Bushcraft Foraging: Dehydrating Mushrooms

Description

Dehydrating Mushrooms is a very simple process that requires no special equipment!

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Video Transcription

by the guys is Mike from mcq bushcraft here and I'm out doing a bit of foraging today in the woodlands and in this video today we're going to go and pick some fungi dehydrate it and actually store it indefinitely for use in the future in the kitchen right in the field and dehydrating wild edibles and storing them is a fantastic skill to have and practice and it really doesn't extend their life and usability in the kitchen at home or even out in the woods and it's something our ancestors really did depend on many years ago and they needed to take food through colder months or colder times to actually sustain themselves in my bag here I've got two examples of dehydrated fungi and these are two jars that I filled up gradually over time one of which I'm still filling and it requires no special equipment at all and one of those chances well over five years old and it can go a lot further than that they've kept in the right conditions but I've made myself a basket the occasion and this is just a clematis basket a very simple rough-and-ready one that i knocked up this morning when I came into the woods there's lots of dead tomatoes on the path in here and I thought the best to use it to actually collect the fungi but let's get going so I found the fungi I've been looking for and this is called juicier or woody is another common name for it or the scientific name which is Oracle Arya regular to day and the name really comes from Judas one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ who hung himself from an elder tree it's a type of fungi that's generally found commonly growing on elder and perished elder like this this tree is here and you can see this fungus growing all the way up this piece of elder all the way to the top juicy is not a funghi that's too commonly known for its taste if you fry it or you know cook it and just eat it as it is it's generally quite rubbery just taste like you're chewing a balloon but it can be dried and crushed and made into soups it's commonly used in Chinese medicine and Chinese cooking and it's a funky really used for its texture but I'm not here to tell you about this specific type of edible fungi if you're going to go through these processes with picking mushrooms on wild edibles and dehydrating them and storing them you really need to tackle the biggest challenge which is knowing what it is you're actually picking and dehydrating is you certainly want to wouldn't want to take anything poisonous and dehydrate it you're probably going to amplify or strengthen the effects of the the compound poison that's within it by dehydrating it so really do want to know what you're doing before you go out and pick these kind of things juicy is a very easy one to ID but there are poisonous look-alikes again but to make that mistake you really have to be quite new to to Jews ear and not really know too much about it but let's pick some I'll put it in my basket and we'll take it home and then explore the methods of how to dehydrate it and also some methods in the field of dehydration as well if you're actually doing in an outdoor living situation so you can see I have quite a bit here and hopefully that should fill the rest of the glass container that I've got before we get home and have a look at a really simple method we can use in our everyday homes to dehydrate this funghi and actually store it it's very simple to do the same thing in an outdoor living situation if I reflect back to an earlier video where we made the fruit leather out of Hawthorne and Blackberry and various other fruits we made a drying rack and we dehydrated the material over the fire and then it was ready to store and it could be put into a leather bag or a container of some kind in our packs and we could eat it and the fruit leather will last for years and years and years especially even longer if you add sugar but let's go home

and get these dehydrated so I'm back at home now and I fired up the log burner gets a bit chilly in this house at this time of year so I usually get this fired up around this time of day and by the evening all this brickwork brick works heat it up and you know it goes up through the bedroom there and it really does help heat the house up I'm running it pretty hot at the moment because many just fired it up so I'll turn the air intake down you know as it gets warmer but if you've got an ambient heat source like this kind of rolling and you can take advantage that free fuel if you get wood for free take a needle and thread and just thread on the funghi just like this

and you can hang these around and the same goes if you're outdoors and you've got a thermal wall you can take the needle and thread out of your maintenance kit and just hang mushrooms and various wild edibles from the thermal wall in the heat that reflects off the thermal wall is really the best place for drying things out you can make or incorporate shelving into thermal walls or hang clothes just above them to increase their height and at the same time you know use that heat to dry those sorts of things out but this is really if you've just got a Wrayburn or something like a log burner this is a pretty small log burner rabens a lot bigger and you can actually buy racks for Rayburn's that you can put wild edibles and mushrooms on specifically for for drying them out for storage and you can see here got some pretty good specimens obviously I'd be here a while if I'm doing this whole basket it's just an example you want to space these a just a little bit there you don't have to like space them out too much and you can just hang them like this you don't want them to lay down if you've got a log burner obviously you probably know if you've got one if you hang them up here

you can get quite a few on that piece of cord and in an evening you'll probably be able to dehydrate all of those and then transfer them to a container to join the rest of them you all fill up a container if it's empty so this brickwork gets really hot and there's a lot of air circulation there a lot of heat and things will draw very very fast I did have a rack that slotted in just that and you could put fruit leather on there and dehydrate that but it's fallen apart I'd need to repair it if I was going to use it in this case but this is a good technique really if you're out in the field or indoors but there is another way of dehydrating them if you don't have a log burner for example and you just have normal heaters and it's even easier really than doing this and we'll have a look at that now this here is just a regular night storage heater I was they still fairly warm as the bricks retained a lot of heat when it was on last night and I've put a piece of cardboard just on top there you can use a piece of cloth as well and obviously this has a wooden cover this nice storage heater so if you're going to put it directly onto the actual metal of the heater make sure it's on a low temperature is not to risk having some kind of house fire so do be mindful but you can just put the funghi just space it out on the cardboard and again when you get up in the morning it'll be completely dry

morning guys it's the following day and our Funky's been on this heater for the duration of the evening and a little bit of this morning as well and it's nice and dehydrated I thought we'd take a look at them so they're not cooked at all or burnt in any ways the heat has just been producing a very low heat for a long period of time exactly what you want really if you're drawing things on a heater and you can see that they've just got no moisture in them anymore they're just nice and dry and these are ready to put in the container so making sure you're in a fairly dry place and your hands are nice and dry you can open up existing container and start putting the fungi in I always make sure the seals are nice and clean for I put diet there we go so our fungus in the jar is dehydrated and there's a very low moisture content obviously there always will be an element of moisture in something like this but provided you keep it in a cool dry place it should be absolutely fine and the shelf-life should be pretty high on it I've got a few jars myself that are 4 or 5 years old a friend of mine who's really into this kind of thing he's out all the time you know picking various fungus throughout the year dehydrating them and storing them he's literally got hundreds and hundreds of jars like this and some of them are well over 30 years old when it comes to washing you probably notice I haven't covered that in the video just yet some of you may be wondering well do you clean them first the answer is no I don't I brush off obvious soil and bits of moss and anything that may be in contact with them and obviously if it's a mushroom I'm picking out of soil I would cut it prior any way to leave the mycelium in the ground and just take away the actual funghi fruit itself and obviously that's really a better technique for picking funghi that resides on the forest floors it's far easier to damage the mycelium which is the root structure of the fun on the ground with funghi that grows on on trees and Deadwood it's far less likely because generally the mycelium is right in the heart wood of the tree and you're just picking the fruit and it doesn't damage from damage them but really don't take as ways as much dirt as you do by picking fungi off the floor when you're picking on the side of the trees most of the time but brush off obvious soil and dirt and prior to cooking I would soak these so the beginning of the day or part way through the dad I decided I was going to use them for whatever I was cooking I take them out and I would soak them in cold water they would rehydrate more importantly and they would obviously get cleaner as well because all the debris and dirt would fall off and sink to the bottom of the actual pot or float and it's far easier to clean them that way than it is to clean them prior to actually drying them out and when they're rehydrated you can chop them as well which is a much easier way of working with them but I hope you've enjoyed this video juicier Funky's probably a poor example to use for a video like this but I wanted to fill up this jar and thought it'd make a good video for anybody out there who'd be interested in doing this kind of thing and the same thing can be done with wild edible plants as well but it's far easier so thanks again for watching and I hopefully see you in another video very soon take care guys