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Mega Lactarius indigos


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Went out to a spot last year at this time where I found 2 lactarius indigos around white pine and some maple, beech, oak mix. We came across a massive fruiting this year! In various stages of maturity from small inroll margin ones to big blown out ones that were past their prime. Also found a beautiful stump with aborted entoloma and non parasitized ones together growing and perfect for pickin - clean!

Very interesting after we handled the indigos and cleaned them up and rebagged them, the colour does fade and green happens. Next day sliced them up and cooked them up as the pics show. The orange sliced mushroom there in the bowl next to indigos was a painted bolete found under white pine.

Any recipes out there from members that I might try with these? I will be adding some to the entolomas for a nice wild mushroom soup. I have a lot!

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I envy your knowledge - The thought of eating a BLUE mushroom...hah!

While I do not posses much mushroom knowledge, what I lack there, most would suggest I make up for in cooking abilities.

I would suggest a few tips for cooking shrooms -

- Dont overcrowd the pan, 1 'layer' at most.

- Cook on high heat, grape seed oil and a bit of butter - and brown on both sides (the flavour you can get out of mushrooms when you create the Maillard effect is amazing).

- If desired, add in any aromatics at the end (garlic, thyme, etc) and always salt, perhaps pepper.

From there the choices are endless - puree it up and use it in a mushroom risotto, pasta, soup, keep it chunky and serve on crusty bread, etc etc etc.

Enjoy!

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The indigo lactarius is a good edible, especially when you find them in cool weather. I often find big fruitings in August where I live and I usually find these warm weather indigos to be badly infested with worms (I guess these are gnat larvae). One interesting thing about indigos is that when you fry them they will bleed their blue color into the cooking oil so you can get some weird effects. Fry some indigos, toss in some eggs and scramble them and the blue mixes with the yellow eggs to produce green eggs. Indigos have a nice firm texture and you can use them in pretty much any way that you would use any other mushroom. Im not so sure about soup though, the color might be an issue but I admit to never having used them for soup. I quite like this mushroom when I can find some that are worm free.

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Made some wild mushroom soup using the aborted entolomas and indigos.

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...the rest was sauteed and I made bunch a pizzas! Looked good on colour contrast with small home grown red tomatoes ! Too bad I would have tried the green eggs treatment. Next time when fresh!

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What do you folks do when you find a mushroom with some worms (the little white things with black heads)?

Lately if there are a lot, I will try to take the mushroom and poke it on a stick in hope of reproduction near my house, if there are not many worms, I try to remove as many as possible and figure the super high heat of the pan will kill them (more protein?!) Any harm in this?

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I think its up to the individual. Most people ingest bugs or bug parts without even knowing through produce and flour products. If you eat wild mushrooms, it is probable that at some point you will ingest insects or insect eggs. Really buggy mushrooms should be left where they are so that they can continue their reproductive cycle.

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It's very tough to tell with Elm Oysters if they are wormy until you cut the stem (seeing the holes in the cut of the stem is the tell-tale) and often these are high up in a tree.

I saved the ones with worms (and stems) and made a killer mushroom stock last night (strained all the worms et all through a fine mesh siv :) )

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As long as enough of the mushroom's flesh is in tact, I'll encourage any large maggot/worms to find a new home down the sink then let the rest fly. I'm willing to bet people that suck down McDonalds and such 4 or 5 times a week eat way more bugs than the mushroom forager. As John pointed out, there's probably a good couple of bugs in almost all processed food.

As far as extra protein, probably not. With the quantity of protein on offer and the high heat used in cooking, there's probably not that much to go around in the end.

If it's extra protein you're after, I would recommend saving the bugs aside and eating them raw. You know, if you're into that sort of thing.

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I'm so glad you found those shroomersue. You see last year after having spent most of two years fungus finding I was rarely finding new species (assuming I identify them correctly) and decided instead of going to random places and finding anything to take a specific fungi I hadn't found and went where it would most likely be found. I spent a whole trip in pine woods during early Fall, but found none (still worth going).

The bright blue of the liquid is DIVINE isn't it?

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