This has been a dry year so not many mushrooms have come up. A few years ago there was lots of rain and lots of mushrooms. That doesn’t mean mushrooms are for dinner.
Edible or Poison?
That is the question when it comes to mushrooms. Many look a lot alike and a mistake can be fatal or make you regret dinner with an upset stomach.
As Mike Snyder pointed out: Only eat mushrooms you are positive about. Any new one needs checking in guidebooks, asking someone who knows about them, definitely not an ID app. These are notoriously inaccurate.
Just as with wildflowers, the guidebooks only have some of the mushrooms in them. They tend to favor the really good ones and the really bad ones.
I settle this question by sticking to a few I am positive of: morels, puffballs and chantarelles. Summer is the season for chantarelles.
Enlarging my Known Varieties
My public library offered an evening talk with Mike Snyder of Wildwise Botanicals. He has lots of experience hunting mushrooms, a new book coming out: “Foraging Mushrooms of the Ozarks” and a well illustrated talk. I went.
One of the good things about this talk was it concerned itself with local mushrooms. When I lived in the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan), I ate mushrooms that grew there. Not here. Now I want to eat more of the mushrooms found here.
Facts About Mushrooms
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi. They serve only to produce and disperse spores to spread that kind of mushroom to new places.
The main part of a fungus is composed of slender threads called hyphae. If you allow a slice of homemade bread or roll (store bought ones are full of chemicals to slow this down), you can see these hyphae when you slice through the fungus. If you wait, there will even be minute mushrooms.
Most of the maybe 15,000 kinds of mushrooms are edible. At least, they won’t make you sick or kill you. That doesn’t guarantee good flavor.
The main toxic mushroom in the Ozarks is the Death Angel, an amanita type. It is pure white and a classic shape. There is an egg-shaped part surrounding the base and, later, a ring of tissue below the cap.
However, another mushroom that often forms fairy rings in lawns is called The Vomiter. This is the biggest culprit in mushroom poisonings as small children and pets can easily take a bite. It’s called the green-spored parasol mushroom.
Mushrooms Are for Dinner
This book, officially out September 15, 2026, looks to be a good source for identifying local mushrooms. Even better, it includes recipes for those I bring back to the house.
A few of the mushrooms are mentioned in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“.