Sarah Hawkins pulls the hem of her long paisley-print dress up to her knees, revealing long scratches along her shins where thorny vines have left their mark. Days prior, Hawkins had known the risk of a spontaneous trek into the woods when she wasn’t dressed for it. In the last five years that she has been foraging mushrooms, annoyances like briars or bug bites have just become business as usual.
“It can be a pain to go out in the woods, but it’s so rewarding,” Hawkins says. “You’re enlightening yourself. You’re leveling up.”
Photograph by The Sintoses
Hawkins, who lives in Athens and works near Stone Mountain at a mushroom farm called The Horti-Culture, has a USDA-issued wild mushroom identification license.
For her, the act of foraging—touching the soil, smelling the moss, connecting with nature—is satisfying in its own right. But the goal is to return home with a haul of tasty forest treasures. And anyone can do it: You just have to learn how to find the right fungi, and how to cook with them.
What’s in season
Edible mushrooms grow nearly year-round in Georgia. All of them must be cooked thoroughly because some, including morels, are poisonous if eaten raw. But preparing them doesn’t have to be complicated. Chef Brian So at Spring, a restaurant in Marietta, says that for most types of wild mushrooms, all you need is butter or olive oil and salt.
“Just melt your butter in the pan, add your mushrooms, salt them, and then you’ll notice that water starts seeping out,” So says. “All that water evaporates, and you start to see your butter brown. That’s when you have to keep an eye on [the mushrooms] and make sure you’re not overcooking them.”
In the spring, flavorful morels are a forager’s top prize. Morels have a short season of only a few weeks, they’re difficult to find, and they’re expensive. So, although there’s usually a strong sense of camaraderie among mushroom foragers, morels are the exception; no one will divulge their secret spots.
So puts cooked fresh morels on the menu while they’re in season, often as the starring feature of a vegetarian pasta dish.
“I like how meaty they are,” So says. “And I like how versatile they are—you can quickly saute them, you can stew them, you can do whatever you want with them.”
When morels disappear from the woods, chanterelles are just around the corner, first popping up around late May or early June. Hawkins likes to shred chanterelles and use them as a meat substitute. Other summer specialties include a shelf fungus called “chicken of the woods,” which Hawkins dredges in seasoned flour and fries like chicken, and certain types of boletes, which can work well in Italian cuisine.
In the fall and early winter, oyster mushrooms and lion’s mane emerge. Lion’s mane is a good substitute for crab or lobster, but Hawkins has another suggestion: Coat it in barbecue sauce and roast it for about 25 minutes at 350 degrees.
“Throw that on a bun, and you’ve got the best vegan barbecue,” she says. Similarly, she likes to dice up oyster mushrooms, saute them with seasoning, and add them to tacos in place of ground beef.
Photograph by The Sintoses
Honorable foraging
Because many mushrooms are inedible or poisonous, it’s safest to start foraging with an expert guide who can teach you how to identify edible species and where to look for them. In the Atlanta area, sign up for Hawkins’s foraging tours through The Horti-Culture, or join the Mushroom Club of Georgia on its twice-monthly mushroom walks.
Husband-and-wife team Sam Landes and Cornelia Cho have led the Mushroom Club of Georgia, which Landes describes as an “educational, scientific, outdoor social club,” since 2010. On their walks, club members spend a few hours in the woods collecting mushrooms of all types, then circle up to identify their finds together.
“That’s one of the ways you learn,” Landes says. “Learning is better when it’s not a solitary activity.”
Photograph by The Sintoses
Landes and Cho tell club members to take along a stack of small paper bags—a separate bag for each type of mushroom, to avoid cross-contamination—plus a basket to carry everything. Mushrooms need to breathe and stay dry, so paper and baskets are ideal for gathering and storing them.
Some varieties, they say, may need to have their base dug up to help confirm identification. For others, they recommend using a knife to sever the mushrooms from their bases, or pinching the stalk and snapping the mushroom off.
If you pull upward on a mushroom, you’ll remove a mass of soil and mycelium (the subterranean network of threadlike structures that produce the fungi we see aboveground). But cutting or snapping the mushroom from its base allows the mycelium to proliferate, while the mushroom stem can decompose back into soil.
When leaving the stem and mycelium in place, Hawkins leaves about 10 percent of any cache she finds so the mushrooms can continue releasing spores and carrying out their essential ecological functions. She calls this approach “honorable foraging”—a way to preserve the heritage of foraging and honor the land.
“We’re hard-wired to live in close connection with nature,” Hawkins says. “Whether I come out of the woods with one mushroom or a whole bag of mushrooms, I come out feeling more human.”
This article appears in our August 2024 issue.
The post Finding fungi: Hunting for edible mushrooms in Georgia’s woodlands appeared first on Atlanta Magazine.