The Hunt and the Bounty

Spring is most definitely here.

This meadowlark near Kaw River State Park tells the passing cars it's finally springtime!

Everyone loves a good spring, and while ours is awfully early this year, it's hard not to enjoy the daffodil, hyacinth, and tulip blooms and the flowering bradford pear, redbud, and crabapple trees.



Crabapple tree at Dillon Nature Center

 It's been rumored that this has been one of the best springs Kansas has had in years, and we've had so many years of drought that we have become unaccustomed to the gaudy splashes of red, pink, purple, and green.  But we had the pefect storm of early spring weather (ha ha, get it?!) that led to explosion of life from the ground: a full week of a good soaking rain, followed by days of warm and dry sunshine. 




Beautiful red tulips that sprang up just as the daffodils began to fade.

 That kind of weather doesn't just bring the tulips out of hibernation.  It wakes up something else.  Something straight from legend.  Folklore handed down generation to generation tell us about the madness that grips a cultish group of hunters scattered across the countryside: Men and women abandoning their families at all hours of the day and night to trek deep into the woods where normally they would never venture, seeking out prey that only appears in the spring.  The locations of their hunting grounds remain secret, passed only onto children or the occassional relative.  Some would rather choose death than give up the coordinates of their territory.  When the bounty is collected, a feast is held where participants gorge themselves on the kill until they can only curl in the fetal position and groan.

What is this mythical creature of the woods of which I speak?  The thing that drives usually sane people right into the heart of tick habitat?  The treasure that even comes with a series of awesome-sounding names? 

Sleeping in the earth are impossibly small threads of living tissue, so tiny they might as well be invisible, absorbing nutrients from the ground and called...wait for it...mycelium, which lump together to a form a sclerotium in the face of harsh weather (like winter).  When things start to warm up, that little lump will either send out more tiny threads of mycelium, or if a complicated set of conditions is just right (weather, soil conditions, nutrient base), it will send forth a fruiting body to the world above.   Tasty, tasty fruiting bodies.

Coming to you live, from an undisclosed location: Morels

The fruiting body.  A mushroom.  The morel.  One of the most expensive mushrooms of them all, selling anywhere from $8.00 an ounce to $35.00 a pound, often more if it's during the off season (the off season being the other 48 weeks a year when morels exist only as underground mycelium or sclerotium).  Its taste has brought the most fearless warriors to their knees weeping tears of joy and enlightenment. 

Or so I hear.

This year, I finally got my hands on some.  But, it's not as easy as going to the woods, picking up a mushroom, cooking it, and eating it.  Oh no, there's way more involved.  They're worth the work, but by the end of morel season, you are glad it only comes once a year.

Step 1: Make Sure You Have the Right Mushroom

You'd think morels are pretty distinct, but there are other shrooms that come pretty close.  False Morels are nothing to play with as they are capable of nasty, nasty things.  From the Missouri Department of Conservation, I relay this warning: "The problem seems to involve the amount of a toxic chemical, called monomethyl hydrazine (MMH), present in these mushrooms. MMH causes diarrhea, vomiting and severe headaches, and occasionally it can be fatal." (For the link, click here)

Real morels.  These are good.

One of the False Morels.  These are bad.  The picture is courtesy these guys

There are other false morels that look a lot more like morels, but here's what I've figured out:
*Make sure the cap is attached to the stem.  If it's not, just leave it be.
*Make sure it's absolutely hollow inside, no cottony fibers, no extra stuff, nothing.
*If it looks really gross, it will probably do really gross things to you.

Luckily, I never ran into one of the impersonaters during my hunting trip, though that didn't stop me from intently studying each morel I brought home like there was gold hidden in one of them. 

Step 2: Gain Access

You can't just walk into the woods and expect to find morels.  First, they seem to prefer specific trees and usually come back in the same spots year after year, meaning that only occassionally will a new morel ground open up.  They also seem to pop up after a fire has gone through, and those don't happen all that frequently.

Second, even if you were to stumble upon a batch of morels, chances are that spot has already been staked out by generations of hunters and you're being watched this very instant.  If you pick a morel from such a spot, do not be surprised if you return to your car to find the tires have been slashed and "FEAR ME" written in pig's blood on the front windshield.

Your best bet is to make friends with a mushroom hunter or attempt to marry into a mushrooming family and hope that someday they will introduce you to morel hunting.  This will protect your life in two ways:

1) You won't have morel-crazed slashers seeking revenge, and
2) You won't accidentally pick up one of the Falsies and spend some quality time in the hospital.

As for me, I'm lucky enough to belong to a kin group with their own morel hunting grounds.  Somewhat secret of course, but I'm willing to share with you that it is located somewhere in the state of Kansas.

Step 3: Get tangled in bushes.

Now that you know what you're looking for, and you've gained access to a morel spot, it's time to get down and dirty.  For real, this isn't Walmart, these things grow in the dirt.  Be prepared.

Not all morels are easy to snag, sometimes you have to crawl into a thicket of saplings and bushes to pluck one or two from the earth and get your ponytail stuck on some branches only to nearly step on a cluster of five waiting in the open ground.  That's truth right there.  Thank goodness my aunt had better eyes than me!

Once you have a site with some morel action, just pluck those gems up and carry them home.

My haul:

1 lb, 6 oz of delicious.

Step 4: Clean and Salt Soak

Cleaning these babies is a pain, and after spending an hour or two hunched over a sink you'll begin to really appreciate what our ancestors must have gone through in preparing food.  See all those little folds?  Those fleshy pockets house bugs, sand, and probably some nasty things we can't see.  How to get everything squeaky clean? 

Rinse the living daylights out them.  "Rinse" might even be too gentle a word, "shoot pressurized water into them" is a more accurate description.  Scrub the nooks and crannies with a soft toothbrush.  Repeat.

Some people say that if you clean them well enough, you don't need to brine them (soak in salt water) to get rid of the buggies and that the salt may even alter the taste of the morels.  I'm more of a food safety girl than a purist, so into a big bowl of salty water they went.  I let them soak for about ten minutes, though I'm sure you're supposed to soak them for longer, I just got impatient.

"Rinse" again.  Pat dry.

Squeaky clean

Step 5: Cook

Ah, the methods of cooking.  Some fry them in butter.  Some bread them first and then fry them in butter.  Some batter them and then fry them in butter.  Whatever the recipe, copious amounts of butter are going to be involved, and you'll just have to get over it.

I followed what appears to be the most traditional way of preparing them:
Whisk some eggs together.  Crush up some saltine crackers into a fine powder.  Get some butter going in a frying pan.  Dunk morels in egg, then in cracker crumbs, place into pan.  Wait until your instincts tell you the things are done on one side, and then flip 'em.  When all golden brown and smelling good, take 'em out and eat 'em.

Frying morels in an obscene amount of butter.  No olive oil allowed.

For about a pound of morels:
4 eggs whisked
1.5 sleeves of pulverized saltines.
As much butter as your heart can handle (I probably used somewhere around a stick and a half)

Step 5: Devour with Gusto.

If you need me to explain this step, then you have no business eating morels.  They come once a year, you're supposed to gorge yourself.

Morels straight up.  Earthy, savory, melty.

[Note: Don't try to heat up fried morels from the night before.  My mother tells me they still taste amazing, but they get chewy like calamari.  That's, uh... just not my cup of tea.]