Looking over the wikipedia page on this mushroom and all the similar, very edible ones...Yeah I'm never foraging mushrooms.
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Yeah, I carefully read the description of its distinguishing features, studied the photo, and concluded I have no idea what I'm looking at and how to tell them apart.
Simple, just eat it and see.
If you're dead, it's poisonous.
If you are alive, you haven't eaten enough.
I'm really good at spotting differences or inconsistencies, I'm totally lost with mushrooms though, and I go multiple times every Autumn with a woman in her 70's. She is very clear about what we are looking for. She throws out at least half of what I gather.
She does that cause she's jealous of how many you pick
chanterelles are pretty safe to forage if they grow near you.
they are very distinct looking.
egg mushrooms 😋
They are so goddamned good, I highly recommend looking around white oak trees by carefully clearing away the leaf litter a few days after it rains. They can't really be bought in stores and when they do show up they're like $50 a pound because you can't really farm them as they have a symbiotic relationship with only certain trees and are very vulnerable to other fungus like mold.
Where I live (mountainous region in Austria) they are everywhere. I just go hiking for a bit so I'm at not too frequented spots and then I can just pick as many as I need, often the floor nearly is more yellow than brown on certain spots.
We don't have white oaks here but they typically grow in needle forests.
(And we call them Eierschwammerl = egg mushrooms, to explain my previous comment, I just think that sounds much nicer than chanterelles)
Image of a typical spot, took it a month ago ^
Mushroom foraging can be safe, but the rules are:
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Always learn from a local guide first. It's not transferable to other regions. Which makes books a bad way to do it, and the internet a horrible way.
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You don't rule out dangerous mushrooms, you identify a specific edible mushroom.
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Never trust a little white mushroom.
Is the main visual difference just the stem or whatever it's called being much longer?
IIRC, the only definitive way to ID mushrooms is by making a spore print - and even then you need to know what you're doing.
Just doesn't seem worth the risk to me.
nah it's generally fairly easy to ID mushrooms, the problem is just that if you miss a feature and mistake it for another, you'll fucking liquidize from the inside out.
This is the same reason that you never touch something that looks like a carrot plant in the wild, because it could be that one plant that kills you 3 times over.
I agree that it's generally not worth the risk though, hence why those who pick mushrooms (which is pretty standard to do here in the nordics) stick to like 5 species who have no dangerous lookalikes and actually taste good and are easy to find.
Here in sweden 90% of what people pick is chanterelles or boletes, whose entire families look effectively the same and at worst simply don't taste good. Boletes have ONE slightly toxic species in sweden, and it's bright red and only grows on one island in the baltic sea.
There are old mushroom foragers and then there are bold ones. There are no bold, old mushroom foragers.
There are no bold, old mushroom foragers
Sure there are, they just have to not eat what they picked up.
Source: friend's mom once gave food poisoning to the whole family by serving them an omelet made with mushrooms she found, but didn't eat it herself. Fortunately it was merely mushrooms of the "fucks up your stomach" variety.
Looks like a destroying angel (e.g. Amanita virosa) to me. This and the death cap together account for the vast majority of mushroom poisonings in the world. Cooking it will not destroy the toxins, nor will acid. Symptoms tend to appear 5-24 hours after eating, too late to pump the stomach. Half a mushroom can be enough to kill you.
I don't recommend going out to pick mushrooms unless you know what you're doing. If you do, stay away from the white ones. You can still get terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea from other colors of mushrooms, but the white ones have the most dangerous species.
Easiest way to avoid problems I've heard is to never pick any mushroom with ribbed underside. If the underside looks like a sponge, it's usually safe to eat. At least where I'm from.
Might be valid advice for some regions, I don't know. But mushrooms tend to vary quite a bit in appearance. Sometimes ribbed species don't have very visible ribs, or younger mushrooms don't quite have all the characteristics of their mature form. If you really want to get into picking mushrooms, there's often local groups you can join with a resident expert who can tell you which ones are safe.
My fucked up brain goes like, "woah, I wonder what death tastes like."
Saute in a pan with butter and garlic. Death will taste fabulous.
Little salt, little pepper. /~~chef's~~death's kiss
That's cheating. Anything will taste great with butter and garlic.
Technically it's still edible
Only once. ;)
You can do anything once.
Don't tempt me with a good time.
Once.
They said you die one or two days after eating. You could definitely eat more than once in that time.
Amanita bisporigera, or the aptly named eastern North American destroying angel, if anyone's wondering.
From Wikipedia:
The principal amatoxin, α-amanitin, is readily absorbed across the intestine, and 60% of the absorbed toxin is excreted into bile and undergoes enterohepatic circulation; the kidneys clear the remaining 40%. The toxin inhibits the enzyme RNA polymerase II, thereby interfering with DNA transcription, which suppresses RNA production and protein synthesis. This causes cellular necrosis, especially in cells which are initially exposed and have rapid rates of protein synthesis. This process results in severe acute liver dysfunction and, ultimately, liver failure.
I could not confirm that it causes liquefactive necrosis of the liver specifically, however. I wouldn't doubt it, but I couldn't confirm it.
Edit: I should clarify, I got this from the original thread on Bluesky, not my own identification.
ooh, amanita
Which mushroom is it then? 😱
Eastern North American Destroying Angel. Half a mushroom is enough to completely destroy your liver and symptoms show up too late to do anything about them
Destroying Angel
No joking around when it came to naming it.
i didnt even consider that this AI shit was going to claim to be able to ID mushrooms
ok ive been a little skeptical of the idea so far but now im fully convinced. this dumb ai shit is going to get people killed. like straight up more than one person is going to die because of these upjumped autocorrects masquerading as intelligence. and no one is going to be held responsible.
I love fungi facts.