#Durango wild lands cooking guide how to#

вЂњTo get to know where a particular species is, how it grows, what its characteristics are, you have to learn them one by one.

вЂњThe recommendation is donвЂ™t eat anything you have not positively identified,вЂќ says Chris Ricci, a Durango-based wild mushroom expert who leads mushroom hunting tours in the San Juans through his guiding outfit, Fish and Fungi.

#Durango wild lands cooking guide how to#

The Modern Forager has a Colorado-centric online foraging course ($50) and the Pikes Peak Mycological Society posts video lectures on topics like foraging ethics and how to get started hunting mushrooms in Colorado. Buy a few guidebooks, sign up for a guided foray, or take a course.

The short answer is: ThereвЂ™s no easy way to identify edible mushrooms. The other one is prolific.вЂќ How to Identify Mushrooms You Can Eat вЂњFor beginners, learn to identify chanterelles and porcinis in the summer,вЂќ she says. Blizzard recommends focusing on one or two edible species and getting confident in your ability to spot them properly, instead of trying to identify all the mushrooms youвЂ™re seeing out there. Oyster mushrooms are common, too, and those can even be collected during the winter months. Morels, which are harder to find and a real delicacy in the kitchen, grow in the spring.

Any chef would be thrilled to cook with either of those.вЂќ вЂњIf Colorado had a state mushroom, it would probably be the porcini,вЂќ says Blizzard, who co-wrote Wild Mushrooms: A Cookbook and Foraging Guide and runs the website Modern Forager with her husband, Trent.В вЂњPorcinis and chanterelles are known as choice edible mushrooms. Many different species of mushrooms grow throughout Colorado, but the most popular edible ones are porcinis and chanterelles, which grow during the summer months, from mid-July to the end of September. But even if wild mushrooms abound in this state, how do you know which ones are safe to eat? And where can you find them? We asked two Colorado-based wild mushroom experts for their helpful pointers.