OM DENNE EPISODE
There’s gold in these Ozark hills. You’ve probably walked right past it.
Not the shiny kind. The delicious kind.
The forests of the Ozarks are loaded with wild edible mushrooms, and most of us have absolutely no idea what we’re looking at.
Morels get all the fame in Missouri, but they're just the beginning, and actually there are many easier ones to find... if you know what you're looking for.
Chanterelles glow gold on the forest floor. Indigo milkies accent the woods with a stunning grey-blue. The chicken of the woods at the base of that oak tree that you hit with the mower every year actually wants to go on the dinner table. An entire world of other edible mushrooms is hiding in plain sight.
For this episode of Take On The Lake, I sit down with Mike Snyder, a mushroom forager with 15 years of experience whose obsession with fungi has grown into teaching, guiding and now writing Foraging Mushrooms of the Ozarks, an upcoming field guide from Simon & Schuster.
Nerdiness alert: we geek out pretty hard! But there's a lot to learn:
• the strange magic of mushroom hunting
• why morels are only the beginning
• what makes the Ozarks such an incredible place for fungi
• how a beginner can start learning what’s edible
• and why people who already hunt, hike and fish are surrounded by wild food they simply don’t notice.
Yes, Mike and I are both completely addicted to mushroom hunting. (The legal, delicious kind of mushroom addiction.)
Mike argues that Missouri is especially blessed with mushrooms that are both excellent edibles and relatively easy to identify. His new book covers how to identify them, where to find them, how to harvest them and even what to do with them in the kitchen.
If you spend any time in the woods, this episode may permanently change what you see when you look around.
There’s treasure out there. Go find it.
