grow next year’s crop.