Mushroom foraging is mushrooming

Story by Mary King

Video by Nick Perlin

Photos by Daniela Rodriguez-Puente

Nutty or fruity. Fluorescent orange or soft white. Slapped on a piece of pizza, or served with the world’s finest delicacies. They can bring your risotto to life, or they can kill you within days. 

Growing in countless forms and flavors, mushrooms span thousands of distinct species. And you’d be hard-pressed to find their breadth more on-display than in the Appalachian Mountains that run through North Carolina. 

“This is the most fungal-diverse area in North America,” said mycologist Tradd Cotter, a forager of 28 years.

With a climate tailor-made for a vast expanse of mushrooms to flourish, North Carolina is home to a passionate foraging subculture. Venture onto the 16,000-member “North Carolina Mushroom Group” on Facebook, and you’ll find master foragers who sell their findings to restaurants along with amateurs just looking to bring some fresh fungi back to the dinner table.

And then there are people like Nicki Ross.

Nicki Ross.

Chicken of the woods

Ross, a Ph.D student at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education, considers herself a newcomer to foraging. But on a mid-September afternoon in Chapel Hill, she navigates the woods of Battle Park with an ease you’d expect from an old pro. Probing for diamonds in the rough, she scans the decaying logs and patches of fallen leaves.

“This one is tough,” Ross says, stooping down to feel the underside of a white mushroom. “Usually, the tough ones you don’t eat.”

Some mushrooms are inedible simply because they’re disgusting; others are inedible because they’re dangerous. Complicating and sometimes imperiling a forager’s trek is the fact that many tasty mushrooms have near-doppelgängers that are poisonous. Ross once had a near-miss with a yellowish growth she found on a dead tree.

“I was like, ‘It’s got to be chicken of the woods!’” she says before interrupting herself to warn  others about the poison ivy she spotted nearby. 

The “chicken of the woods” mushroom grows on trees as a clump of orange ridges. It’s coveted for tasting like chicken when cooked; a quick online search will turn up recipes for “chicken-fried chicken of the woods.” It was only because Ross had posted her find to the Facebook group that she discovered it was actually a poisonous look-alike. 

But Ross isn’t deterred. Finding the chicken of the woods is the next goal she’s set for herself in her foraging endeavors. People were finding them in Western North Carolina over the summer, she says, and they’re moving east with the changing temperature. 

Should Ross finally come across the delicacy, she has two plans for her precious chicken of the woods: “Cook it. Eat it.”

Imagine Ross’ reaction if she were to see the 50-pound haul of chicken of the woods that Andy Conner brought in from the North Carolina mountains in August. 

On the market

Conner is the co-founder and chief product officer of Foraged, an online market for mushrooms and other food found in the wild. He launched the market in the spring with close friend Jack Hamrick, the company’s CEO. Conner said about 250 sellers use the platform, and about 150 of them are mushroom foragers. 

“I built it from scratch,” Conner said. “And it’s essentially like Etsy: Etsy, you just buy and sell crafts. We just buy and sell wild and specialty food.”

A few years after graduating from UNC-Wilmington in 2016, Conner moved back to his hometown of Columbus — “pretty much at the gateway of the Appalachian Mountains” — to take care of his mother, who had cancer. After she passed away, Conner stayed there to be with his father. 

That’s when Conner started exploring his family’s acres of land, just as he used to do when he was a kid. After a season of heavy rain, he discovered mushrooms popping up all over the place. He bought a couple of books, and from there his passion for mushrooms flourished. 

But under North Carolina law, Conner couldn’t just set up at the market and start selling the mushrooms he’d picked. He needed to get certified.

It was time for Tradd Cotter to work his magic. 

‘Shroom school

Cotter and his wife, Olga, co-own the research company Mushroom Mountain, which works with state governments to offer a mushroom foraging certification. The company has certified more than 1,200 foragers across states from North Carolina to New York. He said that about six years ago, the FDA secretly audited the class. 

“I didn’t know they were in the class,” Cotter said. “And they handed me the business card and said, ‘This is the best class we’ve ever seen.’” 

Different states use different entities to regulate mushroom foraging, Cotter said. In North Carolina, it’s the county health departments. To legally sell mushrooms, you’re required to demonstrate competency in mushroom identification skills — and a certification from Mushroom Mountain does the trick. 

It’s a two-day class that teaches how to identify mushrooms, how to avoid poisonous look-alikes, how to handle them safely, and how to work with tracking numbers. 

“If we find a mushroom makes somebody sick — it should have been in a box or a bag that had a tracking code on it — we can find the forager,” Cotter said. “And that forager should have a log of what was picked, where it was picked, and we can very, very quickly make a determination as to what went wrong.”

When Conner did Cotter’s ID class, it took him several hours to complete the intensive exam. Cotter said that although the class is highly accessible to beginners, it’s designed to be thorough: After all, when people eat foraged mushrooms, they’re putting their lives into the hands of the foragers. 

“There’s hundreds of questions on the exam,” Cotter said. “And if they get one wrong, they have to call me and they have to correct their answer. I give them one chance to do that.” 

Fried oysters, or fried oyster mushrooms?

Once a mushroom is pulled off of a log or out of the dirt, it just might find itself on a plate in front of a hungry mouth. If it ends up in the hands of chef Martina Russial at the Mediterranean American restaurant Glasshalfull in Carrboro, it could become crabcake-style lion’s mane mushroom cakes, mushroom risotto or a fried oyster-mushroom sandwich.

Lion’s mane mushroom sandwich served at Glasshalfull restaurant in Carrboro, N.C.

“There are so many wonderful mushroom places available in North Carolina,” Russial said. “This is just kind of like ground zero for incredible mushroom picking and growing.”

There are a lot of small-time foragers in the area, Russial said, and some will come to restaurants and try to sell what they’ve gathered. But Glasshalfull buys from Haw River Mushrooms, a farm in Saxapahaw. Russial said there’s nothing wrong with what the foragers are doing, and a lot of them are licensed. But the restaurant trusts Haw River: The farm is well-established and responsible, and she never feels she has to worry about safety. 

“There is always the chance for wild foraging that something has grown off of another fungus that you shouldn’t eat,” Russial said.

The ins and outs

As a craft that demands in-depth knowledge and the ability to pick up on subtle visual distinctions, foraging is an inherently risky business. One wrong call, and you could end up with a sour stomach — or much, much worse. For anyone who wants to give it a try, Conner cautions against using mushroom identification apps.

“The applications on your phone that people use sometimes to try and ID mushrooms are completely incorrect,” Conner said. “And actually, they lead to several poisonings every year because people are like, ‘Oh, this is a chanterelle because my app said so.’ But it’s like, no, get a book. Learn the ins and outs of the mushrooms that you want to find.”

“Learning the ins and outs” is a big ask when you’re dealing with the mind-bogglingly diverse fungal kingdom. Even after all the hours the budding forager Ross spent in the woods, she can still only classify three types of mushrooms confidently enough to feel comfortable eating them. 

But for Ross, it’s all in the learning. Foraging for mushrooms evokes the work of scholar Donna Haraway, who theorizes that humans are entangled with other species through composting, Ross says. 

Fried oyster-mushroom sandwich at Glasshalfull restaurant in Carrboro, N.C.

“Mushrooms become this apex of compost, because they grow out of death and decay,” Ross says. “So, you’ll find them on dead trees. A lot of times you’ll find them growing in horse poop. They grow out of the actual compost of our lives, of our history, and become this new form of life from that.”

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