Boletus rubriceps (the kind Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for scale)
Boletus rubriceps (the kind Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for scale)
My favourite culinary species outside of chanterelles and morels. They have a much richer meat flavour than an oyster mushroom, very close in taste and texture to beef pot roast. They typically associate with conifers in wet high elevation (2000m~) forests, fruiting from now until Septemberish. These and Boletus edulis make good novice foraging targets because they're easy to identify and the lookalikes are distinct.
I cut it into strips after soaking it to remove bugs and stripping the outer flesh, then sauteed them in olive oil with pepper/salt/garlic powder. It's the only specimen I found today and weighed about 1kg.
God I wish I was confident to forage mushrooms without poisoning myself, so cool!
Depending on what you have near you, there are a few safe species that are as good as they are easy to distinguish:
Pleurotus sp. - Oysters, growing on trees or deadwood. Very distinct shape.
Cantharellus sp. - Chanterelles, growing on the forest floor in open spaces. Very distinct shape and colour.
Hericium sp. - Lion's mane, growing on trees or deadwood. Very distinct shape.
Morchella sp. - Morels, growing on the ground. They have closer lookalikes than the above genera but can still be distinguished pretty easily from those and look like nothing else.
Boletus edulis - The trickiest of this list, growing on the ground next to spruce/fir/pine trees. The genus is super easy to distinguish but identifying the species within that requires cutting it open.
I'd never pick anything generic-looking like a little brown/white mushroom. Those are where you really risk being poisoned. With these you'd want a field guide to positively ID them but you get good at that fast. There's probably a mycology club in your area which organises regular foraging trips with experts and I highly recommend doing those. The Colorado Mycological Society is a huge resource here.
Fwiw, mycology has had a pretty big boost in popularity/notoriety here (take your pick) due to a high profile murder case outside of Melbourne which just concluded today, in which a woman was found guilty of three cases of murder and one of attempted murder, by poisoning a beef Wellington with death cap mushrooms she foraged herself.
If you get a proper field guide, pick an easy species to identify, learn what specific characteristics to look for, and what specific look-alikes to avoid & how differentiate them. Step by step It's pretty straightforward.
-A lot of people start with Morels because they are easy to identify and their look-alikes aren't all that similar. Plus, (when cooked) they are delicious.