Delicacy sprouts from the ashes
The wildfires that swept more than 6 million acres of the West last summer have set the table for a gourmet treasure hunt this year. Wild-growing morel mushrooms, prized in the USA and abroad for their nutty taste and pleasing texture, thrive in burned forests. Sponge-like and cone-shaped, they sprout by the millions in spring and early summer in the year after a major fire. Sprouting along with them are mushroom hunters, who feed a multimillion-dollar cottage industry. Thousands of harvesters ” from hobbyists on club-sponsored forays to commercial crews that follow a seasonal "mushroom trail" through the woods of the Pacific Northwest ” soon might head for the same forests where legions of firefighters battled last year's blazes. "Burns make morels," says mushroom expert Larry Evans of Missoula, Mont. The U.S. Forest Service has hired him to forecast likely hot spots for mushroom growth in western Montana so that rangers and forest communities can prepare for the spring influx of pickers. Evans says ideal growing conditions, including moisture and warm days, could bring 50,000 morel hunters into forests across the West. But with morels, you never know. "It could be a bumper crop, or it could be a bummer crop," says Evans, a mycologist (mushroom scientist) who also owns a cafe featuring wild morel soups, lasagna and roulade. The season could last two months ” or two weeks. Commercial pickers can earn as much as $8 a pound for the distinctive fungi, whose hollow, honeycombed heads look like oversized peach pits atop stubby white stalks. Wholesale buyers and traders, in turn, can fetch three to nine times that price from gourmet restaurants, specialty shops and grocers and a brisk export market in Europe and Asia. Going for the burns So mushroom hunters will "go get the fire maps. They'll look where the burns are. They're coming," says Keith Blatner, a forest economist at Washington State University. Brokers are even flying over burn areas in spotter planes to check landscape conditions and logistics for getting morels out of remote locales. In one of the few studies of the wild mushroom trade, Blatner and another researcher estimated that the wholesale morel business in Oregon, Washington and Idaho generated $41 million in 1992. In western Montana, where more than 900,000 acres burned last summer, the Forest Service is requiring mushroom-gathering permits for commercial and recreational pickers: $20-$100 for the pros, free for the amateurs (hobbyists must cut their morels in half to diminish their commercial worth). It also has set aside special campsites for commercial operations, which sometimes include portable dryers and refrigerated trucks to move product to market more quickly. Outdoor outfitters, hoping to capitalize on the invasion of pickers, plan to pitch field kitchens and other services on patches of private land in the middle of the public forests. "Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of local people are really psyched about the harvest," Evans says.
Morels can grow wild in most of the USA, except the coastal plains of the Southeast. They don't need fire to sprout, but they flourish in disturbed soil. They begin to emerge in April but can be found at higher altitudes as late as August. Recreational mushrooming is a popular hobby in the Midwest and East, where morel festivals and other events dot spring and summer calendars. Armed with pocketknives and porous buckets or bags to allow the powdery spores of picked mushrooms to reseed the ground, passionate fungiphiles sometimes hike for miles in search of the wrinkled gems. They also watch out for the "false" morel, a poisonous pretender that is easily recognized with a little training or a wild mushroom guidebook. The commercial trade is mostly a phenomenon of the West, where large and remote forests from Alaska and Canada to the Pacific Northwest hold potential for big paydays, especially after wildfires. Last year's blazes across the West blackened a combined area the size of Vermont. Pounds for the picking "In the East, most people report the number of specimens they've found," says Nancy Smith Weber, an Oregon State University mycologist whose father first took her morel hunting when she was 6 weeks old. "In the West, where people are collecting in burns, they talk about the number of pounds they got." Even in parts of the West not thought of as prime morel habitat ” the drier Southwest, for instance ” "shroomers" are on the lookout. "We certainly expect to see them," says Pat Brannen of Albuquerque, an amateur mycologist whose local mushroom club has scouted the scorched forest around Los Alamos, N.M., scene of a 47,650-acre inferno last May. In Colorado, members of a similar group are checking the sites of two large blazes that burned in the Rockies outside Denver and Fort Collins last summer. The morel's relationship with fire has spawned many theories but only a limited amount of science. Research money to study fungi is scarce. Some mycologists say that burned soil has mushroom-friendly nutrients. Others say that fire triggers the outburst of morel "fruit" because the flames kill tree roots from which the underground part of the mushroom organism draws nutrients. Like the mushrooms, the movements of pickers are unpredictable, too. "We just don't know where these people are going to go, or how long they're going to stay," says Rick Floch, timber coordinator of Montana's Bitterroot National Forest. Some pickers are full-time harvesters of "special forest products": mushrooms, berries, florists' greenery and other non-timber items that represent a $200-million-a-year business in Oregon and Washington alone. Many are part-timers, local and out-of-state, who pick for extra cash. Growing numbers of them are Southeast Asian, Mexican and Russian immigrants who pick in family groups. In Montana, the Forest Service has hired an interpreter who speaks Asian dialects to help out this season. While fungus fans wait for the morels to emerge, interest is mushrooming on the Internet. One online seller is asking $29 a pound for fresh morels yet to be picked. Computer Web sites with names such as "Morel Majority" and "Fungal Jungal" share research, hunting tips and recipes. Some sell morel artwork, knickknacks and other merchandise. One even tracks the season's first sightings in the wild, state by state. |
|||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||
