On the trail of mushrooms

By N.L. ENGLISH, Associated Press

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	Staff photo by Jill Brady Rick Tibbets finds young golden chanterelle mushrooms in the woods of Hollis. Tibbets, of Scarborough, is a forager who supplies restaurants with wild mushrooms.
	Staff photo by Jill Brady Young golden chanterelles rest on the forest floor in Hollis.
	Staff photo by Pouya Dianat Candice Heydon walks past logs where she is cultivating oyster mushrooms that will be ready for picking in the fall. Young golden chanterelles rest on the forest floor in Hollis.
	Staff photo by Pouya Dianat Heydon, left, and her husband, Dan, own Oyster Creek Farm in Damariscotta.
	POISONOUS MUSHROOMS EVERY MUSHROOM HUNTER should be familiar with the three most dangerous groups of fungi. These are the amanitas, the false morels and a catch-all category known as little brown mushrooms. Mushrooms in these groups cause virtually all the fatal mushroom poisonings in the United States, with amanitas alone accounting for 90 percent of mushroom-related deaths. THERE ALSO ARE hundreds of other mushrooms that will cause anything from a mild stomachache to severe physical distress, including vomiting, diarrhea, cramps and loss of coordination. Two common poisonous mushrooms of this type are the jack-o'-lantern and the green-spored Lepiota. Although the symptoms of poisoning from these mushrooms may be alarming, they usually pass in 24 hours or less with no lasting effects. You should, however, notify your doctor immediately if you suspect mushroom poisoning of any kind. THERE IS NO quick and easy test that will separate edible from poisonous mushrooms, including peeling the cap, testing with a silver spoon, checking for insect damage or any other folk method. To avoid mushroom poisoning, you should follow these five rules: 1. Identify each and every mushroom you collect, and only eat those whose identification you are sure of. When in doubt, throw it out. Novices should have their harvests checked by a professional mycologist. 2. Strictly avoid any mushroom that looks like an amanita (parasol-shaped mushrooms with white gills); all little brown mushrooms; all false morels. 3. Some people are allergic to even the safest mushrooms. The first time you try a new wild mushroom, it is important that you eat only a small amount and wait 24 hours before eating more. 4. As with other foods, rotting mushrooms can make you ill. Eat only firm, fresh, undecayed mushrooms. 5. Most wild mushrooms should not be eaten raw or in large quantities, since they are difficult to digest. Source: http://mdc.mo.gov/nathis/ mushrooms/mushroom/ To top of story

SCARBOROUGH — After 8,000 years of Chinese medicine, and a few Western scientific studies, authorities agree that the powers of mushrooms are more than legend. Fortunately, they also feed us deliciously. Biting into a grilled, fresh porcini should not be missed.

Chanterelles, simply sautéed in butter, make a fine side dish for grilled meat, and mushrooms like Hen of the Woods can stand in for meat.

The Maine mushroom business relies on two methods: wild harvesting and cultivation.

Maine's forests are haunted by foragers from early spring to late fall, people who have learned the secret relationships of mushrooms to trees, who know to look in a burned-over patch of forest for a special crop of morels in the spring or among the beech trees, oaks and pines for other symbiotic species.

Rick Tibbets, a forager from Scarborough who supplies restaurants with wild mushrooms, said the largest part of the mushroom life cycle is underground, in a root structure called mycelium.

When the earth is 56 degrees, the fruiting of those fine, white roots can start. Mushrooms are that fruit.

Sometimes, Tibbets said, there is no mushroom crop, because the earth hasn't provided what a species needs. The porcini, or boletus edulis, didn't show up in 2004, he said, for that reason.

Others reappear year after year, in a fairy ring that expands annually, spreading out in a circle as the mycelium grows outward from it original spore. Some fairy rings are hundreds of years old.

But mushrooms aren't waiting out there just so we can find them and eat them.

"Its job is to decay," said Candice Heydon, owner, with her husband, Dan, of Oyster Creek Farm, a mushroom cultivating and wild foraging business in Damariscotta. "If we didn't have it we'd be buried in debris."

MUSHROOM 'BEDS'

Heydon uses 4-foot lengths of hardwood logs, set out in her woods, as the "beds" for her mushroom farm, but she can't just plant with a seed. Instead she takes the mushroom spores, tiny little organisms, and feeds them potato agar in a petri dish kept at the right temperature.

Then the agar is cut up and mixed with rye that's been sterilized, until it grows some more. After that Heydon feeds it with sterilized wooden dowels, and when they are well saturated, they go into holes drilled in her logs.

A year later she can begin harvesting her crop.

She grows shiitake and oyster mushrooms this way, selling them at farmers' markets in Boothbay Harbor, Damariscotta, Camden and Brunswick. She also sells her oysters to the Whole Grocer in Portland, Royal River Natural Foods in Yarmouth and Morning Glory in Brunswick.

After three or four years, the now-decayed logs fall into the ground, and another set takes its place.

Heydon also buys mushrooms from foragers, and this year there have been a few who have had some luck finding morels, a prized brown to tan mushroom.

Those she can sell for $32 a pound; they make a sublime meal, the simpler the better to enjoy their earthy flavor.

In Newport, two hours north of Portland on Route 2, Andrew Smith is harvesting different types of oyster mushrooms and Lion's Mane or hericium mushrooms, as well as shiitakes.

He sells them at the Portland Farmer's Market in Monument Square, which runs every Wednesday through the summer.

A Lion's Mane mushroom is like a furry snowball, about the size of a fist, Smith said, and Pearl oysters are clusters of mushrooms that resemble a bouquet, with sizes ranging from that of a quarter's diameter to 10 inches across.

"They're all teeming with medicinal compounds," he said.

HEALTH PROPERTIES

At 24, Smith has been cultivating mushrooms on mixtures of sawdust in greenhouses for just nine months, after he wrote what he called a "killer business plan" and came up with the financing.

Smith's focus is on the nutrients. His lab is working with 60 or so strains of hybridized mushroom spores he just brought back from Shanghai, China, after a conference there.

"I eat mushrooms three times a day," Smith said. He claims he didn't have a cold this winter, even though he has a 2-year-old child in his house who hosts many playdates.

Smith extolled the polysaccharides in mushrooms, a nutrient that feeds white blood cells and helps them ward off bacterial infections.

Research on the potential of mushrooms to ward off the growth of tumors is under way at the National Institutes of Health, according to a research paper by Paul Stamets in the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms.

Stamets, who runs the mushroom cultivating and educational business Fungi Perfecti in Washington, lists B complex and D vitamins (in mushrooms grown with sunlight), potassium, and enzyme inhibitors as other praiseworthy nutrients found in the low calorie, nutritious mushrooms.

USE EXTREME CAUTION

But of course, it is not advisable to run into the woods and pick yourself a dinner of mushrooms if you don't know what you are doing, because some mushrooms are fatally poisonous. Heydon said they work slowly to destroy your liver. "By the time you realize what's going on, it's too late," she said.

Asian pickers mistook a poisonous American mushroom for their familiar straw mushrooms, and several were killed after eating them in California.

Even the weird-looking morel can trick pickers, because of its close cousin the false morel.

This coral-like, rounded mushroom is always hollow and never reddish, as one man Heydon met recently had found out. He'd been very sick from eating the false morel, solid and reddish, though fortunately its poison is not deadly.

Heydon recommends people try a small serving of any new mushroom first, just to be safe. Some people can develop hives from shiitakes.

N.L. English is a free-lance writer from Portland.

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