Wild mushroom season is here. I always enjoy this seasonal local treat, but can't help wondering if some of you old Kunming hands know ways to enjoy them while minimizing risk.
I've bought 牛肝菌 at my neighborhood wet market and cooked them together with Chinese friends. Afraid I don't know enough to buy other varieties.
They are expensive in restaurants but are affordable in the market. I like the idea of being able to cook them at home. Have learned to slice them thin and cook them a long time as basic safety measures.
But i still hear stories about people getting real sick from eating bad mushrooms. Any tips or tricks that have worked for you?
I ate some mushrooms cooked at a small restaurant. They didn't taste right after the 2nd bite. But I kept eating them since they were edible, and I thought it could be just because I don't know what this variety tastes like, and not to waste the dish. 15min later, I threw up every bit of the mushrooms. Surprisingly, I didn't get any further maladies after throwing up.
My advice is if after the FIRST bite you sense or taste something funny/off about the cooked mushrooms, stop eating. Don't be polite or second guess yourself, just stop.
As it happens, the Kunming Institute of Edible Fungi (昆明食用菌研究所) has an attached restaurant. Pricey, but the mushrooms are *very* good, and they'll cook the tricky ones for you to make sure they've cooked out all the poison.
On Jiaochang Zhonglu:
goo.gl/maps/ATHd
poi.mapbar.com/kunming/MAPIFPHEXOCWQIFBSNTOC
Good advice, @Alex.
@Joshwa, that looks like a terrific resource. I had no idea such a facility existed. I will go there and see what I can learn.
Many thanks.
There is a recent health scandal about farmed mushrooms being bleached.
The mushrooms that are in the market at the moment as wild cannot be farmed, and that is why the price is so high. They should not be wet.
Agree with Alex, ANY food that does not taste right, don't trust it. It may be something is supposed to taste like that, but I have learned, 'if in doubt - don't'.
Another way to keep the wild mushrooms is to shred them by hand and the then fry them in raw/unfiltered canola oil (that is the dark brown one at the supermarket), until they are dark brown. Then preserve them in more raw canola oil. They will then keep for up to a year.
I remember when I was cycling through Naxi and Yi minority mountains during summer, there were lots of mushroom pickers trekking about. I stopped in a shack to have some hot instant noodles, and inside was a very large vat of boiling water with mushrooms. The water in that vat looks like it had been boiling mushrooms for a long time, very brown and thick with spores. Seems the mushroom pickers dumped the mushrooms into that vat to cook for a while, before selling them.
Why and how long, I wasn't able to figure out. They just said they did that before selling them. That leaves a lot of guessing. I thought boiling mushrooms would be considered cooking them for a meal and not some step in preparing them for sale. Of course, it was only one type of mushroom in that vat, so maybe it's specific to that mushroom.
@Alex, Must have been interesting to see the harvest up close like that. I've read that some varieties of wild mushrooms are classified as "conditionally edible" since they taste good but still contain toxins than produce illness.
It's possible the Naxi and Yi pickers were parboiling those varieties to make them safe for consumption. They might be pickled after brief boiling. (That's just a guess.)
@Tiger, I was invited to visit a local family the first night of Spring Festival this year. They had preserved wild mushrooms by frying in raw youcai oil the previous summer as you describe. Cooked them some more that night and served them as part of the traditional feast. They were a a special treat since they were out of season.
In reading about the subject, I found out that China is the world's biggest producer of edible mushrooms. Wikipedia said that in 2008, China accounted for 45.89% of the world's output.
Many of these mushrooms sell to Japan for over 2000/kg at the height of the new season.
@Alex, is it possible that the mushrooms you saw were being boiled in oil?
@tigertiger
Just boiling water. Didn't see oils mixed in. And only a single type of mushroom in the vat. I think GBTEXDOC nailed it. That variety was probably "conditionally edible"
I'm not a mushroom connoisseur, but I am thoroughly impressed by the wild mushroom variety and availability in Yunnan. And very glad that adds to income of those mountain dwellers. It's a beautiful but hard life up there.
