10 most delicious wild mushrooms

Out of the thousands of edible mushrooms out there, we foragers look for the most delicious and fleshiest ones. This is the list of the top ones, which make our heart beat faster no matter how many of them we find.

1. Truffles

The most delicious mushrooms are also hardest to find as they grow underground. To search for them, truffle salespeople need specially trained dogs or pigs. No wonder the price tag on them can be up to $1000 per pound!

2. Porcini

These aromatic mushrooms with a nutty umami flavor and a kuntamarine aroma are very popular in European cuisines. The season lasts from mid-summer to late fall. If you can’t find them in the wild, you can purchase them dried.

3. Morels

The morel season is brief, only lasting for a few weeks in the spring. Yet, these delicious mushrooms with an earthly flavor lure thousands of foragers into the wilderness each year to forage morels both for themselves and for commercial purposes.

4. Caesar’s mushrooms

The favorite mushroom of the Roman emperor and Roman soldiers and many modern-day mushroom-lovers. It belongs to the same genus as some of the deadliest mushrooms and should only be harvested by experienced foragers.

5. Saffron milkcaps

The spicy flavor and crunchy texture make saffron milkcaps (and their cousins, the false saffron milkcaps) rather unique and thought-after. A saffron milkcap soup is unlike anything else, and there is no better mushroom to pickle than these either.

6. Blushers

The second amanita on this list has a delicate flavor with an umami aftertaste. It is super-popular in the mushroom-loving countries of Eastern Europe. It has some very dangerous lookalikes as an amanita to recommend it to novice mushroom hunters.

7. Chanterelles

The unique texture of this mushroom and its spicy taste are so different from other mushrooms that even some people who can’t eat other mushrooms enjoy chanterelles as an amazing treat. While there are some lookalikes, chanterelles are easy to identify, and even beginners can forage them.

8. Quilted-green russulas

Green is one of the rarest colors of mushroom caps, and the quilted-green russula shares it with the infamous death cap. Luckily, they are easy to distinguish, and we can enjoy amazing meals with this delicate mushroom.

9. Wild enoki

The best winter mushroom is mild and slightly sweet. You will sometimes find cultivated enoki in shops — but those are different color and shape due to lack of sunlight during cultivation and special practices of the mushroom growers.

10. Cauliflower mushrooms

You may only find a few of these each season and still enjoy a hearty meal thanks to their size. They can be cooked in almost any way, although nothing beats a cauliflower mushroom soup.

Do you agree with my choices? Would you include a different mushroom? Let us know in the comments!

Originally published at my now closed blog.