Forage to Feast: Exploring the Biology and Culinary Magic of Morel Mushrooms

 

It’s a mild spring day, with the warm sun casting flecks of light on the forest floor. Deciduous tree branches tangle together overhead and close in around a grassy depression, likely the remnant of a past disruption or abandoned pathway. The mushroom forager advances along this path, deeper into the wilderness. Woody debris crunches underneath their boots as their gaze scans the forest floor, scouring the underbrush for the prize of the season: the elusive morel mushroom .

As the forest awakens this spring, the search for morels begins. We wanted to share some expert insights to help you make the most of this year’s morel foraging season. Morels, also known as Morchella mushrooms, are a genus of around seventy species of edible mushrooms. Unlike your typical smooth-capped mushroom that comes from many spore syringes, morels are known for their patterned, honeycomb-like caps. A surge in the popularity of morel mushrooms, especially in high-end dining, has created a lucrative market. Many people grow their own mushrooms at home using liquid cultures, and experiment with growing morels outdoors, using Morel Liquid Culture. Commercial cultivation, while not impossible, has seen limited success thus far, allowing a largely informal market of morel foraging to thrive. 

When the time is right, experienced foragers spend weeks staking out the best place to find morel mushrooms. Because of their mycelial networks, morels can come back year after year, and prominent foragers can even get territorial over their spots to find these foraged mushrooms.

Even if you’re not an expert forager, you can still follow some basic steps and clues to find morels yourself. To learn more about foraging morels, I sat down with our founder Drew, a lifelong forager with years of experience finding these highly coveted and unusual fungi. Here are some excerpts from our conversation. 

 

Morel Mushroom Biology

 

Morels do not really look like a typical mushroom; they’ve got that kind of wavy pattern on top. How does that work? Is that waviness where the spores are coming out? 

 

Correct, they do not have traditional gills. Instead, the whole fruiting body in a sense is a gill. So, all those little indents are where the mushroom spores come out of. 

 

Can you tell me about the life cycle of a Morel mushroom? Where do morel mushrooms grow?

 

The life cycle is very similar to any traditional mushroom fruiting body. You have the spore germination, which is the beginning stages of the mycelium, then you have the mycelium spreading through vegetation, through nature, and then you have the fruiting bodies actually being triggered to produce, and drop spores, starting the whole process over again.

 

One cool theory which comes from Paul Stamets, is that morel mycelium is one of the most present fungi on earth, and that its mycelium actually exists everywhere and covers almost everything underground; under concrete paths, under houses, everywhere you can think of. But it requires certain environmental triggers for the fruiting bodies to show themselves. 

So the fungi, as an organism, is in its most natural, thriving state when we don’t actually see it, when it’s just the mycelium forming under the earth. When we see the fruiting bodies, that’s because they have gone into some sort of stress which triggers them to reproduce and spread spores so they don’t die entirely.  

Where To Find Morel Mushrooms

 

So if adverse conditions essentially trigger these morel fruiting bodies, what environmental factors can lead to a good year from a foraging perspective? 

 

Moisture is probably one of the most important things. Most of the areas where you can find heavy flushes of morels are areas where there was snow in the winter, then the snow melts when the ground warms up to a certain temperature, and morel fruiting bodies start to pop up.

When the snow melts, that provides enough moisture which is a precondition for morels, but there’s usually other environmental things too, most commonly any sort of disruption. So forest fires are top of the line, and if there’s a big forest fire, morels pop off like crazy. 

 

So if there are forest fires in August, then morels will begin popping up the following spring or when?

 

Exactly. So if there are forest fires in August, morels will start popping up in that area, and the timing varies by the region. Morels come up a little earlier in the Midwest, whereas over here in Washington, they come up around the first week of May. 

One technique for where to find morel mushrooms is to follow burn maps. Commercial foragers keep track of forest fire locations so they can hit those areas next season. 

Another environmental factor is deforestation, so logging areas where people are harvesting trees are another great place to look, but it’s not just  the fact that the tree was cut down. It’s the fact that the machinery drove over the mycelium, or trees hit the ground and caused stress on the mycelium. Keeping track of logging roads, looking along the edges of forests and fire roads can be another indicator. If you go hiking in the PNW, you will see these roads that go up the mountains. The edges of those are usually really good places to find morchella mushrooms. The mycelium grows through the ground, and hits that gravel, which triggers the fruiting bodies to grow.

 

So that could potentially happen year after year?

 

Yeah, totally. I have one spot where some forest roads were put in seven years ago. Seven years later, morels come up super hard in the same areas year after year.

 

You touched on this a little bit, but can you speak a bit more to how morel mushrooms interact with their habitat or the environment they’re growing around?

There’s definitely a lot going on with the trees around them. Especially in the Midwest, where there aren’t as many burn areas as we get on the coasts, people will hunt for elm trees to find morels. There is definitely a symbiotic thing happening between those two organisms, where the mycelium is intertwined with the roots of those trees, allowing for mutually beneficial nutrient uptake.

Morels also act as decomposers in the environment. Morels thrive off of the decay from the trees and plant matter like decaying pine needles. They get their nutrients from the organic matter they can break down from a dying tree. 

 

Identifying Morel Mushrooms: How to Tell a True Morel from a False Morel 

 

So what are the different types of morels that you can find around the Pacific Northwest? Are there different species? 

 

There are a few different kinds. On a basic level, there are blondes, which are natural, and black morels which come from burned areas. There’s also a really weird kind of green-tinted morel, but they all taste the same, it’s just how much you want to nerd out and get excited by what you’re finding. There’s no difference in taste or texture between the different species, and all those differences just come from how you cook it. 

 

And then there’s this thing called a false morel. What’s the deal with that and how can you know that you have found a true morel? 

 

On true morels, the stem runs all the way up to the cap, connects seamlessly  and then continues to be hollow all the way through. On false morel mushrooms, the stem and the cap are two separate things, and the cap can be easily removed.

 

Okay, so a true morel steam is like a continuous tube, and a false morel has a sort of separation between the cap and stem? 

 

Yes, that’s the best way to tell. If you forage for a day, you’ll immediately be able to see the difference. Verpa bohemica is the Latin name for false morels, and they really do look different. Verpas usually have these tall, thin stems. You could identify it from the outside because with a true morel, the cap and stem would be fused, and you wouldn’t see any separation in the underside. 

Usually if you go foraging for morchella mushrooms, you find Verpas first, and that’s okay because it can help you figure out where to find morel mushrooms; you know there will also be morels in the area when you see Verpas. 

 

Cultivating Morel Mushrooms 

 

I’ve been curious about morels because I’ve seen some amazing morel dishes at high end restaurants and wondered, what about growing morel mushrooms? And what are the challenges with cultivation? 

 

The challenge with commercial cultivation has always been that there’s just a mystery to how to grow morel mushrooms. There’s so many things that are happening in the natural forest environment that it’s hard to recreate.. You pick a shiitake mushroom or something, and it’s growing out of a log; that’s pretty simple to understand. But a morel, it’s relying on so many bizarre environmental factors from nutrients in the soil to types of trees around them. 

Most restaurants are supplied by a huge commercial foraging scene in the Inland Northwest and Canada. There’s a bunch of different species of morels that are sought after by restaurants. The burn morels are usually really dark, and the natural morels will have a blonde color to them. The only reason that matters is if I was a mushroom connoisseur, and I went out to a restaurant and I saw that they had blondes, I’d know they had a local forager pick them, and not just large-scale commercial foraging. At the end of the day, they’re pretty much the same.

 

Morel Mushroom Recipes & How to Cook Morel Mushrooms.

 

What’s your favorite way to eat morels? What is the best morel mushrooms recipe?

 

My favorite way to eat them is sautéed, just, you know, the same way you sauté spinach, just salt, oil and nothing else. In terms of how to cook morel mushrooms, they have so much flavor that you don’t need to do much with them. Most people say to sauté them in butter, but I do olive oil. Another fun way to cook them is to stuff them with cheese and herbs, like what you do with a stuffed bell pepper; stuff them, cover them in oil and put them in a broiler. For morels in particular, it’s good to make sure you really thoroughly cook them because they contain compounds that, if you eat them raw, can get you really sick. 

 

So cooking morel mushrooms can be pretty straightforward, but what about harvesting them, and how to store morel mushrooms? If you’re harvesting and cutting all those morels, can you explain why that doesn’t harm the organism? 

 

Harvesting doesn’t harm the morels because the real life behind a morel is in the ground. As long as you’re not disrupting the mycelium underneath when you cut a morel, you’re not harming it. You don’t want to just pull out of the ground and disrupt all the soil underneath. So cutting it allows a clean break so you’re not disturbing what’s underneath or anything. 

The fruiting bodies are only there to spread spores, so once you’ve picked a morel, you can put it in a mesh bag or a milk crate that has holes so that the spores will be released while you’re carrying them. When you cut them, they just want to flush all their spores out. So that process actually becomes exaggerated, whereas if they stayed put in the ground, they’d probably go for a few more days, gradually releasing spores. Once you slice them, the spores disperse instantly. Morel spores are white, very fine, and super abundant. If you pick a bunch of morels and leave them on your countertop for a day, it’ll look like someone spilled flour on the counter. 

 

Morel Mushroom Hunting 

 

Could you tell me some of your morel memories? 

 

The first time I ever forged for morels was in Michigan as a young boy. I was hooked on foraging since. I grew up gathering food, but it really was the search, like treasure hunting, that I was so drawn to. 

Throughout college I would forage in the blue mountains, and sell mushroom to restaurants and professors at my university. After college, I spent about 5 months traveling around Canada in my van, just me and my dog Buddy, and I was looking for morels in this really small middle-of-nowhere area outside of Banff.

I remember I pulled up to the motel I was staying in, and this guy was just sitting there on a beach chair outside the motel, looking straight out of a movie. I walked by and he noticed I was drying lobster mushrooms on the dashboard of my car. (A great technique for on the go mushroom drying).

He goes “oh, you’re into mushrooms. You wanna come in?”

I hesitated and brushed him off, but I came out a little later and he said,

“Hey, I wanna give you something”  and handed me this bag of dried morel mushrooms. He introduced himself as Brock.

“This is all I do. I live up here and I forage. You should come and see what I have in here.”

And I think, yeah, sure. You’ve got a bag of Morels; you can’t be that bad of a person, right? I went into his motel room and I can’t even describe what I saw. He had probably  five million dollars worth of dried morels in there, just bags and bags, stacked.

So basically he gets a crew together each year, he scopes out burns with a helicopter and then he comes back into town with a team of people. They camp for seven days and just pick and pick and pick and pick. And then he comes back, they dry them, and then they ship him to Switzerland. 

 

How does he dry them on that scale? 

 

He has big shipping containers that he builds racks in, and then he puts giant fans on each side with  heaters connected to them. And then it just blows the hot air through the shipping container. And he can dry hundreds and hundreds of pounds at a time.

It’s so wild, and you know? There’s gonna be a movie about this guy one day. I mean, it’s territorial. Everybody out there is carrying a gun not just for the bears, but because they know people are gonna try and stomp on their areas. I mean, it’s mushroom war. There are millions of dollars involved, and there’s no regulation, so it’s everything you would imagine when it comes to that type of scene, back in the woods, protecting their patch. When he took me out one day, we passed a few groups going to their spots and he was explaining to me, everybody kind of has this sense of respect where it’s, okay, these are my ten acres this season. Those are your ten acres and we’re not gonna interfere with each other.

 

A Final Reflection on Morel Mushrooms

 

Reflecting on this conversation, it’s clear that morel foraging can be a fascinating gateway to mycology and a broader appreciation for the natural world. Ecology and local regulations permitting, we encourage you to forage morels this season with these insights in mind so you can experience the thrill of foraging for yourself.