How To Eat Wild Forest Lobsters -- Lobster Mushrooms, That Is! 🍄

haphazard-hstead (66)in #howto • 7 years ago (edited)

How can this ugly thing be good to eat? It is! It's a wild lobster mushroom! Sure, they look strange. But they are delicious and fascinating! Come into my post to find out more, including how to clean and cook them.

This post is an entry into the King of Steemit How To challenge posted by @papa-pepper. I'm not saying I'm better than @papa-pepper, but I am submitting this in the friendly spirit of the challenge. I've posted some unique How To content here on Steemit, like How To Identify and Eat the Insidious Gomphidius Mushroom, 5 Ways to Eat Hop Shoots, How To Make Hop Mac & Cheese, How To Make Cookies from Spruce Trees and Pine Pollen, How To Roast Wild Carrot Roots and Not Poison Hemlock, Tips and Tricks for How To Eat Garden Weeds, How To Make a Salad from 25 Weeds and the Shaggy Parasol Mushroom - and lots more! I'm not King of Steemit How-To, but I do feel like royalty when I have so much great wild food!

Searching for Lobsters

They are out there, in forests all over North America. But they don't emerge from the soil until weather conditions are just right, usually in the late summer and early autumn. What are they? Lobster mushrooms, Hypomyces lactofluorum. They are a strange mushroom -- really two fungi in one. The Hypomyces lactofluorum attacks and parasitizes other mushrooms, making them delicious to eat.

Here in western Oregon, the poor parasitized mushroom is the Short-stemmed Russula, Russula brevipes. In other places, the vulnerable mushrooms are different Russula or Lactarius species. All these mushrooms have a close mycorrhizal relationship with specific trees - the fungus and trees are connected and share nutrients. So the best way to find a Lobster mushroom is to go the forests that have those trees.

I was in an area with lots of mid-aged Douglas-fir trees and large Sword ferns. This is typical of the 3rd-crop forests along Oregon's west coast along the Pacific Ocean.

I was hiking through the forest over on the Oregon coast, only a couple miles from the Pacific Ocean. So I was in prime Lobster territory -- forests with spruce, hemlock, and Douglas-Fir trees. In other regions, forests of pine, oaks or other hardwood trees are good places to look, if they have a good layer of decomposing leaves and other duff.

Do you see them? Do you see them? Right at the base of that Douglas-fir! It's always exciting to see that bit of red -- but it's only a bit!

But you have to look closely! A lot of times, these mushrooms don't even get above the forest floor. They are just "shrumps" or mushroom humps pushing up the debris. At least they are brightly colored, so seeing any part of them is good enough for a closer look.

Often, this is as much of the Lobster mushroom that shows through all the debris on the forest floor. That's not much, but at least they are bright colors!

They are nestled down in the duff, so it's fun to see what each one will ultimately look like. They come out of the ground easily.

Identifying Lobsters

There is nothing else that looks like Hypomyces lactifluorum! Not only is their color a distinctive orange or red-orange, but you can see that they don't have any gills or other standard mushroom parts. Their skin is a hard, roughly stippled crust that looks like it's covered with little pimples. Any gills under the cap of the host mushroom get reduced to blunt ridges.

This surface crust is unique to Hypomyces fungi that have surrounded their unfortunate victims. The red-orange color is unique to the H. lactofluorum -- the Lobster!

Or the lobster mushrooms can be so contorted that they look like some strange lump! What happens is that the parasite infects the baby mushroom, preventing it from forming correctly. Even then, underneath the thin crust, the inside is bright white. And the inside is crisp and brittle, not soft or supple.

Lobster mushrooms can look like a deformed glob. This little Russula mushroom must have been very small when it got infected with the Hypomyces fungus. But the crust and white interior are key identifiers.

Taken all together, the colors inside and outside, the rough and pimply crust, and the solid crispness of the mushroom are key identifiers. If you want to see more about identifying Lobster mushrooms, I made a 10-minute YouTube video you might like. It that shows how to use an identification key from the great book, "All That the Rain Promises and More" by David Aurora. It's a great book that shows mushrooms are a lot of fun to know!

My latest YouTube video shows how I use this key to identify the Lobster mushroom. Learning how to use an identification key is a good thing!

Field guides will tell you the Lobster mushroom is worth eating! This time of year, Lobster mushrooms are sold in markets and in restaurants, too. They are a tasty mushroom!

Preparing Lobster Mushrooms to Eat

Lobster mushrooms can have a lot of forest debris on them. It's always good practice in any foraging to pick clean. But that crust keeps lobsters from getting the debris inside, so they can be cleaned back at home. The easiest way to is brush them with an old toothbrush. Their crust can hold up to some scrubbing!

This mushroom is really crisp. It's in great condition to cook and eat!

Then I soak the mushrooms in a bowl of water for about 10 minutes. A lot of mushrooms do not take well to soaking! They will absorb the water and turn into a slimy mess when they are cooked. But Lobster mushrooms are so dense that they won't get soggy. Once they've soaked, I wash them off with running water, cutting off any spots too hard to clean. And I break them up to clean between the bends and crevices of the contorted bodies.

Lobster mushrooms can be covered with grit and debris. Unlike many mushrooms, soaking lobsters makes easy work of cleaning them, without making them soggy. The pieces in the upper left are before cleaning, and the pieces on the right are after cleaning.

Soaking the lobsters make cleaning them a lot easier. You can see how dirty the water gets.

Cooking Lobster Mushrooms

Lobster mushrooms are easy to cook. A simple sautee in butter or olive oil works well. Like any mushroom, they should be cooked all the way through. I sauteed these in a little olive oil. I then roasted them in the oven for 10 minutes at 350F degrees, to make them crispy on the outside.

A simple sautee in a cast iron skillet works well for Lobster mushrooms.

I roasted my Lobsters in the over for a few minutes, too. It made their outer crust nice an crispy.

These lobster mushrooms are delicious! Left: before roasting, Right: after roasting. It was hard not to eat all of them right away, but I wanted to use some in a separate recipe, too.

It was so hard to not eat all of these right out of the oven! But I wanted to use some of them for @progressivechef's Steemit Iron Chef Contest, too. You can see how I used them to make a stuffing for Grilled Stuffed Squash Blossoms. This was so delicious! But cooked Lobster mushrooms are great in eggs, soup, with pasta, or in a salad. I'm sure you can find other ways to enjoy them, too.

Here is a live taste review of these Lobster mushrooms. They are delicious! I hope I find plenty more this autumn!

These lobster mushrooms were great in a stuffing for these grilled squash blossoms that I made for the Steemit Iron Chef contest.

What Do You Think?

I hope you get a chance to try eating Lobster mushrooms sometime! You may be able to find them at a market that has wild-crafted produce, or at restaurants featuring local foods. If you find Lobster mushrooms in any of these places, I would really like to know!

Have you ever eaten Lobster mushrooms?
Have you seen Lobster mushrooms in the woods, in a market, or at a restaurant?
Do you forage for wild mushrooms?
Would you try eating my wild lobster mushrooms?

I eat a lot of wild plants and show you how, because I believe that we can all have lives that are richer, more secure, more grounded, and more interesting by getting to know the plants and the land around us – in our yards, our parks, and our wilderness.

I would like Steemit to be the premier site for Foraging on the Internet! If you have any thoughts about foraging, or experiences to share, write a post and be sure to use the Foraging tag. And check out the @foraging-trail to see curated quality posts about foraging. Happy Foraging!