What mushrooms are harvested in spring

Morels

When answering the question, what mushrooms are harvested in the spring, morels are most often remembered. Their wrinkled brown caps, always hollow, on brittle legs, often appear on the slopes of ravines, among aspens. They can appear both under a shrub and under a tree, on humus-fertilized soil or on sandy forest paths. The most popular spring morel mushrooms delight with a rich taste and unique forest aroma.

How to cook morel mushrooms

Rinse the mushrooms, chop and cook in boiling water for half an hour. Drain the liquid through a colander, cut the morels into rings. Fry in a cast iron pan in vegetable or butter, add salt and sour cream to taste. Simmer for half an hour on low heat under the lid. Alternatively, bake in a well-heated oven for 15 minutes.

Morel hats

Fans of picking mushrooms in the spring at the same time as morels can also find related morel caps. They can choose lowlands, places near wet pits and ditches, aspen and birch forests. The “headdress” of spring mushrooms is light brown, small in size, while the stem is quite long - sometimes more than 10 cm long. Some specimens have wrinkled caps, while others have smooth conical caps.

How to cook morel cap mushrooms

It can be cooked along with morels, the taste and aroma of those and other gifts of the forest is the same. A very satisfying dish - spring mushrooms, morel caps and morels after preliminary boiling, fried in a pan with eggs. Mushrooms should first be fried with chopped onion in oil for 10 minutes, then mixed with a couple of beaten eggs and add salt, pepper, or sour cream to taste. Fry while stirring for another 10-15 minutes.

Stitches

The conditionally edible spring mushroom with its wrinkled hat resembles an edible morel, but there are differences. His cap is dyed a richer, red-brown color, not cone-shaped, but shapeless. Lines are especially fond of pine plantations, they grow in places where butterflies are found in summer.

How to cook stitch mushrooms

Scientists have found that the line contains gyromitrin toxins, deadly to humans. In addition, the pulp of the mushroom has a characteristic iodine flavor and not everyone likes such food. Regarding the use of lines in food, the opinions of experts are divided. Some believe that the poison of mushrooms does not decompose from cooking, others - that the lines can be eaten after soaking and boiling for an hour, or after drying.

The safest way to prepare stitches is natural drying for six months. Then the mushrooms should be kept overnight in water or milk to swell, drain the liquid after soaking and rinse. Cut the lines, after which you can use them for cooking mushroom soup.

Pour a handful of mushrooms with hot water, boil, add table salt to taste and keep the pan on fire for 40-50 minutes. After that, you can add other ingredients to the cabbage soup. Consistently put in the broth: potatoes; browned carrots and onions; shredded cabbage; spices and spices to taste. Cook everything until done.

oyster mushrooms

Oyster mushrooms are known for their unpretentiousness, it is no coincidence that they are grown on an industrial scale along with champignons and even cultivated in private farmsteads. Mushroom pickers usually harvest forest oyster mushrooms in autumn, but in cold springs, you can find individual specimens in May and even early June. Multi-colored caps (whitish, greyish, tan, purple) appear on living wood and develop well on dead wood.

How to cook oyster mushrooms

Fragrant and juicy mushrooms, when properly prepared, can become a real delicacy. Cooking oyster mushrooms is easy, because they do not need to be boiled, soaked, or dried beforehand. It is enough to clean the raw materials from debris, rinse and cut into pieces - and you can fry.

Heat the frying pan, add a little vegetable oil and fry the chopped onion (pickled). Put oyster mushrooms, fry with stirring for 15-20 minutes.

Polypore scaly

Going to pick mushrooms in the spring in a mixed deciduous forest, you can probably find a tinder fungus on trunks and stumps. These gifts of the forest are extremely common in the middle lane, but they can only be collected for food when they are young, tender, crumbling in hands, with a hat up to 10 cm in diameter. Then the mushrooms will delight you with tastes that are not inferior to oyster mushrooms.

The scaly tinder fungus especially likes to grow on maples and ash trees, located low above the soil. Initially, the fungus resembles a kidney, then its fleshy cap grows. "Headdress", as the name implies, is covered with scales, its smell is pleasant, fresh, reminiscent of flour, wood and cucumbers at the same time.

How to cook tinder mushrooms

Washed and peeled young tinder fungi, cut into slices, boil in salt water for 1 hour. Drain liquid and refrigerate mushrooms. Mix with sour cream and chopped herbs, onions, add salt to taste and sprinkle with citric acid. Serve tinder salad with vegetables.

Sarcoscif cinnabar red

Now you know what mushrooms are harvested in spring. The most popular species in the middle lane are described here. It is recommended to pay special attention to morels and morel caps, oyster mushrooms. With luck, a fragrant harvest will allow you to cook a hearty roast and even stock up for the winter.

Attentive mushroom pickers may stumble upon lesser-known mushrooms that can also be eaten. Among them is the spring mushroom cinnabar-red sarcoscypha. Already in April, these very beautiful red mushrooms with raised hat edges appear in the forest, because of which these gifts of the forest are called scarlet or elf bowls in another way. Sarcosphyres delight with the beauty of bright placers formed on rotten trees in moist soil.

How to cook cinnabar red sarcoscif

It is known that even in ancient times, people prepared a hemostatic agent from the powder of sarcoscypha. But should you eat it? Mushrooms are conditionally edible, although they have low nutritional value due to small, thin fruiting bodies. Some gourmets boil the scarlet bowls for 20 minutes, after which they are fried with sour cream or used in a salad with onions and vegetable oil.

Even if a novice mushroom picker does not dare to try a sarcoscif, meeting her is a good sign. It has been noticed that it does not grow near industrial zones and highways, which means it is an excellent environmental indicator. In the area where scarlet bowls appear, you can safely pick spring mushrooms.