Are you a fan of mushrooms? We are, but truth be told we have not experimented too much with different varieties of mushrooms and have never picked our own mushrooms. However, we do live on 20 acres in a rural Michigan village; if you know anything about Michigan you know that morel mushroom hunting is a big deal.
Not just Michigan either – the mushrooms grow in many US states (except the desert and deep South). You can find countless articles and You Tube videos about hunting morel mushrooms.
For the past 12 years that we have lived here we have seen a variety of funky mushrooms growing in our yard and in the woods. We have never eaten any of them, usually afraid we’ll pick the one that causes you to get sick! But this year there are a lot of mushrooms growing on our property so we decided to do a little digging and become educated about them, kind of embracing our “up north” location! We do have a neighbor that travels up from his home in Detroit (his home next to ours is used as their summer cottage); he picks nearly every kind of mushroom and his wife cans them. They are a wealth of information so that, along with our Google research, You Tube videos and tips from friends gave us the confidence to start picking.
Wow!
Here is just a small sampling of the morel mushrooms we pulled from the yard yesterday. In total we had about 8 times the amount shown in this photo:
We found this Beginner’s Guide to Hunting Morel Mushrooms helpful. It showed photos of morel mushrooms as well as other mushrooms that are similar but not safe to eat. You will want to be sure that the mushrooms you pick have the cap attached to the stem where they meet, like this:
If the cap is attached to the mushroom stem near the top, it is what is commonly called a fake morel. Don’t eat that one. If in doubt, don’t eat it!
Once we had picked our bounty of morel mushrooms, feeling quite proud of ourselves, we brought them inside to clean. With the pits and hollow stems we wanted to be sure nothing was living inside the mushroom! We put them into a big bowl of water and rinsed them out about 6 times. Then we let the mushrooms sit in the water for a couple of hours to soften any grit that may be inside the pits of the cap. Once they sat for a while we went ahead and rinsed the water in the bowl another 3 or 4 times.
Then we cut them in half. (Thinking back, we should have cut them in half and then cleaned them in the water.)
To cook the mushrooms we browsed the internet for recipe ideas. Since we love mushrooms we wanted to be sure to capture the flavor as best as possible. Time after time we read about sauteing them in butter, so that is what we did. We used margerine (we hardly ever have real butter in the house). They cooked for about 15 minutes and became much softer. Once finished we ate them alongside a pasta alfredo.
What did we think? Oh my ….. morel mushrooms are so good! They are meaty, and very flavorful. To be honest, a couple of times there was a tiny bit of “grit” that we bit into, most likely a piece of sand that had not washed off. It made us realize next time to clean them a bit more. But a little bit of grit did not hurt us, or deter us from enjoying our bounty. We have to admit, eating something that we picked from our yard without having to plant it first was pretty awesome.
Have you hunted for morels?
