September Mushroom Hunt | Come And Learn Which Toxic Mushrooms Not To Eat! (+ a few edibles!)

I love a montage. Yeah. Um, good, okay, I think that's all we need. Woo! Right, let's do it. Oh, Tim has already eaten all the mud. Hi guys, it's September, which is a perfect time for mushroom picking. We've had loads of rain in the past couple of days, so we've come out to the woods to see what we can find. Let's go. Oh, there's some mushrooms over there. I think these ones are sulphur tufts. So, these are one of the most common mushrooms that we find, and they're a toxic kind of mushroom called sulphur tuft. Really, really easy to identify. They grow down in clusters on dead wood, and they've got these kind of lurid, off-yellow caps with a slightly orange centre. And if we pick one, you'll see they've got almost like a dirty, bluish kind of colour underneath the cap. So, if you see these ones, just leave them alone and keep going in search of the edibles. Sulphur tufts are one of the most common mushrooms in the UK, and because they're so toxic, it's good to get really familiar with them. If ingested, these little mushies will cause sickness, stomach cramps and even temporary paralysis for at least a few days. They could potentially be confused with edible mushrooms like honey fungus or brick tuft. Look for that yellow stipe with no ring, the tightly packed, off-yellow gills with a blue tinge, and the yellow cap with a drop of orange in the centre. They also drop dark brown spores, so you might see some brown or blackish staining around the edges of the mushroom. Sit in here. No, I couldn't. It's very small. Sit in here. And have a cup of tea, though. Oh, luxury. So, I think these are the first mushrooms that are going to come home with us. These are a type of belete mushroom, and they're called red cracking beletes. And they haven't got the best texture in the world, but the flavour is pretty good. We know they're a member of the belete family because the underside of the cap doesn't have gills, it has these kind of tubes, which form a kind of sponge-like surface. And they're bright yellow, and the reason they're called red cracking beletes is because the top almost looks like it's been cracked. They've kind of got a reddish tinge to them, and then there's another little reddish tinge at the bottom of that yellow stipe as well. So, I'm going to gather some of these because I can see plenty, and we'll cook them up later. The belete family contains some delicious edibles, like the porcini and the bay belete. They're a great family to start with for beginner mushroom hunters, as it's a relatively safe family to forage from, with only a few toxic members, like the devil's belete. Our red cracking beletes can be identified by their brown caps, with cracks showing a yellow flesh underneath, large yellow pores, and a yellow stem that turns red at the base. Oh, I just nearly decked it. But look how big they get. I mean, I'm not going to pick that one. It's already kind of out. It's already out. But look, it's huge. So, if you see here with this mushroom, if I take off a bit of that underside of the cap, it's so squishy and gross, and you're not going to want to eat that. It's just going to turn to, like, slime in your frying pan. So, some people will peel off that layer, and they'll just cook the cap, but I don't think we're going to bother doing that in this case, because even the cap is a little bit squishy, and they don't hold their form that well anyway. So, we're just going to take this little guy, add him to the collection, and off we go. We also spotted this incredible panther cap. It was pretty old, and had been munched by slugs, so it's lost some of its defining features like the ring that would usually sit around the stipe. It's so important to only ever try identifying mushrooms when they're in the prime of their life for this exact reason. You want as many clues as possible to help you arrive at a positive ID. Anyway, this is another toxic mushroom which contains psychoactive compounds. Like the fly agaric, it has a history of being used for spiritual and religious purposes, but it isn't one to mess about with. It can cause vomiting, stomach cramps, and acute respiratory failure. Look for a brown cap with white spots, white gills, and a white stipe that becomes fleecy with age, as well as a smooth ring that sits around the stipe. A little gushula that's called the sickener, and you can probably tell why it's called the sickener, because it's not going to go down too well, guys. So, definitely not one we want to eat, but it's so beautiful, so let's have a closer look at it. So, the sickener is a member of the russula family, which is also known as the brittlegill family, and the distinctive features of that family are a simple white stipe, so literally, usually, they just look like little stubby pieces of chalk, and then very brittle white gills, so you can see they're pure white underneath, and if I run my finger along them, they're going to kind of flake off, because they're so brittle, and they'll end up looking like little chopped almonds in the middle of your hand. The russula is a really interesting family, because it is one of the only mushroom families where we can do a bit of a taste test, so only if you are 100% sure that you definitely have a member of the brittlegill or the russula family, you can take off a tiny little bit of the mushroom, and you can nibble it, and you can even do this with the sickener, and it's going to taste incredibly spicy, so if you're chewing it, and you get that spiciness, you know you've got a poisonous one. So these are called chanterelles, so I just got my hopes up, because I thought, maybe we've got some late chanterelles going on, but as soon as I kind of got up close to them, I could see they were a bit too orange, and not really yellow enough, and then they just lack all the classic signs of a proper chanterelle, so they've got real or true gills, instead of grooves on the underside, and also the inside of the flesh isn't white, it's orange, so we're going to leave these ones here, because this is another one that's going to make us sick. Fingers crossed for edibles, please everybody! These little mushrooms can be pretty infuriating to find, especially when you're on the hunt for true chanterelles, but their bright orange colour stand in contrast to the bright yellow colour of the true chanterelles, and the false chanterelles has these gills that can be pushed to one side, whereas the true chanterelle has grooves that can't be moved. I've also just spotted this baby beefsteak mushroom, I'm not going to forage him because he will literally grow this big, and be just the most gorgeous edible, which is a really good vegan replacement for beef. So what we're going to do is we're going to leave him to grow a bit, shall I cover him up? That's so sneaky, isn't it? I'm going to cover him up so no one else forages him, and then we're going to come back and we're going to forage him in a couple of weeks. Okay, so we're just literally building a little den for our mushroom, because he's right on the side of the path, and I know that if someone walks past, they're going to want him. So, let's build him a den, we'll build him a little house. Well it wasn't the most successful mushroom walk in the world, but you can always learn something no matter what you find. We went home with a beautiful basket of red cracking beletes, which I'm going to fry and have on toast, and I can't wait to come back in a few days to see how this beefsteak mushroom is doing. Thanks so much for joining us for the adventure today, I so hope you had a good time. Please do consider subscribing, and let me know in the comments what you'd like to see next. I'd absolutely love to connect with some of you a little bit more, I feel so excited about being over on this platform, hopefully a bit more regularly than I was last year, because I literally posted one video last year. Sorry. We're going to drive the whole way backwards. Yes. I'm scared. Me too.