Shaggy Mane

We were so excited to find this fun-looking mushroom! We had joined a few Facebook groups for fanatical mushroom hunters like ourselves, the members are local Pennsylvania people who share photos and recipes and who help newbies (like us!) identify new species. We have been learning so much from the more experienced members of these groups and it’s always inspirational as well as educational to see all the photos, descriptions and cooking tips they are posting of their finds. The Shaggy Mane had been featured quite frequently, as it was the season for them (late summer to autumn) and all the comments were about how delicious they were, more than a few people said it was their absolute favourite wild mushroom. They also seemed to be an easy one to identify with no poisonous look-a-likes which is always an encouraging start! The photos were imprinted in our brains so when we spotted them on the side of the road, driving home after a fruitless couple of hours searching for mushrooms in a nearby wooded valley, we immediately knew what they were and screeched to a halt! A closer inspection confirmed our find, they were the much anticipated shaggy mane, yippee!

They are an interesting mushroom to identify as they are usually found growing in a cluster and you will clearly see the different stages they go through in their life cycle represented within the group. When they are young they will look like the photo on the top left; white, cylindrical caps with wavy, upturned scales. As they age the rims of the caps disengage from the stems and start to curl up, assuming a bell-like shape (tall mushroom on the right, second photo). The rims turn black as they liquefy, dripping an inky, gooey mess as the cap shrinks upwards until there is only a flat, black-rimmed cap left (third photo). You can clearly see the different stages, from youngest to oldest, in the order we laid them out on the cutting board (below, left). They are edible in all their stages, with the younger, white ones having a more subtle flavour than the stronger tasting inkier, older ones.

These mushrooms do not keep well and need to be cooked within a couple of hours of harvesting them, or else they will just melt into a black goo. Many of the inky cap mushrooms in the Coprinus family cannot be consumed with alcohol as the combination will make you very sick, even if the alcohol is drunk a couple of days before or after eating the mushrooms. Shaggy manes, however, seem to be the exception to the rule here, from all the research we have done as well as from personal experience, they do go well with a glass of dry red wine :-).

For our first time eating them we wanted to savour their real taste of the mushrooms so we kept it simple and just sautéed them up in some butter with a little salt and pepper. We didn’t want the older, inky ones to blacken the young, white ones so we sautéed them up separately then served them together. They were absolutely delicious! They have a subtle yet extremely flavoursome taste to them and the texture just melts in your mouth. We even got visiting family to brave their first taste of the wild shaggy manes and it was a unanimous thumbs up!

Update: a week after finding our first shaggy manes we drove past the same place we found them and lo and behold, a new patch had sprung up already, score! We harvested them again, picking even more than the first time. We had so many young ones that we put the older, inky ones aside (more about that in a bit…). We had found a new recipe we wanted to: parmesan crusted, fried shaggy manes. It was an easy recipe to make and delicious, but we did both find it a bit too oily as neither of us are big fans of fried foods. We have adapted the recipe and changed it to oven-baked version which we will trial with our next harvest. Click here for the recipe:

Oven-baked, Parmesan-crusted Shaggy Manes

So, in full disclosure, the patch we had been harvesting from was actually at the front of someones property, next to their mailbox, a short drive down the hill from us. Being the polite mushroom foragers we are, we had knocked on the door both times to ask permission to harvest but when no-one answered we assumed by the inky state of some of the mushrooms that the people who lived there were not harvesting them themselves so we took them anyway. We did feel a bit sneaky so we are now trying to grow our own patch here at home. We took about 4-5 of the inky mushrooms and soaked them in water for a few hours and then sprinkled the water and mushrooms on a patch of lawn at the side our house, hoping to seed the spores and grow our own crop of shaggy manes for easy harvesting. Now, with fingers crossed, we wait with bated breath to see if they will burst from the ground! Stay tuned…….