Mushroom Foraging

Description

http://www.selfrelianceoutfitters.com

The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning guys I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school I'm out here and a piece of woods today in the wildlife area and a mushroom hunting and I've had lots and lots and lots of questions over the years ten years I've been putting videos on YouTube about mushrooms eating mushrooms identifying mushrooms and I've stayed away from that topic for a long time because I really truly believe that in a basic survival scenario you have no business worrying about mushrooms you really have no business worrying about plants in a 72-hour type scenario because you shouldn't have to eat you should only be worried about water core temperature control shelter signaling for rescue or navigating your way out and sulfate things like that but longer-term and becoming a better woodsman you want to understand what fungi is edible in the woods in your area and there are lots and lots of edible mushrooms out there we have a kind of a phobia of mushrooms in the US it seems like compared to places like Europe and really my interest got piqued on mushrooms really hard when I was in Sweden last year talking to a mushroom expert over there and this year I began to do some studies in the Eastern woodlands looking at different types of mushrooms and so I guess this video is really kind of advice about how did I go about doing that how did I go about learning mushrooms without going to some expert in the US and saying show me what's what well really it's kind of like the advice I give people when it comes to plants learn the ones that are really really poisonous because there's really only a few in the u.s. at least in Eastern woodlands there's only a few and I need to type mushrooms that'll really really jack you up you know there's a several mushrooms out there it'll make you sick they'll make you throw up they'll give you cramps they might make you wish you were dead but they're not gonna kill you and again different people react different ways to mushrooms so I'm not telling you to eat the same things I eat this is not a identify this mushroom and eat it type video this is just a video to talk through what I do when it comes to mushrooms and today I've kind of found a mushroom that is very plentiful in an area right here and the first thing I do with a mushroom is I try to find one that's either broken off already alright break it off with a stick and move it over onto the ground without touching with my hands so that I can then number one photograph very well with my iPhone and then number two I always carry a really really good reference manual like this Audubon Society which is the one recommended by most of the experts in this field which I'm not and I try to compare it to photographs and descriptions within this book and so I found this one today and this is a milky type mushroom and I can show you the picture here that I've kind of compared it to and I've went through and I've read the description the description absolutely matches this mushroom so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to kind of walk back through this book real quick for you guys and if I believe that this mushroom is what it is and it almost looks identical to this on the ground link sideways it's got the same sunken caps as these as this other mushroom on the same page and most of these mushrooms are kind of in the same family in this book and so now I'm gonna go to page 685 and look up this Tiger forest milky mushroom and it's on page 685 so I turned back to page 685 and I start to read through the description and look at the mushroom up-close-and-personal once I've determined that it's not a poisonous variety or doesn't appear to be because I don't want to touch it if it's poisonous so I go to 685 and I look at this description and it says that it is flat or sunken and almost they shaped which you can see by this one it is sunken and it's turned into kind of a up upward base

it's got minutely velvet 'add surface it's got wrinkles at times orange or brown in color I would give it that for sure sometimes becoming cream color thick an orange brown or paler white when it's in first bloom elliptical ornate sports white okay sport pattern is something that you can do by taking the mushroom home cutting the base of it off cutting a stem off putting it under glass

so that it releases its spores onto a piece of paper and see what color the spore deposit is that helps you positively identify the mushroom but looking at this looking at the gills looking at the way the description is on here I'm

very confident at this point that that's what this mushroom is now knowing where these are at I don't have to pick a bunch of these today that's why I've got the phone with me I'm gonna take a bunch of pictures of this mushroom in different stages of its life smaller ones bigger ones older ones ones that are just coming up because there's a bunch of them right here probably 30 or 40 of them right here in this area then I'm gonna go back home and I'm gonna pull up on the internet this species and look at each individual species and try to compare them on mushroom expert calm places like that that have really good picture and information and compare by 2 or 3 different sources to the pictures that I have and exactly what I remember about the mushroom because I'm gonna write some things down you know things that I would write down is it seems to have a milky deposit within the gills latex it's got this sunken shape on the top it's got gills that are fairly widely spaced whether they're connected to the stem are not connected whether the stem is Club shaped or straight the color all those types of things are things I want to write down in my notes and then I'm gonna pull out my phone and again I'm not a big fan of phones for navigation but for this kind of stuff I'm going to pull my phone off this tripod and Mark the location these mushrooms on my GPS because if I go home tonight and research it and I think it's a good edible mushroom I'm going to come back tomorrow and probably take at least a sample and eat a piece of it and wait a few hours and see how my body reacts to it and that's the other side of this coin is when you find a mushroom that you think is edible if you're not sure what it is you don't need a ton of it and even when you come upon a mushroom that you're knew exactly what it is but you've never eaten it before you don't need a ton of it you eat a little bit of it and see how your body reacts to it because you just don't know how it's going to react if you've never had that in your body before so we'll talk further about these in just a few minutes let's explore some more because what I'm really looking for today is some chanterelles okay here's the one we're looking for this is a chantrelle very very easily recognizable mushroom that looks like the gills kind of which aren't really gills but they run all the way down the stem it's orange in color and if you find one you generally will find quite a few of them and I'm gonna look around right here cuz I've already got three of them in my bag the collection bag here I'm gonna collect a few more if I can find them okay now we just hit the motherlode chanterelles here area and just start picking them put it in my basket here and the thing about mushroom hunting is first of all be very careful and make sure that you look at everything you put in your take-home bag and make sure you identify what you're actually grabbing only pick the best of the best if it's slightly wrinkled up or dried up don't take it take the younger nice ones remember that mushrooms are very much the fruit of the mycelium under the ground so they're gonna come back this is a really really nice specimen right here a beautiful big orange chanterelle gorgeous so we're gonna be able to picking up right here in this area I quit stepping on them to fill up this container and that will be more than I need and then I'll mark this spot again on my GPS so that I know where they're at next season or later in the week there's another great big - great big list side by side right there okay what I came out here for besides hunting those chanterelles was for this guy right here this is a cauliflower mushroom and it is edible again they don't advise you to eat mushrooms raw and there's lots of reasons for that from digestibility to toxins that may be in the mushroom before it's cooked nevertheless a lot of people eat mushrooms raw every day I'm not going to eat this raw because I've never eaten this particular type of mushroom before even though I know it's edible what I'm gonna do is I'm going to try an experiment I brought some things out here with me to cook it and I'm just gonna fry these gills kind of like potato chips

stay with me so what I'm doing is they just brought an MSR rocket stove out here a little bit of oil Pathfinder skillet and I'm going to basically just heat this oil up in the skillet with this rocket stove until it's crackling when frying oil then I'm going to take this mushroom that we picked not even five feet away here and I'm gonna process a few chunks off of that and fry them up so that in and I'm just gonna take a couple of these flaps off of here cut them off clean the dirt off of them kind of lay in here to the side for a minute

these guilt

things are what I'm after and if there's a little dirt on them I don't really care about that to be honest with you I don't work too much about dirt and I'm not going to eat a lot of it because I've never eaten it before so I don't know how I'm gonna react to it so I'm just gonna eat you know four or five chips and see how my body reacts to it and go from there pretty simple easy way they cook them up we'll see how they taste when we're gone I don't want to overcook them but I don't want to undercook them either they say this stuff is kind of a chewy mushroom it's got a lot of cartilage like texture to it it's tough to get it tender so I'm not gonna worry about getting it tender try to slow cook and I'm just gonna make it crunchy instead and eat like that all right I think we're gonna call that good take these dudes out here and put them on this Shimoga drain cool down we'll give them a shot see what happens

alright guys well let's do you dudes cool down a little bit see we got I'll tell you what not fall off a potato chip be honest we go WOW if I brought the salt on here game things would've been great Wow yeah I was really really good like I said a little seasoning on those things that would've been money okay right now that mushroom is going in the bag and corn to the house guys I really hope you enjoyed this little foraging adventure with me today just thought I'd bring you out here in the woods with me again I don't talk about mushrooms very much and I've really just started learning a lot about them recently I've always been a morel hunter and things like that but you know chicken of the woods that kind of stuff that you grow up with common in Eastern woodlands but some of the more diversified species of things I've just started to study myself really hard but there are several species probably ten that you can identify pretty easy that don't have poison look-alikes necessarily one of them is this cauliflower type mushroom that I showed you a minute ago and another one is the chanterelles pretty easy to identify most of you probably already know what morels look like chicken of the woods things like dried saddles all those are pretty hard to mistake for something else unless you get all of the false morel and they're very edible and they're multi seasonal you can find a lot of these mushrooms throughout different seasons throughout the early spring to the summer and through the late fall as well and there's other species out there as well that I would encourage you to explore but what I would encourage you to do is never eat a mushroom that you do not know exactly what it is never put that in your mouth don't pick up mushrooms or handle mushrooms with your hands that you haven't been able to at least identify as non-deadly poison and then make sure that if you do try a new mushroom that you only try small amounts at a time even though it's something edible like I did today with this cauliflower mushroom which I'd never eaten before even though I know it's an edible mushroom and it's considered to be you know a choice edible mushroom like that I don't know how my body is going to react to it until I do I'm not going to eat a lot of it I'm gonna keep the specimen with me I've got pictures on my phone if something were to happen at least I know that's the only thing I've eaten that's the reason I didn't fry up any chanterelles at the same time because I want to know that if I get sick that's what made me sick and give it to other people to be able to identify when I do get sick so that I can get treatment those things are all important to understand and then again carry a field guide carry a field guide with you that you can trust the Audubon Society field guides probably the best one out there as far as I'm concerned to at least get really close then take pictures go home do research mark the spot on your GPS and go back it's exactly what I did with this cauliflower mushroom I was positive I knew what it was the day I found it which was yesterday I think it was all day before but I took pictures of it from different angles things like that looked it up my field guide went home compared that on the Internet to trust one of these sites on the internet because they're not all trustworthy but some place like mushroom mushroom things mushroom expert calm is the name of it that I use I've got a link save to it on my desktop those sites are trustworthy and you can use those to cross-reference your manuals cross-reference what you see in the woods and then make your own decisions but make intelligent decisions before you eat anything that's unidentified I'm Dave Canterbury self-reliance offers in the Pathfinder school I appreciate you join me out of the day for this video I appreciate all the things that you do for our school for our family for our business all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends I'll be back to another video as soon as I can thanks guys