It’s wet out there this summer, and that’s made for a mushroom bonanza for St. Albert mycophiles.
Scores of fungi fans are expected to sprout up at the Devonian Botanic Garden’s Pine Pavilion this Sunday to take part in the Alberta Mycological Society’s annual City of Champignons wild mushroom expo.
Society members have fanned out across the province to collect and classify all the fungi they can find to present at the expo, which regularly draws hundreds of guests, said member and Sturgeon County resident Elizabeth Lakeman. Many of the edible mushrooms will be made into delicious gourmet meals for guests to try at the event.
This summer’s massive rains have made for a bumper crop of wild mushrooms around Edmonton, Lakeman said. She’s seen scores of red tops, hundreds of poisonous fly agarics (the infamous magic mushroom), and edible shaggy manes (which don’t normally turn up until fall). She’s also managed to harvest some 10 pounds of the delicious hericium mushroom (which looks like a frost-covered weeping willow) from a certain spot in St. Albert.
She even spotted a rare umbrella polypore mushroom (which looks like a cloud of hundreds of tiny light brown broken umbrellas) in her front yard that’s typically only found in China.
“I couldn’t even find it in any of the mushroom books for this area,” she said.
“This year there are so many mushrooms out there.”
Michelle Whitehead of St. Albert’s Untamed Feast (which sells wild mushrooms at the St. Albert Farmers’ Market) said it’s been a strange year for mushroom hunting. The late rains pushed back the start of morel season by six weeks (morels are tasty mushrooms known for their honeycomb-like caps), but made for some huge ’shrooms when the morels started sprouting.
“Into the third week of July, we were harvesting morels the size of my hand or larger,” she said.
“They’re just gorgeous.”
Mushrooms are the fruit of fungi, the main bodies of which exist underground as thousands of hair-like strands called mycelium. They exist in symbiotic and parasitic relationships with almost every plant, recycling dead material into useable nutrients.
There are a lot of wild mushrooms in Alberta, Lakeman said: some are edible, some are medicinal, some are pretty and many are deadly. Many are also very hard to tell apart, even to experts – an issue this month’s rains may have compounded by washing away the telltale colours and scales from certain species.
That’s why she and Whitehead recommend going out with an experienced mushroom forager first if you plan to pick wild mushrooms.
“Don’t go out there and just pick something you think is good and eat it,” Lakeman said.
“You need to know what it is you’re eating.”
The mycological society offers beginners’ classes on mushroom identification, and its members will be available Sunday to try and identify any samples guests bring in.
Sunday’s events will have gourmet chefs turn various wild mushrooms into butters, soups, spreads and other dishes, Lakeman said.
If you want to try cooking them yourself, Whitehead advises you to keep it simple.
“SautĂ© it with butter, maybe some onions, little bit of salt, maybe a little bit of white wine or cream ... low slow heat, get them nice and golden, and that’s when they’re most delicious.”
First-timers should also eat in moderation in case they’re allergic to mushrooms, she added.
Sunday’s expo will also include talks on mushrooms and guided mushroom tours.
The expo is free with admission to the garden and runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Aug. 14. Visit www.wildmushrooms.ws for details.
