Mushroom world explored in Extension class

By Jackie Montgomery

Over 40 enthusiastic attendees participated in the Cooperative Extension Service gardening series presentation, "Exploring the World of Mushrooms" April 30, 2024.

Family and Consumer Sciences agent Dylan Gentry covered food safety and sanitation, ideas for cooking with mushrooms, and preserving mushrooms by canning and dehydrating. He emphasized the importance of reducing potential contamination including by cleaning the mushrooms, keeping the kitchen sanitary and of course, washing one's hands.

Finding healthy recipes with mushrooms is as easy as going to the Plan. Eat. Move. Kentucky page at www.planeatmove.com.

Dylan passed around canned mushrooms for the participants to see the finished product and answered questions about the hows and whys of processing this low acid food. He talked about how best to use both canned and dehydrated mushrooms in recipes. He treated the crowd to a taste test of samples of marinated mushroom jerky he had prepared earlier in the day. One observer noted this would be delicious as a salad topping in place of less healthy croutons.

The second speaker of the evening was Dr. Ellen Crocker, Assistant Professor of Forest Health Extension in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Kentucky. She introduced mushrooms as the fruiting bodies of certain fungi, illustrated a variety of mushroom types and how to use the tops, bottoms and stems for identification. She cautioned that she was providing an overview and not a class to train experts on which mushrooms were safe to consume, although she did show photographs of the poisonous Destroying Angel that can cause liver failure and death.

More than half the attendees were especially interested in foraging mushrooms. Dr. Crocker gave the following as a starting point and NOT a qualification to start foraging or as a substitute for other training.

7 Mushroom Foraging Tips

1. Always ID mushrooms to species

2. Start with species that are easy to identify

3. Learn to distinguish edibles from look alikes

4. Hunt with knowledgeable people

5. Take photos that enable ID

6. Store properly and always save a few in case you get sick.

Most Important: Don't eat anything unless you can confidently identify it!

To the delight of the audience, she showed slides of large varieties and numbers of mushrooms gathered in foraging trips and passed around samples.

In addition, local edible mushroom enthusiast Eric Sanders brought some of the growing bags he uses to produce mushrooms for sale by his business, Friends of Fungi (you can find them at the Adair County Farmers Market). There was lively discussion about inoculating different kinds of wood with mushroom spores and the ups and downs of production in any growing medium.

Further conversation centered on where to look for the star of this mushroom hunting season, the elusive Morels, also known as Dryland Fish. Nobody shared any secrets about where and when they find their own stash of this coveted fungus, although all ears were listening.

This story was posted on 2024-05-10 00:38:48.
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