Chanterelles, russula and sweet teeth

Last Sunday was an excellent day for mushrooming and this time we brought along our camera. First up are the majestic Black trumpets (Craterellus cornucopioides):

These chanterelles are as delicious as they are rare, especially when dried (see above). While the fresh taste is good but not remarkable, when dried they obtain a rich earthy flavor with notes of black truffle. Once you find where they like to grow, look around as they usually come in numbers. We picked almost 2kg!

Next are the common yet still tasty Funnel chanterelles (Craterellus tubaeformis):

These mushrooms are very good to eat fresh with their firm texture and pleasant mild yet distinctly mushrooom-y taste. Because of their small size it is very simple to dry them (i.e. scattering them out on newspaper) which is good because they are usually found in sizeable quantities.

We also picked a few Golden chanterelles (perhaps the best known member of this family of fungi). But over the last two months we have literally found a dozen or less, so it must be a bad year for them here in Norway. We also collected various edible Russula (kremler) and Sweet Tooth (piggsopp / Hydnum repandum).

Here are some about to go into tonight's dinner: a pork and mushroom stew. These reddish purple russula are also known as the Shrimp mushroom (Russula xerampelina) because of their particular smell of boiled seafood.

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Mushroom soy update: completed a batch per the Norwegian recipe last week but was left a bit disappointed. It didn't taste bad but more like Worcestershire. We'll try again one of these days..