Hericium coralloides - “coral tooth”
In mid-September, in rich oak-hickory-maple forest near the river, we found a good patch of Hericium coralloides. This species was formerly known as H. ramosum, and a different species (now H. americanum) known as H. coralloides. But that’s okay, because you can eat all of them. H. coralloides
is a large, attractive fungus, resembling a snow-white coral emerging
from a dead hardwood log. It is structured like a cauliflower that ends
not in lumps, but in delicate fringey spines. We took a small amount of
what was there and still ended up with enough mushroom for two meals.
Allegedly, this fungus is easily cultivated by inoculating hardwood
logs and chips. We’ll have to see about that.
Anyhow, the first thing we did was to break up the
coral tooth and rinse it out thoroughly in order to evict the small
population of rollbugs and the spider that had taken up residence in
there. All bugs were safely transported outside. We had heard of what
the fungus resembles when cooked, but I didn’t believe it until we did
it ourselves. We sautéed half the fungus, broken up, in oil with salt
and pepper. It sheds a lot of water while cooking. We poured this off
and added it to the stock pot. We cooked it thoroughly until lightly
browned, and were left with material that strongly suggested, in
texture and even somewhat in flavor, cooked crab or lobster. No
kidding.
We ate this first batch in this manner: Served over
broiled catfish fillets, over rice noodles, with sauce and vegetables
over everything. It came out looking like this:
For the rest of the coral tooth, we’re going to cook it in butter, with
some lemon juice, a tiny bit of sugar, and a blop of Thai fish sauce,
to see how crabby we can make it. We will report back.
Also present in the same woods at this time are large flushes of Laccaria ochropurpurea (forage report upcoming), lots and lots of various Lactarius, Russula (including some past-their-prime R. virescens) and Clitocybe species, some beautiful Amanita flavoconia, lots of miscellaneous Clavaria, some kind of Clavariadelphus, a few Tylopilus felleus, more Strobilomyces floccopus,
and some large, yellow-pored, blue-staining, bun-like mystery boletes
that we were unable to precisely identify from the extensive lineup of
yellow-pored, blue-staining boletes.
-CH