Today’s blog is going to help you identify a really unique, fun, tasty, mushroom that our founders found in abundance here in the Colorado Front Range (and recently in Telluride).
On the front range of Colorado, we’ve experienced a prolific mushroom foraging season. The rains have been heavy all summer and have continued into the fall.
So of course we had to go off into the woods to find ourselves and mushrooms.
Each geographic location is different but here in Colorado, the fall forage usually starts mid-August and goes into mid-September.
Our founders, Jake and Del, took our good friend and UFC bantamweight Cory Sandhagen up for his first mushroom forage. And the mushrooms didn’t let us down.
They found boletes, oysters, puffballs, and most prolifically, wood ear! Wood ear is really cool mushroom that is very easy to identify and impress your friends with your mushroom knowledge.
Jake was the first to listen to the call of the wood ears. While slipping through the woods he came across a log that was covered in Auricularia Americana. This mushroom is easy to identify as it grows on fallen conifers and loves Douglas firs. They are mostly brown and you guessed it, look like ears! They are fairly tasteless and take on whichever flavor you introduce them to. They have a texture like seaweed salad. You can find them in Asian soups. And there's even a restaurant in Telluride called Wood Ear!
So next time you’re out foraging, look on fallen logs for this gelatinous appendage listening to the sounds of the forest.
