Category Archives: Mushrooms

A Super Duper Truffle Dog

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Last week I had the distinct pleasure of watching a truffle dog in action. Cooper, the super duper truffle hound, is half lab, a quarter bernese mountain dog, and a quarter shepherd. His owner, Anne Seward, like the owners of many interesting pets, has her own distinguished pedigree: she’s related to the man responsible for “Seward’s Folly.” History buffs and denizens of America’s Last Frontier know that folly as the great State of Alaska. Secretary of State William H. Seward practically raided the U.S. Treasury himself to make sure it was purchased in 1867.

I joined Cooper, Anne, my friend Jack Czarnecki, and Jack’s friend Chris in Oregon’s Willamette Valley to give the dog a workout in search of the first black truffles of the season. In addition to owning the Joel Palmer House restaurant in Dayton, Oregon, where his son Chris is the chef, Jack is also the owner and chief producer of Oregon Truffle Oil, one of the few truffle oils on the market to use real truffles rather than test tube chemicals to produce its powerful flavor and aroma.

Last year I hunted white truffles with Jack. In the right habitat, coming across white truffles is about as challenging as finding chanterelles. Black truffles, on the other hand, require more skill. For one thing, unlike whites they blend in with the duff and dirt. Also, they tend to hang out a little deeper beneath the surface, requiring more digging (though sometimes you can find them poking right through the moss, as if coming up for a breath of air). And lastly, they just don’t seem to be as numerous as whites.

It doesn’t take much to train a truffle dog. Anne spent a week or so hiding little balls of truffle-doused cotton around the house. For a dog expecting a reward, latching on to the truffle scent is puppy’s play. The canine smeller is a biological wonder of evolution, and though not as developed as a bear’s, a dog’s sense of smell is way overmatched for truffles. Some dogs like a food treat to reward a successful retrieval; Cooper wants ball time.

Once we arrived at the site, Anne pulled both a rubber ball and a baggie of truffle-scented cotton from her pockets. She gave Cooper a whiff, holding the ball tantalizingly out of reach. “Find the truffle,” she commanded. Cooper barked and whined, then got down to business. He put his snout to the ground and started weaving among the sword ferns and second-growth Douglas firs. You could hear his nose in action as he brought the scent in and circulated it around with a snort. A moment later Cooper was scratching at a patch of duff.

“Good boy!” Anne played ball with Cooper while Jack raked the spot. Sure enough, he unearthed a nice walnut-sized black truffle, and then another. “His brother,” Jack said, explaining that wherever you find one black truffle you’re sure to find another.

Without Cooper on hand I’m sure our haul would have been appreciably less impressive. As it was we lined our buckets with truffles while the rain kept up through most of the morning. I’d guess we found truffles in roughly 80 percent of the spots where Cooper scratched; the other 20 percent we chalked up to human error. By mid-afternoon it was cold and miserable enough to call it a day. That’s when the Volvo pitched into the mire. We enlisted the aid of a local farmer, who pulled us out free of charge, knowing that a batch of truffle oil was in his future.

That night we capped our successful truffle hunt with dinner back at the Joel Palmer House, where a Candy Cap Martini kicked off a mushroom hunter’s feast, including Matsutake Chowder, Fungi Tart, Fillet of Beef with Porcini Sauce, and many other finely executed fungal delights washed down with excellent local Pinot Noirs.

I could get used to this Willamette Valley truffle hunting thing.

Chanterelle Soup

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THOSE GIANT LATE-SEASON chanterelles make for fun photos to share online, but mushroom hunters are often disappointed once they get their “flowers” back home to the kitchen. Big, soggy chanterelles cook up slimy!
 
One remedy is to make soup. Here’s an excellent recipe to neutralize the slime factor and get the most out of the last hunt.
 
There are plenty of Chanterelle Soup recipes that use exotic ingredients and techniques. This recipe is quick, easy, and delicious—and it highlights the main event, the mushrooms. You can make a complicated soup if you’d like. Then try this one.
 

6 tbsp butter, divided
1 med onion, diced
1 lb fresh chanterelles, diced
3 oz. dried porcini, rehydrated in 2 cups warm water (optional)
1/4 cup flour
4 cups beef stock
1/4 tsp white pepper
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
salt to taste

1 cup or more heavy cream
 

1. Melt half the butter in a large pot. Add onions and cook over medium heat until caramelized.

2. Meanwhile pulverize porcini into dust with food processor and rehydrate in a bowl with warm water.

3. When onions are nicely caramelized add chanterelles and remaining butter, raise heat to high, and cook 5 minutes or so, stirring, until mushrooms have expelled their moisture. Cook off some of the liquid. The time required for this step will vary depending on how moist the mushrooms are. They should be slightly soupy before continuing to the next step.

4. Lower heat to medium and blend in flour with sauteed mushrooms and onions. Pour in beef stock slowly, stirring. Add porcini stock.

5. Bring to boil, then reduce to a low simmer. Add spices. Use an immersion blender to puree soup or blend in a food processor. The soup should be smooth and creamy.

6. Lower heat and add cream before serving.

Optional but highly recommended: In a separate pan, saute black trumpet mushrooms, chanterelles, or other wild mushrooms in butter for garnish and added texture. If you can get your hands on black trumpets, by all means do so. They taste a lot like chanterelles on steroids and add exceptional flavor to the soup.

Serves 4 – 6

Porcini and Eggplant Parmesan

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THIS RECIPE IS based on Marcella Hazan’s Eggplant Parmesan recipe as a guideline. It’s decadent, with plenty of frying in oil. If that’s not your thing…well then, move along, nothing to see here.

1 large eggplant, sliced 1/4-inch thick lengthwise
1-2 large king boletes, sliced 1/4-inch thick lengthwise
flour
oil for frying
marinara sauce
1 lb mozzarella cheese, grated
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
fresh basil
salt and pepper
spaghetti

1. Heat oil in a large, deep-sided pan or skillet. Dredge eggplant and mushroom slices in seasoned flour. You may need to immerse mushroom slices in water before flouring. Fry in batches until golden, then remove to paper towels. (Note: Marcella recommends sprinkling eggplant slices with salt prior to frying so they release moisture; your call.)

2. Meanwhile prepare marinara sauce. You can take a shortcut and use a 28-oz can of store-bought sauce or make your own. We make our own simple red sauce by sautéing chopped garlic in olive oil, adding a 28-oz can of crushed tomatoes plus herbs, and simmering until the sauce attains desired taste and consistency. Add water as the sauce cooks down, and a pinch or two of sugar if necessary.

3. Grease a suitable baking dish. Line the bottom with a single layer of fried eggplant. Spoon over a third of your red sauce and top with half the mozzarella and a third of the parmesan. Dot with leaves of fresh basil. Repeat the layering, this time with all your porcini followed by another third of the red sauce, the rest of the mozzarella, another third of parmesan, and more fresh basil. Complete the final layer with the rest of your eggplant followed by the remaining red sauce and parmesan.

4. Bake for 30 minutes at 400 degrees. Remove from oven and allow to cool for several minutes.

Serve over spaghetti.

The Delivery

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In my ongoing effort to be a commercial mushroom gadfly—or maybe just a fly in the ointment—I hung out with the fellas at Foraged and Found Edibles the other day while they packed up a couple dozen restaurant shipments and made deliveries.

It was a relatively quiet day. When I arrived at the warehouse (the owner’s basement), Jonathan and Shane were busy sorting and cleaning mushrooms. Order by order, they packed chanterelles, porcini, and other mushrooms into cardboard flats and weighed them. A fan in the corner dried porcini and watercress soaked in a washbasin.

An hour later the packing was done and it was time to make deliveries. Jeremy, owner of Foraged and Found (pictured with a stack of baskets) owns a fleet of three Astro vans for the purpose, all of them used and cheap. He beats these vans like rented mules on the logging roads of the Pacific Northwest, but not before squeezing a couple hundred thousand miles out of each one, averaging more than a 100,000 miles a year.

Jonathan would cover east side restaurants for this delivery; Shane had the city. I hopped in with Jonathan, a CIA (NYC) graduate and former sous chef. Our first stop was his old employer, the Herbfarm in Woodinville, Washington, one of the Northwest’s most celebrated restaurants. I had the good fortune of eating there last spring with my food blog pals Hank Shaw, Holly Heyser, and Matt Wright. The Herbfarm doesn’t serve lunch, so the atmosphere was relaxed. Owner Ron Zimmerman came out to greet us (pictured taking possession of his beloved fungi at top of post). Right now he’s doing his popular annual Mycologist’s Dream menu and his order was both the biggest and most diverse, including chanterelles, yellowfoots, matsutake, both #1 and #2 porcini, a cauliflower mushroom, saffron milkcaps, hawkswings, and man-on-horseback mushrooms. Ron picked through the mushrooms with a knowing hand. We made some friendly chitchat and then headed off.

Next was Cafe Juanita, a perennial favorite on the north shore of Lake Washington in Kirkland. Chef-owner Holly Smith won a James Beard Award in 2008 and just seeing her face light up at the sight of a 10-pound bag of wild watercress was worth the trip. She teased out a strand and munched it approvingly.

Our last stop of the day put these first two deliveries in stark relief. The cook looked stressed out and annoyed at our presence for some reason that was never articulated. “How’s it going?” Jonathan said, trying to be friendly. “Busy!” the cook snapped. I have two children under 11, so I know “acting out” when I see it. It’s not a pretty sight in an adult. The cook slapped his dishrag on the table and grabbed Jonathan’s receipt book, which he slammed against the wall before signing for the goods, then handed it back without a word. He kicked his new box of watercress to one side and had someone take away the mushrooms.

So much for fresh local ingredients. Some people are in the wrong line of work. Jonathan told me one of the hardest parts of his job is trying to educate clients who don’t get the grading system. Even well known and long-standing restaurants don’t always understand that #1 porcini and matsutake buttons will be varying sizes, not always cute and petit. “It’s not as if mushrooms are grown like tomatoes in a mold,” he said. “They’re wild.”

That’s the point, but sometimes people want their wild ingredients to behave like conventional supermarket produce, domesticated and submissive. For years now a variety of cranks and schemers have tried to figure out the secrets of ectomycorrhizal fungi in order to grow them like a crop. Let’s hope they fail.

Grilled Matsutake

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Matsutake, which means “pine mushroom” in Japanese, isn’t among my favorite of the wild edible mushrooms, but it’s fun to forage and I enjoy preparing it in traditional Japanese recipes.

Look for matsutake under conifers in well-drained, even sandy soils. Like porcini, it can be found near the ocean beaches of the Northwest and also in the mountains, especially in areas where volcanic soils are present. Matsutake fruits in other regions of North America including the woods of Maine and Ontario.

Though the Japanese prefer the mushroom in its button stage with gills entirely covered by the veil, I find that it becomes even more aromatic as the cap begins to open.

It has a singular aroma. David Arora of Mushrooms Demystified fame refers to it as “a provocative compromise between ‘red hots’ and dirty socks.” In my opinion this spicy cinnamon-like flavor marries with Eastern culinary ingredients such as soy, rice vinegar, shaoxing wine, and so on, better than Western dairy ingredients such butter, cream, and cheese.
 
Probably my favorite preparation is Matsutake Sukiyaki. Gohan is another way to showcase this unique tasting mushroom. But if you want to experience the flavor in the most dressed down way, try grilling it. Slice the mushroom and grill over low to medium heat until light golden. It should be slightly crispy on the outside with a moist, meaty inside. A dipping sauce of equal portions soy sauce and rice vinegar completes this simple and flavorful dish.

The Ukrainian Connection

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You might not see these people around town. They stick together and avoid attracting attention. But in your local mushroom patch you’re sure to find them. Eastern Europeans, that is. Poles and Czechs, Russians and Ukrainians, many of them recent immigrants in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. They have a long tradition of scouring the woods of their homelands for edible fungi.

Mushrooms are often thought of as basically nutrient-free. This is not the case. Fungi can boast a number of important nutrients, including protein, and while a meal of mushrooms isn’t equivalent to a steak dinner, to an Old World peasant not that long ago it might have been the difference between making it through the winter and starvation.

No wonder Eastern European fungal folkways have been handed down over the centuries—and they’re alive and well in North America.

There’s a mushroom patch that I frequent in the mountains east of Seattle. Actually, it’s more of a huckleberry patch, but sometimes I’ll pick mushrooms when I’m there. Every October I see the Eastern Europeans parked in the many turnouts along the forest road that leads to it. They’re in search of boletes, especially Boletus edulis, which they call the “white mushroom” as well as a number of other species in that family that most recreational mushroom hunters rarely consider for the table. They vacuum up the many slippery jacks and scaber stalks of the forest.

Last year I happened on a troop of them in the bush and I wish I had been able to get some clandestine photos. They looked as though they’d just stepped off the set of a Hollywood movie about gypsies, wearing handmade clothes—the women in ankle-length skirts and babushkas in the middle of the wilderness—and calling to each other through the woods in an indecipherable tongue. As soon as they saw me they turned tail, as if engaged in some sort of furtive, illegal activity. Many of the Eastern Europeans, for reasons that are obvious to even the most casual student of history, are reluctant to talk to strangers and view anyone outside their cohort as a potential authority figure best to be avoided.

Just the other day I was more lucky. I found a group of Ukrainians working a patch who were willing to talk. Already they had a couple five-gallon buckets filled with slippery jacks, red caps, and the odd king bolete. One of the two women spoke decent English and explained that they were from a village outside Kiev. She wouldn’t submit to a photo but her picking partner agreed to hold up what they called a “brown cap.” They differentiated between three different types of Leccinum: red caps, brown caps, and black caps. This is a notoriously difficult genus to key out at the species level, and there is some debate even about the edibility of these mushrooms in general since they are known to cause illness on occasion, with one poisoning case in particular that has made the rounds recently.

The other prevalent genus, Suillus, which includes slippery jacks and jills, is ubiquitous on the forest floor but as the common name suggests, often slimy. The Ukrainians said they peeled the cap and then boiled the mushrooms in salted water before pickling or canning. A dash of lemon juice, they said, made all the difference. These are seriously labor-intensive mushrooms and I’ve never done much with them. Some people will dry and powder various kinds of Suillus for use in soups and stews.

Also that day I met a man from Moscow named Eugene. He was picking with his wife and had a basket filled with similar species (shown at the top of this post). Eugene said he sliced and salted the mushrooms before preserving them. We exchanged email addresses, a level of communication that initially surprised me, but when I tried to send photos to Eugene the next day my message bounced.

I don’t mean to sound like a cultural tourist, but I think it’s cool that an activity like mushroom hunting can introduce you to a diverse group of people from around the world. I’m hoping that I can get to know a few of these folks and learn their methods of mushroom preparation. But asking questions in the bush doesn’t always get you far. You can understand why people hailing from the former Soviet bloc might be suspicious. The Ukrainians were surprised that I was alone.

“Not good to be alone in woods,” one of them said to me. As if putting an exclamation point on the statement, a quick volley of gunfire echoed through the hills. Just target practice, I said. They looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Yes, maybe.”

The Mushroom Camp

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In late September, with my friend Beedle (of Fat of the Land fame) at the wheel, I rode shotgun on a long drive up to northwest British Columbia to go steelheading (more on that in a future post). We camped on the banks of the Kispiox, tributary to the Skeena, and sure enough the first big rainstorm of the season blew out the entire system just a few days after our arrival. So much for fishing.

Instead we took advantage of river out and explored the enormous country that is backwoods B.C., with an eye out for the mushroom trade that is such an integral part of this region.

 

In the hamlet of Kitwanga, just off highway 37 (only 700 miles to Alaska!), we found a buyer named Ave. He had his buy station—a simple wall tent with a wood stove—set up on a friend’s gravel lot just outside of town. As we pulled in Ave was in the middle of telling two First Nations men how they might go about finding mushrooms to sell. Otherwise the place looked deserted. It’s been a poor year for the matsutake harvest in B.C., with a record drought for most of the summer and early fall. We were told the Kispiox was as as low as it had been since river levels were first recorded, 70 years ago.

 
Meanwhile, with ample September rains, Oregon and Washington are enjoying a good year (recreational hunters might call it spectacular, while commercial hunters are happy that it’s finally underway after a slow start in August) and the matsutake harvest in places like Crescent Lake is bountiful enough that prices paid to pickers in Canada are as low as $3/lb. Ave figured he’d have a bunch of pickers pulling in later in the afternoon with mushrooms to sell but he wasn’t too enthusiastic about the season so far. In a few weeks he planned to head south to Vancouver Island to buy chanterelles, and then on to southern Oregon and northern California for the black trumpet pick come winter.
 
After lunch at the excellent Kitwanga Diner, we went north on 37 to … don’t blink or you’ll miss it … Cranberry Junction, where an infamous ad hoc mushroom camp has existed for years. 
 
 

Known affectionately (or frighteningly, depending on your disposition) as “The Zoo,” this place has hosted as many as 1,500 mushroom pickers during the go-go years when matsutake fetched exorbitant prices on the Japanese market and pickers stuffed their pockets with cash for mushrooms. Now, after several so-so harvests and prices in the tank, it was nearly a ghost town. We saw only a handful of campers who had erected various forms of habitation, from simple tarp-and-stringer tents to more elaborate school-bus shacks.

 

The only one around was Grace, who has run the mobile general store here for the last decade. Grace had never seen the camp so desolate and she didn’t expect it to get any better with the recent rain. At $3 per pound, there’s little incentive—even poverty, it would seem—for a picker to hump mushrooms out of the bush all day. Grace explained that expenses (e.g., gas, food, auto repairs) can be as much as $100 a day, meaning 50 pounds of matsutake hardly covers your overhead. And on a year like this, picking 100 pounds a day is only feasible for the most knowledgeable of pickers.

Grace’s two football-sized dogs yapped away and she finally had to go back inside her trailer to nurse an illness. We were left alone in a nearly empty camp with a few indelible images: an outhouse in splinters on the ground, as if overrun by grizzlies; a burned out car that might have once been used as shelter more than transportation; a rusted and bullet-riddled trash-can spilling its refuse; a ruined tent slumping in the wind.

Images such as these might make you think about your next purchase of wild mushrooms at the local grocery store or farmers market. And by think I don’t mean to suggest you not buy them, only that you consider the supply chain that brings us these wild delicacies. The other day I saw porcini advertised for $40/lb and chanterelles at $15/lb. Even birch boletes, not nearly as choice as king boletes, were commanding a hefty $30/lb price-tag.

I’m not sure what the answer is. An astute commenter on one of my earlier posts noted that the inequities in the wild mushroom business are no different than in any other industry in America; wherever you look, those on the lower rungs are compensated proportionately less than those on top, yet without those people there is no top. As a recreational hunter, I can tell you that the knowledge, physical ability, and sheer cojones required to harvest large quantities of wild mushrooms in the wilderness are substantial. As a consumer and restaurant patron, I can tell you that the costs of eating these delicacies are dear. And as a member of the human race, I can tell you there are other hidden societal costs of not valuing the skills that put these foods on our plates. What are those costs worth?

Game Hen with Chanterelles & Madeira over Parsnip Puree

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OUT TO DINNER the other night, the chef came out of his kitchen to explain just how he liked to cook game hen (finishing it with a nob of sizzling butter was key, he said), and then, as we got to talking about mushroom hunting, it occurred to me that this same dish might go really well with a handful of button chanterelles. To make it more of a meal I added the parsnip puree.

1 game hen
2 tbsp butter
1 shallot, chopped
1/4 lb chanterelle buttons
splash Madeira
2 tbsp mascarpone
2 medium parsnips, peeled
heavy cream
salt and pepper
basil, chopped for garnish

1. Remove both legs (including thighs) of game hen, reserving rest of bird for another purpose. Pat dry, season, and saute over medium-high heat in half the butter, browning each side so the skin is dark and crispy and the meat tender. Add second tablespoon of butter to finish before removing legs to a plate and placing in 350 degree oven to keep warm.

2. While meat is cooking, cut parsnips into pieces, cover with water in small pot, and boil 15 minutes. Remove parsnips to food processor, add a spoonful of cooking water plus a little heavy cream, and puree.

3. Add chopped shallot to same pan and saute in pan juices until soft, a minute or two. Add mushrooms and stir. Cook another couple minutes before deglazing pan with a splash of Madeira wine. As wine and pan juices bubble and reduce, stir in a couple spoonfuls of mascarpone to thicken.

4. Remove meat from oven and pour any accumulated juices into mushroom sauce. Plate game hen leg over parsnip puree and top with chanterelles. Garnish with chopped fresh basil. Serves 2.

The fresh basil might seem a quixotic choice. It’s such a strong flavor, you rarely see it used as a garnish the way you see, say, parsley. But in this case it did a really good job of balancing the sweetness of the parsnip and brightening the overall dish. Basil peaked in or garden recently and we’re using it as much as possible; combined with the high season of chanterelles, the pairing seemed like a good idea—and indeed I plan to find other ways to bring these two ingredients together, idiosyncratic or not.

The Transaction

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On Saturday I joined Doug and his friend Jeff for another day of picking.

Hanging out with this pair reminded me of the sort of male camaraderie that develops in close quarters. You’ll find it in school dormitories, on fishing boats, in hunting camps. Old pals, they knew each other’s foibles and weaknesses all too well and exploited them in an ongoing banter of inside jokes, ragging, and general good-natured BS.

We drove a ways north on the Olympic Peninsula to check out a chanterelle patch only to find out another picker or crew had beaten us to it. But while settling for the dregs—only about eight or nine pounds worth—we stumbled on a few king boletes that had just come up. Kings grow fast, much faster than chanties, and it’s likely they hadn’t even broken through the duff when the competition had cleaned out the patch a couple days earlier. This was a key piece of information. We made tracks for another nearby patch.

A king bolete patch in full flush is a lovely sight to behold. Chanties are beautiful nuggets of gold in the dark woods, but kings are something special. I get a thrill with each find—and this thrill would come a hundred times over on these few acres of second-growth timber. This was the patch where Doug had picked 35 pounds of kings earlier in the week and another 75 pounds with the help of Jeff two days later. Here we were only a day after that haul filling our buckets again with tight no. 1 buttons, about 45 pounds in all.

This was a “day saver” (as Doug called it) for the pickers after getting scooped at the last patch. We loaded up the baskets and drove back south to Raymond to meet the buyer, Jeremy Faber of Foraged and Found Edibles, who was en route from Seattle to buy mushrooms from several Raymond-area pickers, most of them Cambodian immigrants.

Sang was in the process of cleaning his pick when we arrived. It was his house and for the use of his kitchen he’d receive a commission at the end of the night. Other nearby pickers started showing up at the back door with baskets overflowing with boletes.

Jeremy worked quickly to grade everyone’s pick—he still had stops to make in Elma and Centralia. First he separated the no. 1’s from the no. 2’s and no. 3’s. A no.1 is a firm button with a cap that hasn’t fully opened. These are considered the most choice. A no. 2 is generally larger and softer than a no. 1, and no. 3’s are known as “dryers”—they’re better suited to dehydrating and sold dry.

Next he cut every mushroom in half to check for worms. A type of fly known as a bolete gnat lays its eggs on the mushroom and the larvae can reduce a perfect looking button into a wormy mess in a matter of hours. After cutting the mushrooms are graded out, weighed, tallied, and the picker paid in cash on the spot.

This is the moment of truth for the pickers and some can’t bear to watch. A cluster of wives looked on as their husbands’ work for the day was added up.

It was after 10 pm when we were finished loading up Jeremy’s van with baskets of kings. Now he had to make a stop a few blocks away to pick up a hundred or so pounds of white chanterelles, then on to his other rounds. He wouldn’t be home for a while yet, and even then his work on tonight’s buy had only just begun. Back in Seattle—more than two hours away—he’d need to haul all the mushroom baskets into his basement walk-in for the night and start packaging up his restaurant deliveries the next day.

For their part, the pickers all went home with cash in their pockets to get some sleep before tomorrow’s pick, when the whole process would repeat itself. 

The Picker

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Doug makes his living as a full-time, year-round mushroom picker. He picks the Washington Coast near his Westport home in the fall, travels south to pick California in the winter, and marches back up the east slope of the Cascades following the spring pick, sometimes up into British Columbia if the pick is good.

The other day I tagged along with Doug to see how it was done.

To say Doug is an interesting character is to make a broad understatement. He’s been a logger, served in the military, and captained a crab boat. When you drive around the Olympic Peninsula’s down-at-the-heels timber communities with Doug in his $500 Buick Century sedan, you spend a lot of time waving to the people you pass, all friends or former colleagues: shake rats*, long-liners, other pickers, and those three old codgers jawing around the tailgate at the general store.

More important, at least in terms of Doug’s livelihood, you also spend a lot of time visiting trees that might as well be personal friends. Within a mile or two of our meeting place we pulled over beside a fork of the Hoquiam River. A single sitka spruce of less than 100 years age was busy cranking out porcini buttons. Doug has known this tree a long time and he’ll stop by for a visit every now and again to say hello and load up on the porcini that spring from its roots like Athena out of Zeus’s head.

After that we visited a hedgehog patch. I found myself struggling to keep up. Doug knows exactly where the mushrooms are. He has patches up and down the West Coast, has in fact forgotten more patches than most pickers will ever know. When you follow Doug through the salal and huckleberry and old cedar slash, you’re following a man who has created little trails through the forest just like the deer and elk and bears. These trails lead directly to mushrooms, which end up in his bucket by the pound, and are later emptied into baskets to be weighed by the buyer.

Doug prides himself on providing good product. His mushrooms are fresh, clean, and unblemished.

After picking hedgehogs we visited a chanterelle patch and another porcini patch. A good portion of Doug’s day is spent scouting. The chanterelle patch needed another week and he figured his early porcini patch was about to pop. He predicted a 30-pound haul for the following day, and when I talked to him on the phone the next night he said it put out 35 pounds—and that was just the beginning. He’ll be visiting that patch every other day for the next week or two until the patch peters out.

Meanwhile the hedgehogs were just coming on and there were always chanterelles to pick. Plenty of chanterelles. When I asked Doug why he picked, he didn’t talk about the money or the virtue of hard work or the allure of being your own boss. It was all about the woods. To pick mushrooms on a daily basis is to be intimately involved in the web of life. Doug knows which salmon streams still have decent runs of wild fish, where to find the best berries, and how to lose himself in the forest’s grandeur without getting lost.

Writers have an expression: a writer’s writer might be unknown to the critics and taste-makers, but earning the admiration of fellow scribes is the highest honor. Doug is a picker’s picker.

* A shake rat is a logger who specializes in cutting cedar shakes, or shingles.