Happy (last Hour of) August, food & foraging friends!
I’ve been blessed with bountiful berries and mushrooms traveling to both midstate and upstate New York visiting family and friends this month, after missing out on morels, mulberries, and wineberries this year.
In short romps in the woods, we have found a late-summer laundry list of delicious edibles: elderberries, blackberries, spicebush berries, sumac, black-staining polypore, lion’s mane, chicken of the woods, and even a few chunky porcini!
A few useful facts about foraging berries: all composite berries found in the US are edible — that we know of (and no one has corrected me yet on that). That means those aggregate fruits with individual sections like a raspberry, as opposed to a smooth rounded berry like holly berry (which is toxic by the way). All berries with a crown are also edible, which on our coast would be the likes of blueberries and Juneberries, which you can find wild while in season. Blackberries went great on vanilla ice cream with grilled peaches and a pinch of cardamom, and also in a savory application of blackberry sage mustard, a super-duper spread for a roasted chicken sammy.
Two other foraged fruits from this month are both botanically categorized as drupes, which is a fun fact to annoy friends on walks and at dinner parties. Drupes are fruits with a single seed inside, and include everything from elderberries and sumac, both on my August menu.
Elderberry has many purported medicinal properties, but I just love it for its fantastic color and flavor. I churned my berries into syrup to add to a batch of kombucha during secondary fermentation; my upstate NY hosts also uncorked their 2023 elderberry syrup for a fizzy mocktail with basil garnish. We found so much on a lonely crosscountry ski trail that we brought home several pounds and yet left much more still in the woods. I find the dark clusters with their fuschia stems pretty unmistakable but if you’re not familiar with them, you could potentially mix them up with poisonous pokeberry, but those grow in a clusters along a single central stem, whereas the elderberries grow in umbrella-like clusters called umbrils.
Last but not least, sumac is another drupe that grows in clusters along roadsides in massive numbers across New York. While staghorn sumac is native to the US, it spreads so aggressively it is still often considered invasive. Catch these berry clusters in late summer when they turn a deep magenta but before a big rain, which can wash out the sour flavor they are all about. I foraged sumac just behind our Middleburg, NY hotel during a family reunion, and processed some into spice and some as a sumac-ade with honey from my community garden, a perfect summery beverage.
Left/top: Top row, blackberries puréed into a beautiful mustard; middle row, elderberries (which need to be cooked, especially if less than fully ripe) make a versatile syrup for mocktails, shrubs, kombucha and more. Bottom row, sumac and spicebush berries are in season now too.
Right/bottom: Chicken of the woods is one of my favorites for its versatility, here, flexing from pizza to miso soup. Middle row, sticky-capped Suillus (slippery jacks) defy gravity; a past-due giant puffball; and wild lion’s mane. Bottom row: a wild porcini species (there are several) in situ and sliced; it’s also the mushroom on my fungi-loving cat Ninjette’s sword on my t-shirt here (available for purchase!)
My friend’s homestead I spent this past week, located in the hamlet of Westford, New York, is a special place indeed. We waded through creeks and bushwhacked through blackberry brambles and tall stands of goldenrod (which I’m told a nonagenarian in town makes a killer wine from) to get to a magical mossy hemlock forest where we found the elusive porcini. This squat-stemmed, highly sought after bolete has a beautiful brownish-red cap like a wide-brimmed hat and a beautiful buttery yellow spongy pore space underneath. Most importantly, it tastes like heaven.
We also found a nice flush of chicken of the woods, which made a great pizza topping sauteed with Japanese miso BBQ sauce. It also was a great addition to miso soup served on a fabulous weekend getaway earlier this month to Pembroke Springs Retreat. Nestled in the mountains near the West Virginia border, this family-owned retreat run by a Japanese-American family was an absolute treasure, between its onsen (Japanese hot baths), home-cooked Japanese meals and private trails packed with spicebush, whose berries I picked for a spicebush saison beer I am planning to make with a MAW member. The mother-daughter duo who run the B&B turned out to be similarly “mushroom mad,” and we schemed on mushroom-themed retreats and exchanged recipes as the weekend wore on.
As if I haven’t moved around enough this month, I’m writing this evening from Sequanota, aka MAW’s mushroom camp in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands, where the forecast is rain with a 100% chance of mushrooms. Our 100+ strong gathering of mycophiles and professional mycologists have found several hundred species here every year, and this year, 15 or so species are also on the menu, with a massive mushroom banquet prepared by my friend, chef and wild food purveyor Iulian Fortu. Iulian hauled 500 pounds of food – 150 pounds being mushrooms alone – for a meal featuring mushroom falafel, mushroom ceviche, mushroom taco bar, mushroom phyllo pies and even a candy cap-chanterelle cheesecake for dinner that will crown our convening tomorrow evening.
So yes, it’s been another packed month of food, family, friends and foraging. I’ve got more fall fun ahead – this autumn I will have a piece in Broccoli magazine’s Mushroom People II, and am planning more classes with ANXO and Shop Made in DC, so look out for announcements on that on Instagram. I’m also been geeking out on various botanical art forms, and will facilitate a virtual workshop through my project for chronically ill artists on nature-themed “photograms” later this month – check that out here!
Wildly yours,
April
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PPS – one of the oodles of mushrooms we found today at Sequanota is a strongly garlic-scented mushroom called mycetinis scorodonius, which apparently you can substitute for garlic in cooking! Nature is stranger than science fiction.