Wooden Ear Mushrooms: A Delicate Deal with

Wooden ear mushrooms are one of many delights of a cold-weather stroll, whether or not it’s a moist day in early spring or when the temperature is sort sufficient to hover above freezing in deep winter. Their darkish caps, tender as velvet and disconcertingly alive between the fingers, cling to logs and typically to injured, dwelling timber, upon which they feed. It’s straightforward to dislodge them with a delicate tug. They’re pliable after rain or below snow-melt, however shrivel up within the absence moisture, turning as inflexible and brittle as outdated sea shells. As quickly as any recent precipitation happens, they plump proper again up once more, resilient and—to the individuals who know and love them—irresistible.

Images by Marie Viljoen.

In the USA wooden ears are offered nearly completely at Asian markets. They’re one of many oldest mushrooms in cultivation, grown for hundreds of years in China, the place they’re held in esteem as a useful meals. The mushrooms of commerce are offered dry, typically labeled as black fungus or cloud fungus. Rehydrated, they behave precisely as they do on their favourite log after rain, turning into floppily tender. However they’re at their most opulently smooth when recent, which is why my eyes mild up after I see a log frilled with the brown and black caps which might be typically frosted with a effective layer of fuzz on their higher floor.

Wooden ears belong to the species advanced Auricularia. For the common mushroom hunter, narrowing down a wooden ear discover to a specific species is tough, and I don’t attempt. They belong to a bunch of mushrooms identified collectively as jelly fungi, whose unifying high quality is…? Sure! Their gelatinous nature. Wooden ears are wobbly.

Regardless of their affiliation in normal mushroom literature with elderberry shrubs (Sambucus species) I’ve solely as soon as seen wooden ears rising on lifeless elder wooden. Principally, they’re on logs, massive and small, whose identification has been stripped together with their bark. In Brooklyn additionally they seem on dwelling road timber—multiple London airplane in my neighborhood has a seam of wooden ears rising up its trunk, fissured by trauma or illness.

In contrast to most different mushrooms, which are typically related to a specific season, wild wooden ears will be discovered year-round, so long as situations are humid sufficient: floppy and large when mature, or pertly cupped when very younger.

Someway the wooden ear flushes of the cool months are probably the most selection. Maybe as a result of they appear so alive when the whole lot else is resolutely hibernating or lifeless.

After I first started gathering wooden ears I turned to conventional East Asian recipes for steerage, including the mushrooms to Chinese language-style scorching and bitter soups the place they took on the flavour of the liquid.