Monthly Archives: June 2008

Buttoned Up


You say you didn’t land any spring kings despite the fisheries biologists’ predictions of a banner year? Me neither. But spring Chinook are not the only kings of the season. The fungal kingdom has its own spring royalty—king boletes—and though the exact species name is up for grabs, we can all agree that what the Italians simply call porcini is out there on the East Slope of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada right now.

I love hunting for spring kings and I love eating them. In Washington these mushrooms seem to be most prevalent around true firs, although experience shows that certain hardwoods can be important too. They start popping as early as April in California and Oregon, but here in Washington I don’t bother checking my patches until June, usually as the morel harvest is waning. Queen’s cup lilies are a good indicator for timing.

Professional foragers grade their mushrooms for market. No. 3’s are the big mature kings that can be spotted even from a speeding car. Also called “flags,” they’re often useful beacons for finding the more desirable no. 2’s and no. 1’s. The former have just emerged from the duff and are still firm, with convex caps and white pores underneath the cap; the latter are harder to see because they’re still in the “button” phase underground, with caps that have just started to open. A trained eye can see the mounded duff that buttons push up, known as “mushrumps” to hungry mycophagists. Hunting for no. 1 buttons is good sport.

Here’s a video that shows the habitat and the progression of looking for spring kings, from flag to button:

While I usually dry my excess boletes for later use in soups and stews, apparently you can freeze the buttons, so this year I’ve vacuum-sealed and frozen about 10 pounds of porcini buttons. I’ll post the results after thawing and cooking the first batch later this summer when the flush is over.

In the meantime, I’ll be eating fresh porcini with morning eggs, sauteed for lunch sandwiches, and prepared in all manner of ways for dinner, from pasta sauces to grilled to stewed. Their meatiness and nutty-woodsy flavor make porcini one of the great treats in all of fungaldom.

Camp Food


Been out hiking, camping, and enjoying the spring pageantry (ok, so it’s officially summer now, but it’s still spring in the mountains). Oh, and harvesting a bunch of ‘shrooms. The morel flush continues at higher altitudes and the spring king boletes are coming on strong. Meaty mushrooms like morels and porcini make for good eats in camp, transforming a simple dish of rice, romano cheese, and cream into something a little more special.

I’ll have more to say about finding spring porcini in my next post.

Shadenfreude


Schadenfreude: Hyperdictionary definition: [n] (German) delight in another person’s misfortune.

Shadenfreude: My definition: [n] (Piscatorial) delight in catching bucketloads of non-native Columbia River American shad, which could be viewed as the fish’s misfortune.

This has become an annual trip for me in recent years. I blast down to Portland for a night of good grub, a dram of Beam, and a few hands of cribbage with my pal Bradley. In the morning we get up before dawn, pound a few mugs of coffee and a Viking-sized butterhorn and make tracks for the Columbia Gorge, where we get in line with several dozen other vehicles to wait for the 7 am starting gun, when they open the Bonneville Dam visitor’s center to the public. It’s key that we be one of the first cars in line, because inevitably we’re the only anglers fly-fishing and we need to establish a proper DMZ for back-casting.

If there can be said to be any sort of silver lining at all to the decline of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia-Snake system, it is the shad. American shad (Alosa sapidissima, from the Saxon allis for European shad and the Latin sapidissima for most delicious), are the largest members of the herring family and native to the Atlantic. Pioneering aquaculturist Seth Green planted the first 10,000 shad in Pacific waters in 1871, introducing the survivors of a seven-day cross-country railroad journey into the Sacramento River. There is evidence that descendants of that original stock might have made it to the Columbia River as early as 1876, but the river was planted in 1885 for good measure.

Now there are millions of shad migrating up the Columbia every year, and without much of a commercial fishery it’s a boom-time for recreational anglers. Most fishermen don’t bother until fish counts over the dam hit 100,000 per day, but owing to a complicated set of schedules, Bradley and I would need to make our trip in advance of that magic number this year. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried.

As Bradley says, fly-fishing for shad in water as big and boisterous as the Columbia is “about as much fun as you can have with a flyrod,” at least on a sustained basis. Sure, there’s nothing quite like a hot steelhead ripping line off your reel (or hooking into a marlin, I suppose, if you’re into 14-weight rods), but in terms of action, it really doesn’t get much better than shad. And in my experience, fly-fishing is far and away the best way to catch a ton of shad, much more so than conventional tackle (although I’m told there’s a hand-lining method that absolutely slays ’em).

There’s something about the dead-drifted fly that turns the shad on, so right off the bat you’re playing to the flyrod’s strength. The take is usually near the end of the drift, which means you’re fighting a three-pound fish downstream in the current of huge water. Double barbed hooks come in handy. As do heavy sinktip lines. I use a soft six-weight rod, which means Bradley is always barking at me to bring in my fish, “enough diddling around already.”

On this day we were joined by Bradley’s brother, Frank. The action was fast and furious all morning as we jostled for position and razzed each other each time a fish got off. Shad have soft mouths and it’s not uncommon to lose as many fish as you land. Still, by noon we had well over a hundred pounds of fish on the stringer, this despite most of the males being tossed back. After lunch Frank and Bradley set to the messy business of harvesting roe from the females. Parboiled for five minutes with a dash of vinegar, the sausage-like roe casings keep well in the freezer and can be fried up in butter to make a powerful fisherman’s breakfast with eggs and spuds.

Minus the eight odd fish I took home to fillet and smoke, the rest of our fish are now at Tony’s Smokehouse & Cannery in Oregon City, getting cleaned, smoked, and pressure-canned. Shad on a shingle, anyone?

The Professional


My head is still reeling. I got to hang out with a professional forager on Monday. Unfortunately, I can’t divulge much more than that right now, but I’ll say this: my own knowledge could fit in with the dirt and duff under his left pinky nail.

Making your living as a forager is unbelievably hard work. Most professionals—and I use the term loosely—are recent immigrants, legal and otherwise, who are willing to do this seasonal, mercurial, back-breaking work for wages that average out, in most cases, to the minimum. Then there are those who either shun society or want to work in the woods. A very small percentage are making it their daily career and being well compensated. This forager was in the latter category.

Together we scouted some of his spring porcini patches in a casual, day-off sort of way, filling a couple buckets just the same with no. 1 buttons and a bunch of coral to boot. That’s about all I can say for now. I’m writing a piece on our day together and will supply more details at a later date.

Pasta with Porcini in Sage Butter

When I got home I took one of my porcini and chopped it up and sauteed it for a few minutes in sage butter (a couple tbsp of hot melted butter that is just starting to brown, with crispy fried sage leaves), then poured over penne. Garnished with chopped parsley and grated parm. Simple and delicious. Don’t be surprised, though, if your spring porcini is milder than the fall variety.

A Good Week for the Wetsuit


While the East Coast may be sweating out its first heat wave of the year, here in Seattle the weather’s been unseasonably miserable: sideways rain and bone-chilling cold. I’ve been down in the basement performing unspeakable rites, putting in calls to Nawlins voodoo shops, even screaming “Uncle!” at the top of my lungs. The cold rain and snow just keeps a-coming. So, if you can’t beat ’em…

I put on the wetsuit the other day and went free-diving with my half-fish friend David Francis. Dave gets in a minimum of 100 dives a year. Long ago I stopped worrying about staying submerged even half as long, or seeing the things he sees underwater. I just like getting wet, working muscles that don’t normally see a lot of action, and checking out the marine environment. There’s food to be had, too.

Dave calls it human-powered hunting. We don’t carry fancy spearguns; the Hawaiian sling is our tool of choice (although according to Wikipedia, what we’ve always referred to as a sling is more properly known as a polespear).

When I first started free-diving 15 years ago, there were abundant populations of rockfish and lingcod—or at least they seemed abundant to me—all along the jetties up and down Pugetopolis. Rockfish are slow-growing and often don’t reproduce until several years old (and older), but the lings were considered fair game in limited numbers. Back then it seemed like we were the only ones targeting lings. Lately with salmon runs so depressed, more and more anglers are turning to bottomfish. We see them anchored off jetties that boats used to ignore on their way out to the deeper trolling waters. And now we see fewer and fewer lings. Each spring I wonder if this will be my last backyard ling hunt…and don’t get me started on the chemical contaminants cropping up in these urban in-shore fish.

That said, we saw a few lings… If you want to read more about my adventures free-diving in pursuit of this toothy—and toothsome—delicacy, check back soon and I’ll have details about a forthcoming magazine piece.