Identifying Wild Mushrooms – Learn How to Find Edible Mushrooms in the Wild

This may come as a surprise to some people, but many of the expensive, special gourmet mushrooms that you will pay a lot of money for in a top restaurant are actually available to you completely free of charge, and many of which could be growing not very far from your current location!

Wild mushrooms such as the Bolette variety, considered to be one of the most delicious mushrooms of all, will usually grow in many different kinds of forests at around summer/autumn time, depending on the weather. Mushrooms like wet, damp, moist conditions, and the Bolette variety like to grow in a close proximity to Oak and Beech trees, amongst grass. These mushrooms are very highly sort after, especially the Penny Bun variety, which tastes just as nice as it looks.

Another delicious and still somewhat mysterious type of fungi is that of a truffle – this is a small round dark (or white) fruit body which appears at the base of old beech trees, sometimes they are a few centimeters below the surface (and therefore invisible and very hard to find), yet with the right knowledge they can still be discovered. People sometimes use dogs or pigs to help sniff out a truffle, thanks to their strange yet potent smell, and it is a very lucrative business as decent, good quality truffles have been sold in the past for several thousand pounds!

Morels are another kind of tasty, edible mushroom, again highly used by top restaurants, and again not too cheap either. These are slightly different in their growing parameters compared to your typical mushroom, in the fact that they appear in Spring time, and by the fact that they prefer an urban environment. Morels have been known to appear in many strange locations, such as popping up by a concrete pavement, or in a car park, and so you are unlikely to find many of these in a forest – they may actually be much closer to you, maybe even appearing in your garden.

The reason that the 3 above kinds of fungi are all so expensive and sought after is down to one point – they currently only grow in the wild, that is to say that no-one is able to cultivate either Bolettes, Truffles or Morels (however some people are spending a lot of time researching how to grow Truffles, and so you could expect these to be available in the future). But its still amazing to think that these expensive and delicious forms of mushrooms are available to you for nothing, in the wild, and yet still you could pay incredible amounts in a restaurant to be able to taste any one of these delights.