Harvesting the Golden Mushroom: Chanterelle Foraging 101

Hey my friends, today we're getting out to forage one of the forest's golden treasures, the chanterelle mushers, but before we do there's a few things I want to share with you about how to find them, where to look, and what to bring with you. Are you ready? Let's go! Before we get started I want to let you know that this is my favorite harvest of the year. I love getting out in the forest, hunting down these golden treasures, and bringing them home to make feasts with. This is a great way to tune in with the wild in your life, but you've got to be in the right forest and you've got to have the right gear. So let's start with the gear to begin with. A mesh bag or a basket is essential because we want to allow the spores to come out and travel around the ecosystem so they can help build more mushrooms. You're also going to need something to clean up the mushrooms with so I've got myself a handy dandy little mushrooming knife. In this case I've got a little brush on the end and a curved blade. This is a beautiful knife. You can see I have it attached to me because I've lost so many of these beautiful mushroom knives in the forest, but this time I am not going to let that happen. So I have it on a little extension cord so I make sure it doesn't leave my side at any time. Next we've got to make sure we have the right gear. So I've got nice boots. I tend to get my feet wet when I'm out mushroom foraging so having boots and having kind of water protective strong pants is ideal. As well keep warm and have some kind of beverage time. Don't go out late in the evening. I've done that a couple of times and lost my bearings at twilight zone. I'm like where am I in the forest? I'm going to stay here overnight. So make sure you've got enough time and you're in the right ecosystem. So let's talk about that. When it comes to looking at the understory of a good chanterelle forest we also don't want to see a monocropping of one type of plant aka tons and tons of sword fern or tons of salal. We're looking for a mix of many different kinds of understory. Last thing to think about is make sure you've got your phone so you can take some photos of the area. You identify some of the plants. Also put a little GPS marker on your maps so you can come back and find those chanterelles again. All right let's go. I want to help you identify them and get more. You got your basket? You got your knife? You ready? Come on let's go. All right here we have our first chanterelle. It's tucked into the understory. I want to give this one a little offering. Say thank you mushrooms. I hope to find your friends. Maybe there's a couple more buried close by and I want to just give you a little identification. So we can see that it has this cap that is a golden apricot color and as we pick it I don't tend to cut it. I tend to just rock it back and forth like so and pull it out and then I'll trim it up later. You'll also see that on the underside it has these ridges. These are false gills. They look like gills but as you can see they come at different places all along the stem and they land at different places and uneven consistency across the margin of the cap. This is an indicator. If it's got true gills they'll be even at the stem and even at the cap and this will be a false chanterelle. Now that we found our first mushroom I want to show you how to clean it up. First things first we're going to brush it off and get rid of any forest debris. So all these little pine needles and all this along here. We're also then going to take our knife and just trim off the little bits of dirt along the bottom. That's what I want to put into my basket nice and clean. If I put dirty chanterelles in even if I have all the rest are clean but one dirty one they'll all get dirty and it's a lot more garbling and processing afterwards. And there we go first one in the basket. A little notable getting out in the forest you're often going to find all kinds of other mushrooms. I highly highly recommend that if you don't know what it is you don't put it in your basket and even if you do know what it is and it's not a food mushroom that you want to eat you don't put it in your basket and you really just focus on one to two mushrooms at a time. You might find an abundance of something yummy and you totally want to harvest it but in this case I've got another species here. This is a type of slippery jack it's kind of like a bleat it's got that spongy bottom. This is an edible mushroom but it's not very tasty in my opinion so I'm not going to harvest these but there's a whole bunch of them just kind of chilling out on the forest floor right here. Nice to notice see where the mushrooms are at in their larger season but also leave those ones alone. I found some let's go. You can see I found a whole bunch I put right here and I'm starting to get needles in my basket so I'm going to clean it all out before I add them all in. Even as I'm making this video though when I flip my camera around you can see there's mushrooms all over the place you just gotta keep looking. Sometimes you'll get past them three or four times and then boom there they are. Look at this nice little beautiful chanterelle. How gorgeous is that? So because this is the best spot I found so far I want to give a little example of what to look for and what not to just in the ecosystem. So first off where all these chanterelles were was a nice little grooved hillside where we saw a little bit of space some organ grape but not a ton whereas when I start to look over here you can see it gets really really thick with the organ grape and that's not going to have chanterelles. So even within the same ecosystem we've got a lot of organ grape here no chanterelles. Look over at that little hillside where my basket is lots of chanterelles right. Here's an example of I noticed a couple right here and then I realized I was in a full-on honey hole when I see another one there another little one there a couple under there and a whole bunch of mushrooms right here here here and over here. So sometimes you'll find one and it'll point you to a dozen more mushrooms. Amazing find. This is usually when I leave my basket in one spot like so and I start walking around the peripheral to see how many mushrooms I can find. A quick note sometimes you get a little excited and you step on beautiful mushrooms so be careful where you step especially when you're around some beauties. Look at these ones they look so good until I crush them. All of these in this one little five meter area. Sweet. Thanks for joining me in getting out and finding this golden treasure of the forest. Chanterelles are an abundant and beautiful resource that are super empowering when it comes to connecting with wild food getting present in an ecosystem and really building on that appreciation for the natural world. So I hope you get out and find some of these golden treasures and remember you got to have the right time of year the right amount of rainfall the right amount of warmth the right ecosystem the right environment the right clothes and the right attitude to find a good patch of golden chanterelles. Let me know if you've found any of these mushrooms how you like to work with them what your favorite way to process and eat them is. One of mine that I'll just give you as a quick tip actually I'll use this one is instead of cutting them when I'm sautéing them I like to split them down the middle like so they have a natural break and I will sauté my mushrooms all in pieces like this. I'll take one mushroom and just break it down. I find this adds to the mouthfeel and better flavor than chopping them up but let me know how you like to process your chanterelles and any stories you have you want to share in the comments below. Alright peace, power, all that good stuff. May you get out and find mushrooms. May the forest be with you my friends and may you live long and prosper. Ciao for now. you