Black trumpets about as safe as mushrooms get

The recent rains have made this a bumper year for mushrooms.The number and diversity of mushrooms you will encounter on a brief walk in the woods is astounding.

I have always admired mushrooms but kept my distance in terms of collecting and eating them. Even the ones that are relatively easy to identify always seem to have poisonous look-alikes. Stories abound of experts who accidently served up some toxic wild mushrooms at a dinner party, killing everyone.

One unlikely mushroom recently helped me overcome my fears of collecting wild, edible mushrooms. While out for a walk I found a large cluster of a very distinctive black mushroom — the black trumpet. I had seen these only once before but remembered reading that they are edible, and so I couldn't resist gathering a bagful.

When I got home I did some research (three mushroom books, a few online sites and with a mycologist friend). It turns out they are gourmet, choice edibles! And most importantly for me, there aren't any local poisonous lookalikes.

So, for the first time, I ate a wild mushroom that I had gathered. I sautéed some and scrambled them with eggs — terrific flavor and smell. The next night my son used them to top a pizza. No one got sick, everyone loved them.

Black trumpets are funnel-shaped and range in color from brown to gray to black. The edges of their caps roll outwards and are wavy — a lot like a chanterelle, to which they are closely related. Unlike a chanterelle, they don't have gills or other obvious spore-bearing structures; the undersides of their caps are, instead, smooth to slightly wrinkled.

Black trumpets are prized for their odor, both fruity (like apricots) and woodsy at the same time. Tom Volk (TomVolkFungi.net) recommends drying them: "It dries very well and adds a great flavor to eggs cooked in the middle of winter, when we here in the north are craving for something other than snow!"

One of the main reasons black trumpets aren't up there in the public consciousness with the universally popular chanterelles is how difficult they are to see. Chanterelles, with their luminous orange color, practically jump out at you from the woods; chanterelle-hunters quickly learn to scan the woods for these glowing prizes.

Black trumpets, on the other hand, are black, making them incredibly difficult to find; you generally need to be looking straight down to see them. Veterans say they often can smell them before they see them. And once you find one you will usually find more, tens to hundreds often grow in a relatively small area. In this area, black trumpets are most often associated with beech and oak forests.

Mushrooms are the reproductive part of a fungus, the "body" of which lives underground or in rotting logs as a network of cells (called mycelium), which feed off of tree roots and/or rotting material. When conditions are ripe for reproduction (like now when it is warm and wet) the mycelium forms the above-ground mushroom, which releases spores that develop into new mycelia. Imagine sheet-like organisms blanketing the roots of forest plants — quenched by the summer rains, they press up through the soil, emerging in wondrous constellations of odor and color and savory delight.

Just remember, always check with an expert before eating any mushroom found in the wild — much of the folklore surrounding mushroom picking is inaccurate. For example, it isn't true that cooking mushrooms neutralizes any toxins, nor can you determine whether a mushroom is toxic or not based on its color.

Sue Pike, a researcher and an environmental sciences and biology teacher at St. Thomas Aquinas High School, welcomes your ideas for future column topics. She may be reached at spike3116@gmail.com or via her blog, sp.stalux.org.