Mushroom porn!

A huge false morel!

Will you look at the size of that one!

ta for posting the pic

Will you look at the size of that one!

Indeed! It is three times the biggest that I have seen before - a monstrous false morel! It is now thrice parboiled and awaiting a dinner with lots of good wines!

-O

That is one LARGE mushroom, thanks.

Mushroom2.jpg

Well what about this 'magic mushroom' - collected here the second week of June.

courtney-mushroom.jpg

Sigh. If Helvella were Morchella, I'd be a happy guy. They're everywhere around here in the winter.

According to most authorities I encountered on the 'net, false morels can be poisonous and is reommended not to eat.

Lousy texture.

Interestingly, what's poisonous is a chemical that volatizes off when they're cooked (methyl hydrazine). If you're in the kitchen and the ventilation isn't strong, you can croak just from the fumes. Once that stuff is cooked off, they won't be poisonous, but they'll be leathery.

If you really want mushroom porn, you need look no further than the stinkhorn mushroom. Its scientific name is Phallus impudens for a very good reason.

-Paul W.

If you really want mushroom porn, you need look no further than the stinkhorn mushroom. Its scientific name is Phallus impudens for a very good reason.

-Paul W.

Shut up! They're featured prominently in the novel I'm working on now! Shhhh!

According to most authorities I encountered on the 'net, false morels can be poisonous and is reommended not to eat.

Apparently the false morels on that side of the pond are different than the ones here. Here, they are considered a great delicacy. Even though, as Stuart says, they turn a bit leathery since one has to parboil them 2-3 times to make them safe to eat, the flavour is one of the best of all mushrooms IMO. Alongside the black trumpet mushroom, the false morel is one of my favourites that I can find here.

-O

According to most authorities I encountered on the 'net, false morels can be poisonous and is reommended not to eat.

Apparently the false morels on that side of the pond are different than the ones here. Here, they are considered a great delicacy. Even though, as Stuart says, they turn a bit leathery since one has to parboil them 2-3 times to make them safe to eat, the flavour is one of the best of all mushrooms IMO. Alongside the black trumpet mushroom, the false morel is one of my favourites that I can find here.

My Finnish expat friend goes home 1-2 times a year and smuggles back as many toxic mushrooms as she can get in. I don't recognize any of them, but she tells me that there is a huge variety of toxic fungi consumed by obsessed Finns and I have no reason (or guts) to doubt her on this.

Mark Lipton

You call that porn? Real porn is shot in extreme close-up.



Chanterelle from Mendocino. Sadly, it was a park so gathering was forbidden.

Walt

...Interestingly, what's poisonous is a chemical that volatizes off when they're cooked (methyl hydrazine).

Jeez. Mushrooms in general are known for trace hydrazines -- their trademark trace toxin, like solanine in potatoes -- not usually a problem because of tiny quantity and because they cook off.

Organic hydrazines are so violently reactive, they (1) are bad news for animals -- that's us -- if encountered in concentrated form; and (2) are the fuel in a famous binary rocket-fuel system* which, as a point of trivia, is one of very few such systems that achieve the highest levels of specific impulse (translation: oomph) without requiring the cold liquified gases usually used in large high-performance rockets.

* Deployed for instance in the 54 US Titan III series large single-stage ICBMs, later decommissioned. The engine of one exploded in 1979 when a technician dropped a tool, puncturing tanks; this in turn caused the large single nuclear warhead -- the size of a small SUV -- to eject and land, intact, on a nearby farm, whose owner surfaced at the ensuing Air Force press conference and prompted the very best understatement I have ever heard, after he asked the USAF spokesman what you are supposed to do when such a warhead lands on your property. Answer: "In my opinion, the prudent thing would be to leave." (This, for the record, is the sort of footnote I used to reserve for Rogov, on eGullet.)

Organic hydrazines are so violently reactive, they (1) are bad news for animals -- that's us -- if encountered in concentrated form; and (2) are the fuel in a famous binary rocket-fuel system* which, as a point of trivia, is one of very few such systems that achieve the highest levels of specific impulse (translation: oomph) without requiring the cold liquified gases usually used in large high-performance rockets.

Indeed, phenylhydrazine was discovered by Emil Fischer[1,2] -- arguably the most brilliant and accomplsihed organic chemist of all time -- and it eventually lead to his demise because of his habit (then standard) of tasting all the substances that he made in lab. Because his crowning achievement, the structural identification of all the biologically important sugars, involved making many sugar derivatives with phenylhydrazine, he poisoned himself by tasting all of his hydrazine derivatives, leading to colon cancer in later life.

Mark Lipton

[1] Supposedly, he once was confronted by Kaiser Wilhelm II during a visit to his laboratory. Kaiser Wilhelm, taking affront, exclaimed "Ich bin der Kaiser!" whereupon Fischer is reputed to have replied "Ich bin der Fischer."

[2] Fischer was so adept at getting things to crystallize in his labs that he was reputed to have a collection of seed crystals located within his long, flowing beard, which would fall out over solutions and nucleate crystallization.

...he once was confronted by Kaiser Wilhelm II during a visit to his laboratory. Kaiser Wilhelm, taking affront, exclaimed "Ich bin der Kaiser!" whereupon Fischer is reputed to have replied "Ich bin der Fischer."

FYI, more on the gastronomic world of Wilhelm II (in what's sometimes called the "Imperial" period there) via succinct overview posted from Germany some years back (in English). Sample:

... Even at court, a strange relationship to good food prevailed. According to author and art historian Max Rapsilber, Emperor Wilhelm II once said after a banquet at the Adlon Hotel, "Dinner was good, but what pleased me most was the discipline with which it was made."

Complete text here. It's on rec.food.cooking (the original 'net food forum, since January 1982) where Victor Sack has served as FAQ keeper.

You know, I wrote a web comic called Mushroom Porn.....few years ago. Pretty....uh.......interesting.

Whoa, Liz, nice gills!


(time to change your "location")