Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Mushroom hunting in Germany

Most of the rules for mushroom hunters in Germany are common sense rules, if you think about it.

For personal use only, which they set at a pound per person. No picking in nature reserves, where a fat pictogram at every access road makes this abundantly clear: a big mushroom inside a red circle and a bar across the whole image. Also off limits are new tree plantations.

Of course, you'll run into groups of guys with big buckets, who go through whole sections of the forest, filling up the containers with the best mushrooms, which they then sell.

That's illegal, which creates a choice: do you take a picture of them and their car and report them?

Back to our own quest. In the past, we played it safe, which means bolete, chanterelle, and champagne.

This time around, having mastered some German mushroom guide web sites, or so we thought, it was time for something more exotic. Bright orange and deep purple fungi graced the basket, as well as some that looked like a lemon skin on an all white stem.

After some serious research, the lemon top was discarded, it was edible but barely. The purple is for another day.

The bright orange ones went into the skillet, then into an omlette. Remember, the local emergency number is not 911, then a smile and...

24 hours later, everybody was still in perfect health.

We'll do some more later this week and we'll think of the ancient hunter gatherers who figured out which ones are good and which ones kill you.

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