BLACK TRUMPET Mushroom ID + Wild Mussel Forage & Cook!

Hello and welcome back to Catch and Cook California. I'm Kevin and this is video number five in my series Mushroom Foraging for Beginners. Today we're going to learn how to identify, pursue, and cook my favorite the black trumpet. We're going to do this as a collab with my good friends Frankie and Katie from Lost Coast Living and we're even going to end this down in the intertidal zone picking some mussels. Now before we get started, I just wanted to say that one of my viewers, Joan, has just undergone some pretty intensive surgery. She's got a GoFundMe so if you can help out, please do so. There's a link in the description. Thank you. Now I was up here on the Mendocino coast this weekend because I was teaching a group of foragers mushroom identification. These folks found a number of different edible species including winter chanterelles, aka yellow foots, golden chanterelles, and my favorite, black trumpet. At that point, I decided I've just got to make a video on this mushroom. So here you can see one of my clients picking some of these more cryptic black trumpets. You can see how well they blend in and you can also see that they're growing out of tanoak. Black trumpets are a member of the chanterelle family. The mushrooms are trumpet-like when young, petunia-shaped when older, and the cap has a central hollow extending nearly to the base of the stalk. The cap is black when moist, brown in drier weather. The underside of the cap is smooth to very slightly wrinkled but without gills or prominent veins. The flesh is tough, thin, and not gelatinous. The stalk is gray, brown, or black, not yellow or orange. You'll find these on the ground in forests, in groups or clusters, often abundant in central and northern California. These fruit late in the season which makes them ideal for the very end of the coastal mushroom season. And as far as edibility, they are incredible. One of my very, very favorites. They don't have a whole lot of meat to them but what they lack in thickness, they make up for an incredible flavor. Now you will find other black fungi on the forest floor. Some of these in comparison to black trumpets are going to be thick, almost rubber-like. You can see on the left we've got a black trumpet. On the right, something else entirely. This mushroom has a central depression and a very thin stalk with gills. Clearly not a black trumpet. So we searched the Tanoak and found some absolutely exceptional black trumpets. For the gram! What'd you find, Katie? That's beautiful. Nice. Alright, I know it's in the shadows here but look at all those black trumpets. That's only a small fraction of what we found out here. What was your channel? Come on down and plug your crab snaring stuff. So engineering outdoors. So that channel, basically I'm taking my engineering skills and then apply to some of the things I do out in the forest. So two things I love, engineering and outdoors. I love it. Keep this place clean. That's right, keep it clean. We've been talking about all the trash we've been picking up. And then you've got crab snares that you've developed as well. I make my own crab snares, so you'll see it on Kevin's channel. Hopefully we go catch some crab. Yeah, nice. Frankie, how's it been today? It's been great. Found a lot of good mushrooms, a lot of black trumpets, hedgehogs, even some chanterelles. Yeah, we got a lot of happy people out here. Absolutely. Yeah, brother. Should we take a group photo? Definitely. So we got our mushrooms. We're gonna head down to the intertidal zone. We're gonna look for some mussels and then we're gonna cook up a nice little surf and turf right there on the beach. Before we do, I want to give you a couple updates. I'm going to be taking folks out to learn rocky intertidal foraging. We'll do a bit of poke pulling. We'll look for some mussels. We might try to catch an eel or some fish. And we'll do a little catch and cook on the seashore. If that's of interest, hit me up. You can learn more details at catchandcookcalifornia.com. Keep in mind that I'm not just guiding coastal foraging. I will also be teaching introductory spearfishing. So if you want to get in the water, now's your opportunity. Again, catchandcookcalifornia.com. Nice low tide. Today I am joined by Frankie and Katie from Lost Coast Living once again. Yeah! And we're gonna do a little bit of intertidal foraging kind of impromptu. I didn't even bring my waders. Look for some mussels. Maybe check out the sea urchin population. Keep an eye on the water because it's pretty rough out there. There's a nice little bit of reef right here protecting it though. Do a little fishing. Maybe a little poke pulling. Catch and cook. Sounds good. All right. Keeping one eye on the water. We already called the biotoxin information hotline 800-553-4133. And so we know that mussels are good to harvest right now. Got a whole bunch of mussels of different sizes here. We're gonna go for about that size like you find in the store and then cook them up. Simple. Yeah. Sounds good to me. Hell yeah. Now the vast majority of this mussel harvest is actually going to be on Frankie and Katie's channel, Lost Coast Living, so be sure to go check that out. But I do want to say a couple things about mussel harvesting before we get into the cooking. As I always say, the species, Mydalis californianus or californianus if you want to make people laugh, is my favorite mussel to eat. Vibrant orange meat. It has to withstand this crazy heavy surf, highly oxygenated water, and I swear that translates to a much, much better flavor. One of the other things I love about these mussels is that you can't buy these in the store. The only way to get it is to go harvest it. There's no commercial harvest for this species. You could go to a Michelin star restaurant and you cannot get wild-caught Mydalis californianus. So if you want to get them, come on out here and pick them yourself. Give it a twist, and off it comes. And there you go. We're just going to take a couple here, a couple there, and that way we're not cleaning out the whole patch. You're only allowed to use your hands. No tools. No screwdrivers. No prying devices. And what we don't want to do is strip the whole rock and leave these bare patches. It's very, very ugly. It's not good for the mussel bed either. Just take a few here and there. Keep it sustainable. Then nobody can even tell you we're there. Look at that. Katie for the win. Right on. We got quite the bounty. We're about to cook it up, so let's show you what we got. So I'm prepping the mushrooms over here. Frankie's over here prepping the fish and prepping the mussels. Now these are black trumpets. So black trumpets are coming right out of the ground, so obviously at the base it's going to be kind of dirty. I'm going to pull the whole mushroom anytime you're trying to identify it, so it's important to get that base. And now that we know what it is, we're going to trim off the base, get rid of some of that dirt. And these are basically little funnels, and they sit like that in the forest floor, which means any kind of forest debris can fall down in there. It doesn't mean that they're dirty. It's just natural forest debris like pine needles, doug fir needles, etc. But it does mean that we want to cut the base off, split them down the middle, and we're going to use the brush to clean that out. You can wash these because they're very, very thin and don't soak up so much water like maybe a chanterelle would. But we're not going to wash these. We're just going to give them a nice brush. They're very, very clean. Let's start with a dry saute. So there's absolutely no oil in this skillet right now. I just got it nice and hot, tossed the mushrooms in, and they're already sweating. So they're going to sweat out all that rainwater. Once they start to dry out, then I'm going to throw the oil, throw in some garlic, herbs, all that good stuff, some butter, you know. I just got the grilled cheese on here. We got this pot of mussels and fish stewing I think it's ready to go. Nice. There it is. Black trumpet grilled cheese, mussels, and grass rockfish. Beautiful. I had an amazing time with Kevin today. We went out on the Mushroom ID, and we did some muscle foraging. It was super fun, and I'm starving. Let's do this. Look how vibrant orange that is. That's so good. It's so good. My first time going out and actually foraging for mussels, cooking them up on the beach and eating them, and I couldn't have hoped for a better outcome. That was so, that's so good. I'm going to be doing this so much. Frankie's first time going for mussels, but this dude is super experienced foraging up here, fishing up here, and you can learn a lot from his channel. So, Lost Coast Living, check it out. Frankie has been like, I can't even begin to describe how helpful he has been helping me develop this website. He's been managing my website. If you haven't checked it out, catchandcookcalifornia.com. That's how you can book stuff to come out with me on guided forays or mushroom identification courses, but we also just launched a forum on there, which means it's going to be a space where we can all stay connected, where foragers can share information. I don't want it to be a spot burner forum, but it will be a spot where we can talk about foraging, what we're catching, where we're going, where we're catching stuff, and sharing information and keeping this a tight-knit community. Making new friends, that's right. Staying in touch. Camaraderie, man. That's what it's all about. The fish is really good. Yeah, I was just about to get in there. Check this out. Katie's grass rock fish. That was just an extra bonus getting that fish. Yeah, it was. In the first 10 minutes. Yeah. Good fishing. Good fishing. It's nice and firm. Yeah, it's really good. That's a good fish. Let's get into the sandwich. I'm going to dip mine right into this broth. That is my favorite mushroom. It's so dark and just like foresty and so flavorful. It doesn't have a lot of meatiness to it because it's not a very thick mushroom, but the flavor is incredible. I want to say it's like restaurant quality, but I haven't had anything this good in the restaurant in a long time. What he's been able to do for this website, it blew my mind. In like a week, I'm just like, wow, I've got a fully functional website. People can book with me and come out and do stuff, and it's like that's the baseline. It's just gotten better and better and better. I know Frankie does a bit of this on the side. If you want to shop local, support good local people, if you're trying to get a website going, talk to Frankie, Lost Coast Living, and go check out his YouTube channel. We're done feasting. We're gonna wrap it up. I gotta hit the road and go scout for my next mushroom course, but we hope you enjoyed this. If you did, please give us a like, leave a comment, consider subscribing, and until next time, keep the old ways alive. So for those of you who don't know, anthropology is my PhD, which is the study of humanity, archaeology specifically, and that caused me to think a lot about the antiquity of foraging and the role of foraging in who we are as a species. And one of the really cool things here is that in California, mussels show up in the archaeological record going back over 11,000 years ago. They were probably predating that when people first made their way down the coast, but this is one of the oldest California cuisine right here. And what's even cooler than that is if you go back even further in time, all the way back to South Africa, we have mussel in the archaeological record that goes back over a hundred thousand years, which means when our ancestors first started eating shellfish, at least the oldest evidence that we have, they were eating exactly what we're eating today. Minus the grilled cheese sandwich, of course.