LOW TECH : The Gold Beneath Our Feet

We’re rolling through some of the most spectacular scenery Central California has: steep hills dotted with live oak; ponds crowded at the edges with tall grasses; deep groves of redwood, dark as a dream. Along the side of the dusty road runs a stream, flashing silver in the sunlight.

Suddenly Jack Czarnecki pounds on his window: “Stop the car! Stop the car!” The driver slams on the brakes, the passengers pitch forward and Czarnecki scrambles out.

“I knew it,” he says. “I knew it. I thought I’d seen this yesterday, and here it is.”

We’re 10 miles from our destination, but already the mushroom hunt has begun.

Czarnecki, owner of Bistro 614 and Joe’s restaurant--two Reading, Pa., stops specializing in mushroom cookery--and the author of two books on cooking with mushrooms, returns to the car with a white toadstool-shaped mushroom. He says it’s an Agaricus augustus, or prince mushroom.

Lee Yamada, the group leader, identifies it as A. augustus’ close cousin Agaricus arvensis, or horse mushroom. Both are edible though little known outside mycological circles.

But which particular variety it is matters little to the half a dozen people in the car. It’s enough that it is a mushroom and that it is wild. They lean over the car seats to get a better look. Everyone wants to touch it. There’s a scent of blood in the air.

That’s a familiar sensation to mushroom hunters. At times, it’s a madness that seems almost like the kind that overtakes yard-sale shoppers. Just a whiff of the hunt and they turn rabid. They know that out there somewhere is a signed Stickley dining room set or an Eames chair with their names on it. Even if they come back with nothing more than a cracked piece of FiestaWare, it’s the lure of the possible that keeps them going. And, of course, with mushroom hunting, you get a nice walk thrown into the bargain.

This particular stroll begins at a wide spot on the dirt road that meanders through Rancho San Carlos, a pristine 23,000-acre preserve in the mountains east of Carmel Highlands. About a dozen of us have gathered for a special mushroom hunt organized by the Highlands Inn as part of its Masters of Food and Wine week.

We park in a meadow flanked on one side by a rolling grassy hill and on the other by a steeper slope thickly forested with live oak. In the beginning, everyone surrounds Yamada as he begins walking up the oak slope. Underfoot, the dried leaves form a thick thatch that crunches as we step. Underneath, the ground is moist and black. There’s been rain this week, and that’s good for mushrooms.

At first, it seems the area is barren; that happens sometimes. But then someone spots the first mushroom--a candy cap (Lactarius fragilis), a smallish reddish-brown spring mushroom. The group fans out. And then there’s another. And another. And then you look back and realize that the slope you just scrambled up is speckled with them. It’s like looking at one of those 3-D pictures where you see what’s there only after you stare at it long enough.

I didn’t have that problem the first time I went mushroom hunting, 15 years ago. Instead, it was one of those Stickley days. We drove to the mountains and within a quarter-mile of where we parked, we had picked enough dinner plate-size Boletus mushrooms (popularly known as porcini or cepes) to fill the trunk of my car.

I drove home in a gold fever, feeling as if I’d just been handed the keys to Ft. Knox. I remember cleaning those first mushrooms, sauteing them in butter with a little shallot, some sherry and some cream, and serving them over toast points with a decent Bordeaux. Bill Gates couldn’t have felt better after he sold his first computer program.

My guide then was a legendary New Mexico mushroomer named Chuck Barrows. It’s essential to have an experienced teacher the first half a dozen times you go; all the mushroom books in the world can’t make up for one experienced set of eyes.

Barrows, who was in his late 70s when we met, was a sprightly old guy with an elfin twinkle who just happened to have one of the best eating mushrooms in the United States named after him. Though Barrows is gone now, Boletus barrowsii is still considered one of the tastiest American members of its family.

The reason a guide is so important is that mushrooms, as nearly everyone knows, are famously tricky things. Eat the wrong one and it can kill you. But mushroom hunting is not as risky as it might seem when approached with caution. The trick to a successful hunt is knowing which varieties you’re looking for, then picking only those.

But even this can have its pitfalls. A wave of mushroom poisonings in the Bay Area this winter struck many Southeast Asian immigrants who happened across Amanita phalloides--the notorious death cap--perhaps confusing them with the prized paddy straw mushroom (Volvariella volvacea) from their homelands.

What you learn in mushroom hunting is to pay attention to detail. Mushrooms are as individual as people. They vary in size, shape, color, habitat and, of course, edibility. Although you can eat many kinds of mushrooms, only a few are considered desirable. So start by learning three or four fairly common culinarily important wild mushrooms and hunting only for these.

A good starter’s set would be chanterelles, morels and boletes.

You can recognize chanterelles by their vivid golden orange color and their vaguely trumpet-like shape. They are flattish on top, with pronounced gills underneath.

Morels are perhaps the most easily recognized of wild mushrooms. Their tall, narrow, honeycombed cap is frequently described as either “brain-like” or “sponge-like.” There is a false morel that is similar looking but can make you sick. To check for sure, cut the mushroom in half. A true morel has a hollow stem and cap.

Morels are sometimes found in surprisingly urban locations, since they pop up from compost gathered in Northwestern forests. I once found a morel growing in the garden at the downtown Los Angeles Public Library.

Boletes are shaped more like the domestic mushrooms we find in grocery stores but are bigger and flatter. Boletes usually have spongy gills underneath the caps and fat, meaty stems.

Although we tend to describe a taste as mushroom-like, mushrooms actually have a wide variety of flavors. Chanterelles are delicate--at least for wild mushrooms--with a curious beguiling hint of apricot when they’re very fresh. Morels have a deep muskiness, and boletes are famous for their rich meaty smell that seems the concentrated essence of what we call mushroom-like. The candy caps we are finding in Carmel Highlands have a distinct sweetness--about the last taste you’d expect in a mushroom.

Of course, no one should try to pick wild mushrooms from these brief descriptions. Again, the only way to learn to hunt mushrooms is to go with an experienced guide.

Better yet, make friends with a mushroomer. As Yamada points out, there is no one more vague than a wary mushroom hunter when talking to a stranger. Ask him where he found his basket of boletes or sack load of matsutakes, and he’ll answer something like, “Oh, in the Santa Cruz mountains”--an area stretching about 75 miles.

On this hunt, as I pick my way up the side of the hill, morels and matsutakes are the last thing on my mind. Mushrooms are highly seasonal, and in California, rain determines all.

In Central California, you find honey and oyster mushrooms after the first big storms in September or October. A month or so later, you start getting the boletes. In January, there is a brief season for the highly sought matsutakes. Morels are rarely found this close to the coast, but in the Sierras they begin to appear with the snow melt--in late April or May at the 4,000- to 5,000-foot level and moving up the mountain as the weather warms.

On this hunt, even the chanterelles are few and far between. They can be maddening mushrooms to find. It’s their habit to crouch under the thatch, so the only clue to their existence is a lump in the dead leaves. Brush away the bump and you’ve got buried gold.

But as you might expect, there are many more bumps than there are chanterelles. And after you’ve brushed aside a couple dozen bumps only to find more dead leaves, you begin thinking more about what a nice walk you’re having.

At the top of the hill, the oak breaks up into another grassy meadow. This isn’t the best habitat for mushrooms, but it is certainly beautiful and other things thrive. I step on a dead branch and 50 yards away a pair of deer bursts from cover, bounding away down a deep cleft on the other side.

Looking for mushrooms, you become aware of so many other things that usually never break through your perceptual filter. You notice every blade of grass. Here’s a field full of miner’s lettuce; pop a sprig into your mouth and you taste the vivid greenness of it.

That may be one of the reasons so few American mushroom hunters seem to be interested in anything more than the most rudimentary forms of preparing their finds. In fact, the American Mycological Society seems to regard mushroom cookery as a thing apart, confining it to a subcommittee on mycophagy (mushroom eating).

Instead, they seem to enjoy more the sheer act of collecting. In that way, they’re kind of like the cult of British train spotters--people who hang around rail yards recording the serial numbers on every passing locomotive. Mushroom hunters collect botanic names. For them, Latin is anything but a dead language.

And so, on we go, scrambling up and down the hills, eyes focused on the mottled brown and tan leaves underfoot. At the base of a dense grove of redwoods, someone finds huge mushrooms the size of your head, stark white against the dark, shady loam. They’re Leucopaxillus albissimus, inedible but undeniably beautiful.

Someone else brings up earthstars (Astraeus hygrometicus), an inedible member of the puffball family shaped like flattened many-pointed stars. Still others find Peziza sylvestris, cartilaginous fungi looking like cellophane shells. Some mushrooms are slimy and look almost newborn. Others tend to garish shades of green and purple.

In the end, though, this group--tending more toward the culinary than the mycological--keeps more edible mushrooms than anything else. We gather around Yamada as he sorts through our baskets. Here and there are chanterelles--some of them as big as a fist. Occasionally, he’ll point out a blewit (Clitocybe nuda)--an edible mushroom that is quite literally blue in color.

Mostly, though, we’ve scored a heavy load of candy caps, which--although they are technically edible--have such an unusual flavor no one seems especially excited about finding them.

When we return to town after lunch, I find some friends sitting around a table smoking cigars and drinking Armagnac. I empty out my sack of candy caps on the white linen tablecloth and we munch through them, amused more than intrigued by the way their caramel-like flavor complements the strong drink.

And in the crowded, noisy restaurant, I think about those deer, the smell of the leaves and the taste of miner’s lettuce.