Foraging for Oyster Mushrooms in South Louisiana

It has been raining an awful lot lately around our little homestead, transforming the barnyard area into a muddy mess.  The cows slog through the mud on the way to the barn for milking, and we slosh through it with our rubber boots on.  As soon as it dries up, I'm going to get a couple of loads of dirt delivered so that I can build up the area.  I'll also cut some ditches as well to drain any trapped rainwater toward the westward slope of the land.

One very positive thing that the rain brings forth is mushrooms.  In South Louisiana we have a couple of different types mushrooms that grow wild and we've learned to forage for them, identify them and then cook and devour them.  I found this painting on the Internet that I've credited the artist below.  I think it is a beautiful painting.  It shows people out foraging in the woods for those delectable mushrooms.

Franciszek Kostrzewski

After a rain the conditions are right for mushrooms to 'bloom'.  Mushrooms are the fruiting body of the fungus.  Just open your eyes as you walk through the woods. They are all around you.  The first thing you'll as is, "Is this one edible?"  Well, an old Czech quote says, "Every mushroom is edible, but some only once." That sounds ominous, and it's true.  Some mushrooms are toxic and can kill you or cause serious damage to you.  That's why we are careful to stick to eating only those that we can positively identify - for us, that's chanterelles and oyster mushrooms. In THIS PREVIOUS POST we showed you how we foraged for chanterelles, today we'll talk about oysters.

Yesterday Russ went walking in the small patch of woods behind the house and discovered a nice stash of oyster mushrooms growing in their favorite habitat - on the trunk of several dead willow trees.  Oyster mushrooms' scientific name is Pleurotus ostreatus.  We really like to eat these!

Oyster mushrooms have gills on the underneath side and are a whitish-light brown or grey color. Unlike many other types of mushrooms, they don't have much of a stalk at all.  They have a nice, "woodsy" scent to them.  We collect them in paper bags and then store them in paper bags in the fridge.  You want to preserve the moisture in the mushroom without introducing a lot of excess moisture.  They'll store well like that, but we seldom store them for long.  They don't last.  We eat them too fast.

They seem to grow in communities, with layers and layers of oysters all together, almost piling on top of each other.  They are a parasite and help to break down a tree.  Since we only remove the fruiting body, the mycelia (the vegetative part of the mushroom that is threadlike) is left in the decaying tree and will continue to produce mushrooms.  

When you've found where they are growing, you can continue to return time and time again to collect additional mushrooms.  Russ took many pictures of the immense quantity of mushrooms he harvested.  We tried, unsuccessfully, to inoculate an area in these woods with Chanterelle spores, but up to this point, we've been unsuccessful in getting Chanterelles to grow.  The oysters are doing just fine, though.  The trick is to make sure you check 'your spot' often, because some of these, like the ones on the bottom at the center right of the photo below are past their prime.  Russ just picked the ones that were in good condition.  We didn't weigh them, but he had a nice harvest.  (You can see our red barn in the background.) 

Russ brought them inside and cleaned them up.  Since they are in the woods, they'll have some sticks, leaves, and small bugs on them that you want to clean up before eating.  

Oysters ready for the skillet

Then he put them on a cutting board and cut them all up.

He promptly heated up a cast iron skillet and dropped some butter, garlic, onions, cream and some of our chopped fall tomatoes in and then added the fresh chopped up Oyster Mushrooms.  He ate the entire skillet by himself!  I didn't get to eat a single one!  Tricia made another batch for us tonight, though.

Freshly foraged Oyster mushrooms cooking

While the mushrooms were cooking, Tricia made some homemade pasta.  It is so much better!  When the mushrooms were done, the creamy mushrooms were spooned on top of the fresh pasta, with a side of some of the last green beans of the season until spring.  We thanked the Good Lord for providing great food for us to eat.  What a meal!

In yesterday's post, we talked about eating 'tuna' from a cactus and today we're eating oysters off of a tree!  "Seafood" from dry land!  It is so interesting how there are lots of edible goodies all around us - delicious treats right under our feet, just waiting to be found and eaten.  It's a garden you never have to water or weed.  How cool is that?