Hunting for Mushrooms in Sonoma County

By Eugenia Bone Photo by Sara Remington

Last January, when I flew out from New York to attend SOMA Wild Mushroom Camp in Occidental, California, I had a secret agenda.

Years ago, at a public relations event hosted by the chef and author Jack Czarnecki, I had tasted a mushroom I knew only as the “candy cap.” He’d made a compote and served it over cheesecake. The mushroom was heavy with the smell of maple sugar. I was surprised by the sweet flavor, and it cemented my fascination with fungi variability. I knew candy caps grew in Sonoma County (they grow mainly on the West Coast)—and I wanted some.

The Sonoma Mycological Association camp was like a Trekkie convention for mushroomers. Everything was mushroomy: the names of the cabins (my friend and fellow New York Mycological Society member Arlene Jacobs and I were in Lactarius), the mushroom-shaped nametags, the mushroom paraphernalia for sale in the main dining/meeting space. We signed up for forays and classes like Introduction to Mushroom Dyes and Toadstools, Mushrooms, and Beyond, and eyed the other participants: about 50 middle-aged people in khaki outfits carrying straw baskets, as well as a smattering of bearded mountain men. Arlene and I were the only people wearing black.

Right away we went hunting. Our first foray was in nearby Westminster Woods, and it was way too dry and cold for mushrooms. To make matters worse, on the way back to camp we were trapped in a van with a loquacious man in huge hiking boots who claimed to be the universe’s leading expert on Arctic polypores, but judging from the way he talked, I think he was likely an expert on many other things as well.

Fungi nerds vs. belly feeders

It was a rather dreary start to the weekend, but luckily a few glasses of wine in the afternoon and a first-rate class on mushroom salads with the chef Elissa Rubin-Mahon (crab and roasted chanterelles, Thai-style grilled oysters with mint) cheered us up. By the time we had ambled around to the ID tables, we saw that others had had more luck foraging. There were easily 40 different species on display, all coded with either a place-setting sign or a skull and crossbones.

As we lingered, listening in on the open and easy sharing of mushroomy information, I realized that there were two classes of people at the camp: those who were interested in fungi primarily from a biological standpoint, and those interested primarily from a culinary standpoint. In the first group were men who rather aggressively corrected each other’s identifications, as well as nerdy biologist types who inspected the samples with magnifying glasses and pronounced the technical names of the mushrooms with an enthusiasm verging on fetishistic. I am of the lower caste: a belly feeder, interested in hunting for the pot. I do envy my academic colleagues, though, as they are excited by every mushroom they find.

The next morning, our first full day, Arlene and I went on the foray we had come so far to join. The camp population had swelled overnight, the weather had warmed up and the forest we visited, in Point Reyes, was spectacular. I’d never seen redwoods before, and walking in that deep grand forest, coming upon a circle of redwoods—a common growth ­pattern—with dozens of mushrooms growing in the middle, was as magical as anything I’d ever experienced as a child, when such encounters were full of mystery and meaning.

A young biology student with enough facial hardware to set off an airplane security alarm pointed out my first candy cap, lactarius rubidus, a mycorrhizal fungus. Small, brown, and cinnamon-colored, with a concave cap and a maple-syrup smell, I thereafter became hyper-focused on collecting them—as many as I could.

I came back to camp with about five pounds of pristine candy caps. At that point, the whole trip was worth it for me. The expense, the hassles getting the kids picked up from school, everything. I tried to be as low key about my haul as I could—though I did want one of the top ID dogs to check them out, in case I had included a LBM (little brown mushroom) of bad repute. Unfortunately, despite the fact that by day two the ID tables were laden with mushrooms, my mushrooms gained more attention than I would have liked. I really did not want to share any. Not one. However, I was being paranoid. The SOMA crowd knew the unspoken-yet-primary mushroomer’s commandment: Do not covet they neighbor’s fungus. And so no one made a play.

In the afternoon we prepared oyster mushroom kits, steamy logs of inoculated straw. (These generated quite a bit of heat in my luggage on the way home, and then went on to become a bizarre science experiment that lived in my kitchen for a month, embarrassing my teenagers. It did produce mushrooms, but they were foul smelling and looked twisted and nasty.) I bought mushroom-dyed silk scarves and attended the evening lectures: Mycologist Gary Lincoff, ­hilarious and charming as always, in a silly mushroom hat, and Elio Schaechter, gentleman microbiologist, who flattered me intensely by gently holding my hand during a lecture on mold. We met enthusiasts of all sorts—earth mothers and hot young chefs and men of the wood-chopping, outdoorsy variety—who thought Arlene and I were troopers for traveling so far. I went on a mission to determine whether fungus was pronounced with a hard G or soft, and got nowhere. We ate mixed wild-mushroom tacos that night and drank a rich ­Cabernet from Sonoma called Brion, made by a friend of mine (B. Wise Vineyards in Sonoma), and traded business cards fully intending to keep in touch.

Anything to declare?

Since we had a late flight back to New York, Arlene and I and another friend decided to take a little side trip. For me, there is no better travel companion than someone who will drive 50 miles out of the way to taste a barbecued oyster. The Marshall Store, in Marshall on Tomales Bay, was worth every extra mile. It’s just a shack on pilings falling into the glorious wide waters, but the oysters are divine. Cooked on a grill and ladled with a kind of buttery, tomatoey, vinegary sauce, the plump bivalves were drunk with heat and flavor. We ate dozens. We also bought king crabs, boiled and chilled, with aioli to go.

Thank God Arlene and I had seats together. My carry-on luggage smelled so strongly of mushrooms it would have dismayed any non-mycological fan. Indeed, had we whipped out those tremendous crabs in a quad row, clobbering the hard shells into bits on our tray tables, drinking airline Chardonnay and flicking bits of crab flesh all over the back of the seats in front of us, we might have been asked to disembark in Iowa. But it was just us, and it was heaven.

I dried the caps (you use them fresh in savory dishes) and froze them in glass Ball jars. The other day I made baked apples and stuck a few of the mushrooms into the flesh before topping it with butter and cinnamon. The apples were mapley and mushroomy at the same time, as woody and sweet and delightful as anything I’ve ever eaten—not just because of their fine, unusual taste but also because they came from a grove of redwoods on the edge of a forest through which I could see the great blue.

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