Shortly after a heavy downpour, on a fresh summer morning, you should take your family on a mushroom hunt. Between June and October you will not only find delicious mushrooms in the forests, but above all in meadows, pastures and fields. Take an airy basket with you (no plastic bags!) and a sharp mushroom or paring knife, then you can start searching. But be careful: Many toadstools look confusingly similar to the delicious button mushroom.
The meadow mushroom can be found from June
You can eat these types of mushrooms
You only know two types of mushrooms from the supermarket - white and brown. However, these are not two different species, but simply different colors of one and the same cultivar. But did you know that there are around 50 different types of mushrooms in total, many of which are edible? We introduce you to the most important ones.
Meadow Mushroom
The meadow mushroom (Agaricus campestris, also known as field Egerling) is probably the best known and a valuable edible mushroom. You can find it in meadows, pastures and fields between June and October, although the population of the once widespread fungus has fallen sharply due to the decline in cow and sheep pastures.
forest mushroom
Between July and October, the wood mushroom or blood egerling (Agaricus silvaticus) is mainly found in coniferous forests, more rarely in deciduous forests. Its appearance is very variable, but mostly light brown with brown to dark brown fibrous scales. The wild mushroom is very easy to confuse with the poisonous guinea fowl mushroom. However, you can recognize the poisonous mushroom by its carbolic-like smell, and cuts, especially on the stem tuber, turn yellow.
Sheep Mushroom
The white aniseed Egerling or sheep mushroom (Agaricus arvensis) is also a valuable edible mushroom. You can find it from spring to autumn in forests, on fertilized meadows and pastures, in parks and on grassy places. Its flesh smells strongly of anise.
Caution: risk of confusion! Identify toadstools
Unfortunately, champignons are very easy to confuse with various toadstools, some of which can even be deadly poisonous.
Karbol Egerling or Poison Mushroom
Agaricus xanthodermus grows between June and October in deciduous forests, on forest edges, in clearings, meadows and in parks. You can distinguish it from its edible relatives by these features:
- unpleasant smell of carbolic ("hospital smell")
- this sometimes only occurs when cooking
- Flesh at base turns chrome yellow when squeezed or cut
death cap mushrooms
There are a number of very poisonous death cap mushrooms that look confusingly similar to edible button mushrooms at first glance. However, you can recognize them by the typical tuber (often underground) and the white or light-colored lamellae.
tips
In every town there are mushroom consultants who have undergone special training and can tell you exactly whether the mushrooms you have collected are edible or not. A worm or snail infestation, on the other hand, is not a sign that a mushroom is edible.