Best Wild Mushroom for Beginners?!

Parasol mushrooms like this one are the perfect beginner's fungi for anyone wanting to get into wild food and if you give me a couple of minutes I'll tell you why they're so good for people starting out in wild food foraging. Aha what do we have here? Nice parasol, I'll take that. So what makes this mushroom perfect for beginners? Well three reasons really. Firstly it's easy to recognise, there's not a lot else that looks like that out in the countryside. Secondly it's easy to find so it's pretty common and thirdly it's got great flavour. You get a lot of bang for your buck here as well because these are pretty large, there's a good meal in here. These caps can reach up to 30 centimetres across, the size of a dinner plate. It's not difficult to see why they are named parasol mushrooms, when the cap is fully opened out they look just like a parasol umbrella as you can see. You've also got this great big brown raised bump in the centre, that's a really key feature to look out for. The other example was quite clean but you can see the cap of this one is quite speckled, it's a little bit shaggy, that's something to look out for with this kind of chestnut brown speckle pattern which is cracking from the centre and getting more sparse towards the edge of the cap. This example here hasn't opened out into its full parasol form yet but give it another day and it will get there. Looking more closely on the underside we can see that they have gills not paws and those gills are quite deep and also they're quite crowded together as well and they're a clean kind of off-white colour when they're in good condition. Look at the centre as well and you'll see that the gills are separated from the stem in the centre, they don't join each other. The stem of the mushroom has a snakeskin pattern on it as you can see here, that's another really key feature to look out for. Here's the head of an even younger one, as you can see it hasn't opened up yet but it gives you a bit of a comparison of what to look out for. I think the young parasols very much resemble the shape of old-fashioned microphones, what do you think? Something else to look out for, have a look at the ring here which can easily be separated from the stem and you can run that ring up and down, a bit like controlling a parasol umbrella again, but that is a key feature and it's a good way of separating this species from the look-alike, the shaggy parasol. I mentioned the shaggy parasol there which is a look-alike species, it's not poisonous but you need to be aware that with about 20% of people, if they eat a bit of shaggy parasol they might get a little bit of a twinge in their stomach like it doesn't agree with them. So what I would say with that is, if you're foraging parasols for the first time and you're not sure it's just shaggy, what I would do is have a little piece of it, try it, wait 24 hours and if nothing happens you should be absolutely fine, you can eat as many as you like. With the shaggy parasol as well, it is by its very name shaggier than the common parasol, more of those brown little frills going down the cap there. Also it doesn't grow as big, only up to about 15 centimetres across. Here's one that's barely opened up, this one is very fresh. So how do we use these beauties? Well pretty much however you use mushrooms at home. They go great in omelettes, in stir fries, in a pasta sauce, they're really good stuff, the flavour is top notch. When it comes to where to look for, this is the perfect habitat. You're looking for old, unimproved pasture. Old country estates are perfect, you're going to find this in the grass, not in the woodland. Because of their height and size, parasols really do stand out from a distance making them easy to spot for the forager. If you're inspired now to get out there and start foraging for yourself, then why not join our free online wild food course. You can find it on our website woodlandclassroom.com, just look under online courses. As I said it's free. There's another decent one there, we'll take that. This is just a short introductory video though, so as with all wild food foraging, do your own research, look deeper and if in doubt, leave it out. So would you agree now that parasol mushrooms are the best beginner fungi for foragers? If not, let us know in the comments which mushroom you'd recommend as a starter.