Shortly after a heavy downpour, on a fresh summer morning, you should take your family mushroom hunting. Between June and October you will find delicious mushrooms not only in forests, but especially in meadows, pastures and fields. Take an airy basket with you (not a plastic bag!) and a sharp mushroom or vegetable knife, then you can start looking. But be careful: many toadstools look very similar to the delicious mushroom.
Where can you collect mushrooms and which varieties are edible?
You can collect mushrooms between June and October, especially in meadows, pastures and fields. Edible mushroom species include the meadow mushroom (Agaricus campestris), the forest mushroom (Agaricus silvaticus) and the sheep mushroom (Agaricus arvensis). However, be careful of possible confusion with poisonous mushrooms.
You can eat these types of mushrooms
You only know two types of mushrooms from the supermarket - white and brown. However, these are not two different species, but simply different colors of the same cultivar. But did you know that there are around 50 different types of mushrooms, many of which are edible? We introduce you to the most important ones.
Meadow mushroom
The meadow mushroom (Agaricus campestris, also known as field Egerling) is probably the best known and a valuable edible mushroom. You can find it between June and October in meadows, pastures and fields, although the population of the once widespread fungus has declined sharply due to the decline in cow and sheep pastures.
Forest mushroom
The forest mushroom or blood hogweed (Agaricus silvaticus) can be found between July and October mainly in coniferous forests, more rarely in deciduous forests. Its appearance is very variable, but usually light brownish with brown to dark brown fibrous scales. The forest mushroom is very easy to confuse with the poisonous guinea fowl Egerling. However, you can recognize the poisonous mushroom by its carbolic smell, and interfaces, especially on the stem, turn yellow.
Sheep mushroom
The white aniseed mushroom or sheep mushroom (Agaricus arvensis) is also a valuable edible mushroom. You can find it from spring to autumn in forests, on fertilized meadows and pastures, in parks and in grassy places. Its flesh smells strongly of aniseed.
Caution: risk of confusion! Recognizing poisonous mushrooms
Unfortunately, mushrooms are very easy to confuse with various poisonous mushrooms, some of which can even be fatally poisonous.
Carbol Egerling or poison mushroom
Agaricus xanthodermus grows between June and October in deciduous forests, on forest edges, in clearings, meadows and in parks. You can distinguish it from its edible relatives by these characteristics:
- unpleasant carbolic smell (“hospital smell”)
- this sometimes only occurs when cooking
- Flesh at the base turns chrome yellow when printed or cut
Ball mushrooms
There are a number of very poisonous death cap mushrooms that at first glance look confusingly similar to edible mushrooms. However, you can recognize them by the typical bulb (often underground) and the white or light lamellae.
Tip
In every city there are mushroom consultants who have undergone special training and can tell you exactly whether the mushrooms they have collected are edible or not. However, a worm or snail infestation is not a sign that a mushroom is edible.
