Lately I’ve been reflecting on the joys of my earliest foraging days. Finding wild food is so fun and satisfying! It makes me feel like a self-sufficient badass and shows me that I’m provided for by Mother Earth. Not to mention the taste! In particular, my tastebuds tingle and my mouth salivates with the memory of the bountiful experience of eating wild Amanita coccora. It was early on in my time as a nomad and I was so excited to find out what the natural world had in store for me. I had already found that if I was willing to work for it, I could hydrate myself with clean, fresh water from creeks and streams. I had also found a few treasured herbs like mint and chamomile, and knew that finding food would be part of this path.
One late spring day, I collected a few mushrooms who made themselves known to me on a casual walk through the national forest near the California/Oregon border. I brought them back to my campsite to identify. One in particular caught my attention. It was a gilled mushroom with an umbrella shaped fruiting body (sort of like a portobello) that was a very inviting shade of pale yellow and had a large white skullcap. The mushroom had a pleasant springy feel, no slime, and was big and thick enough to be good eating! I hoped so hard for it to be edible!
Sidenote: I highly recommend a high-quality mushroom field guide and a detailed identification book for foraging edible mushrooms. I chose the works of David Aurora for this and rely heavily on his “Mushrooms Demystified” as well as the field guide, “All the Rain Promises and More” in my mushroom hunting. For me, internet research is a backup. But it can be fun to ask for confirmation and recipes in online mushroom enthusiast groups!
At that time, I had only my mushroom field guide book to rely on, and no internet available. But I quickly discovered that the mushroom was Amanita. This is the genus of some of the deadliest poisonous mushrooms! Known as Death Angel, Destroying Angel and other harrowing nick names, there are Amanita whose toxins cause severe organ failure with no known antidote. Few who consume them survive. And yet… not every Amanita species is poisonous. There’s Amanita muscaria, a notorious red mushroom with white spots that is known for sacred healing and psychedelic properties. And there’s coccora, a culinary mushroom popular with Italian Americans.
When I had read every word about Amanita in the field guide, I was about 98% sure that what I had was the totally edible Amanita calyptroderma, commonly known as Amanita coccora. The pictures in the reference looked exactly like what I had in front of me. This mushroom is beloved by many, but considered an acquired taste due to a “fishy” perception. I’m an experienced mushroom eater and lover of strong flavors so I wasn’t worried about taste. There’s only one way to find out if you like it or not! However, I was worried about mistaking the ID and dying a gruesome death in the forest just a month or so into my rewilding adventure! At that time, I just wasn’t confident enough to eat the mushroom.
I continued to learn about Amanita. They were everywhere! I observed them closely on every walk and hike until I started to feel that I had developed an understanding of these mushrooms. Amanita share certain common traits such as having gills, a skirt, volva, white spores, and a skullcap. Slight variations in color, if the skullcap remained intact or separated into warts during mushroom growth, and the shape and contents of the stem were just some of the details that would distinguish them from each other. For example, one unique aspect of coccora is that the stems are hollow and filled with a cotton or gelatinous substance. The key to finding the Amanita is to notice how they lift the earth as they begin to come out of the ground. Sometimes, ones that are fully emerged are older and will have been snacked on by other critters or will be showing signs of decay. My advice is to leave those behind! They are often in groups, so if you find one or a cluster of them, keep looking in that area. I only harvested the above ground portion down to the volva and left the mycelium below to propagate future ‘shrooms.
A couple of weeks later, my husband and I needed to move camps and so we journeyed into southern Oregon. We found a meadow by a creek to camp in and soon discovered there was a trail through the woods just beyond. On one of my first walks up this trail with our dogs, I spied my familiar friend Amanita- a round mound emerging through and lifting up the leaf litter and branches of the coniferous forest. There was a mix of many trees including madrone and pine. I immediately recognized this mushroom as coccora. Wariness and excitement mingled within me as I made my way back to camp with my specimen. As luck would have it, I had just procured “Mushrooms Demystified” at the local bookstore. It seemed to confirm my identification. My confidence skyrocketed! My husband and I decided that we were going to eat them. Well, we almost decided. The whole process would take another 72 hours…
“Do you think we can eat it?”
“Well, yes… Do you?”
“Yeah. But the worst-case scenario is horrible, painful death. We need to be sure.”
“I am sure, I’m just scared to be wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”
We carried on like that, talking in circles for at least 24 hours as we observed our mushroom and obsessively reviewed the Amanita chapter in the book. Finally, it was time to either eat the mushroom or just decide we didn’t have the will to take the risk. At that point I viewed it as a very small risk and was confident in my identification. The one nagging worry was if it was worth taking any risk of death when I wasn’t starving and didn’t need to eat it. But I wanted to! Some mushroom hunters refuse to eat any Amanita because of the deadly toxin. So, I looked up the average lethal dose and weighed out ½ that amount on my kitchen scale. I sauteed it up and we each took half, which amounted to one bite per person and a quarter of the presumed lethal dose. Symptoms caused by amatoxin can take 8-24 hours to develop. We waited a full day for any signs of illness. When none appeared, I started to worry that we hadn’t eaten enough and that we could still be in trouble if we ate a whole meal of it. So, we re-did the experiment and each ate ½ the average lethal dose and waited another 24 hours. Being in perfect health after both trials, I was ready to commit to eating a whole meal based on this amazing mushroom.
By that time, I had seen several more on my daily hike. I went out into the forest with gratitude in my heart and harvested a whole basket full. This time I sauteed up two big mushrooms and we enjoyed them as a hearty main course with sides of vegetables and rice. As I sat in front of a roaring early summer bonfire, mushroom juices oozed out of the silky, buttery flesh and ran across my plate, melting into the meal and infusing a subtle yet unique, savory and earthy flavor. At that point it was on! My husband and I ate Amanita coccora almost daily for weeks. Each time we foraged on the trail, we would find enough for multiple meals. There were so many I could spend all day cleaning and cooking coccora! Living on the road, I had to be pretty frugal and simple in my cooking. I added them to homemade marinara sauce and froze the jars to be used in pasta, but otherwise simply cooked them up with herbs and spices in a cast iron pan. Given the opportunity I would love to use them in tacos, creamy garlic sauce, chili, sandwiches, soups, and explore other Italian dishes.
Cleaning tip: Do not let the gills get dirty! I made the mistake of putting mushrooms in my harvesting basket that had dirt on the cap as well as the lower portion of stem and vulva. They got each other’s gills dirty and it was almost impossible to get them clean without damaging the soft flesh. In the future I will check for a volva to reenforce my identification, and then cut the stem farther up out of the soil and wipe the cap off as well. If not too dirty, I like to avoid washing with water and simply brush the dirt off.
So that’s the story of how I dared to feast on wild Amanita mushrooms! The process I went through to identify the Amanita coccora cultivated within me a greater sense of self-assurance. I became a more knowledgeable mushroom enthusiast, and forged a much deeper relationship with the natural world. Human beings are a part of nature; we are not separate from it! Along with physical sustenance, understanding this is one of the great gifts of foraging. I hope that someday soon coccora will once again find me in the forest. I’ll be keeping an eye out! And perhaps one day I’ll even make it back to the beautiful meadow in the woods that I was fortunate enough to call home for a few glorious weeks.
I’d love to hear about your experiences finding mushrooms. Drop me a comment below!
