Woodland Foraging for Beefsteak Mushrooms

Hello and welcome to another video with me Steve England Outdoor Learning. Mushrooms, a subject of great interest worldwide. I'm here in Bristol, a place called Albury Court in Bristol today and we're on the lookout for one particular species of mushroom called the beefsteak mushroom. The first thing that's really important is you have to have a good identification book and know your stuff because foraging can be dangerous but on the same token if you get it right it can be really great fun and it's really nice to be able to come out in this environment and forage for mushrooms safely. So today we're on the hunt for the beefsteak mushroom. So what time of year am I likely to find the beefsteak mushrooms? Well we're in September now and it's the start of the mushroom season so any time from early September right the way through to November. Okay so I found what I think is an oak so how do I identify an oak tree? Well first of all if you look at the bark on the oak tree they have a very deep tread on them very similar to car tires and lorry tires a very deep tread and if you look at the base of the tree as well you'll always find the leaves and this is the host tree for the mushroom that we're looking for today the beefsteak mushroom. So let's go and see if we can find some. So mushroom foraging is not always easy sometimes you really have to work for it. You can check one in a hundred trees if you're lucky you might find one beefsteak if you're lucky. So I've checked four trees and nothing yet but I'm not going to give up like I said you know you have to work for it. So I'm going to carry on now see if I can find another oak tree. That's an oak tree that's an oak tree come on oh hello oh another one okay so these are potential beefsteak mushrooms and what I need to do now is do some ID checks just to confirm that what I'm looking at it is what it says in the book and if I go to my reference book and here we go it's a bracket fungi yes growing on an oak tree yes gelatinous very gelatinous so I'm going to cut the mushroom off now with my trusty knife and all I do is simply just find where it meets the tree and simply slice it off at the base like that and then I have my beefsteak underneath the mushroom you see it's white there that's where they release their spores just there and on the top you have this gelatinous coating of red jelly and one of the other identification factors for this mushroom is when you cut them like that and they oxidize like that they've gone red is when you squeeze them like this they ooze a red juice you see this mushroom blood look at that hang on here it comes there you go you see the red juice dripping on my hand and only the beefsteak mushroom does this okay so we're back at base camp and I've got my beefsteak mushroom I've got my nice little brown trout on the go which I caught down in the river and so I've brought with me some pickled wild garlic flower buds which I got back in the spring some nice cracked black peppers and here I have some lovely blackberry syrup which I made and some cooking oil with a twist of lemon and I have a bit of butter as well sometimes it really does pay not to overdo things sometimes less is more in certain foods and I think that's going to be the case today with the beefsteak mushroom because it contains a lot of flavor and I don't want to lose the flavor of the beefsteak mushroom I want it to come through and I don't want to drown it with other ingredients so I'm just taking all the flesh off the trout this is the easiest way to do it with a fairly small fish like this just without having to go through the hassle of trying to fillet a fish of this size you can simply just run a fork down the skeleton once it's cooked and the flesh comes off in lovely big chunks like this okay so I've got my beefsteak mushroom now and I'll show you how I prepare it ready for cooking and one of the things with the beefsteak mushroom on the bottom of the beefsteak you've got that white coating is where they release their spores I'm going to get rid of that and also that gelatinous coating on the top you see I've got a cross section there so that's going to come off now I'm just going to cut that off and remove that because that's going to be quite tough and I don't want it to be tough like that so I get rid of the spores and then I get rid of the jelly on the top like so and then I'm left with a nice core of meat now you can eat these mushrooms raw they're perfectly fine to eat raw but today I'm going to cook some I have my pan on standby and then we'll get these in a frying pan with some nice Irish butter whoa see how we get on with that that's hot and now I'm just going to season them with a little bit of sea salt some cracked black peppers and I want to give this a little bit of a kick actually so what I'm going to add to it are some chopped up jalapenos just to give it a little bit of a kick and a good old squeeze of lemon look at that sizzling oh the smell it's amazing the smell that's come up if there was only smell-o-vision and you guys could smell what I could smell it's amazing okay so I've had them cooking now for about three minutes and that's plenty and what I'm going to do is I'm not just going to chuck it on my plate I'm going to serve them on a bed of the wood sorrel that I foraged earlier so I've got my nice bed of wood sorrel and now I'm going to serve my butter pan fried beefsteak mushrooms on top beautiful look at that a couple of jalapenos just for that little bit of kick and now I'm going to add my wild garlic pickles a little bit more salt and now the piazza resistance is my blackberry vinegar I'm going to drizzle my blackberry vinegar because I'm going to get that sweet hit and I'm going to get the color too just going to drizzle drizzle all over look at that I think we are ready to go there you go look at that from the land from the river I've got the trout from the river the mushrooms from the woods the wood sorrel from the riverbank everything that you need the blackberries from the local but this literally is a meal off the land let's go sit down have something to eat shall we well there you go so we've been out foraging for the beefsteak mushroom today we found the beefsteak in the end oh wow oh that is incredible and as we've demonstrated today you know going out foraging for mushrooms is fun but you have to do it in a very safe manner and it's really important you guys if you go foraging you must ensure that your identification is 100 carry a book with you do your identification checks and the bottom line is if you're not sure leave it alone forget about it go on a professional course and learn how to be able to do this and if you can do that then you can forage safely and really important that you forage sustainably as well only ever take what you need and not what you want there's a massive difference between the two so wherever you guys are please ensure that you get your identification right and like i said it's fun and you could end up with a little gourmet meal exactly like what we've got today i hope you've enjoyed this video guys and stay safe