After seeing a magazine article about it a few years ago, this Autumn I finally remembered to sign up for a mushroom hunting tour on the Mornington Peninsula with Cameron and James from Mushroom Tours. These 2 guys were a blast to spend the morning with and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things mushroom related – did you know reindeer can get high off toadstools? Don’t try it yourself though, the extra stomachs reindeers have make it easier for them to process the otherwise poisonous compounds in the toadstools.
Things kicked off at the Moorooduc Estate Winery in Mornington where we were treated to tea, coffee and homemade biscuits. The ANZAC biscuits were a standout, as was the beautifully designed and appointed drawing room we all met in. After morning tea we were taken to a secret mushrooming location a short drive from the winery.
Pictured above is an inkcap mushroom. Apparently back in the good old days they used to grind them up and put them in pills to use as a cure for alcoholism – the reason being that any alcohol ingested would react with the inkcap to produce some violent projectile vomiting.
Forgot what this mushroom was called, all I remember is that it wasn’t edible…lost interest after that.
One of many toadstools we found that morning. It’s only really edible by reindeers as indicated earlier.
A cool little coral fungus we found. Is it edible? Who cares, it’s so small.
Yet another inedible mushroom.
Cameron opening a dirt bomb (which is actually some sort of mushroom). The inside of the dirt bomb looked like, well, dirt but I am informed that they were actually seeds. Nope, it’s not edible either.
After bumbling around the scrub a while longer someone finally found something edible – some sort of mushroom that had a very peppery taste according to Cameron. It sounded like an interesting mushroom to eat, unfortunately I wasn’t the one that found it. I did however find a whole bunch of slippery jacks (which are edible) that everyone else had managed to overlook.
I guess you can tell by the above picture why they’re called slippery jacks.
James harvesting the slippery jacks for the after-ramble feast back at the winery. If they turn blue or red or some other weird colour when cut/bruised they’re probably not slippery jacks so don’t eat them. Other than that slippery jacks are pretty easy to pick.
After our initial win, we managed to find more slippery jacks that were even bigger than those that I had stumbled upon earlier.
We also managed to find a few saffron milk caps, which as their name suggests are edible. However mature specimens (which have a different shape) can look similar to a poisonous mushroom. The saffron milk caps have straight gills whilst the similar looking poisonous mushroom apparently has gills that fork at the end. If in doubt, leave it out.
The pillage. Mushroom cappuccino on the left and mushroom bruschetta on the right. They were both fantastic. Washed down with a glass of the local pinot, it was a great way to cap off the morning.
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