Crested Butte – The end of summer isn’t something to celebrate in a tourist-devoted place like Crested Butte, at least not for the folks who depend upon the tourists’ wallets.
But Jason Vernon, chef/owner of the restaurant Soupçon in this central Colorado town, has at least one thing to champion about the eclipse of the season: the rise of mushrooms.
Toward the end of summer, chanterelle and porcini mushrooms, among others, begin sprouting all over the mountains surrounding the town. Their arrival attracts avid hunters who spend days crisscrossing the countryside in search of fungi – sometimes for science, often for the table.
And the fungus-obsessed appear at back doors of his charming alleyway establishment, offering sacks of fresh-picked ‘shrooms.
“They come up with amazing mushrooms, with shopping bags full of them,” he says. “They are mountain men who have basically decided to live off the grid. They live in and around town, and they go out and forage, and they are fanatical about it. I had no clue. Coming from New York, we got our mushrooms out of a cardboard box from a guy named Mike.”
The season for most Colorado mushrooms is short – roughly somewhere in August until early September. By now most Colorado mushrooming is finished, and foragers have put down their sacks for the year. The big mushroom festivals – in Crested Butte, Telluride and Buena Vista – are history.
Most of us, though, are more mushroom consumer than fungi hunter. And for us, mushroom season is just beginning, for we will dream of mushroom soup on a cold fall day. We’ll crave creamy mushroom sauces for pasta, and stews thick with sliced caps, and crepes filled with sautéed mushrooms and blanketed in bechamel.
The mushroom industrialists know all about our move to mushrooms come the first turning of leaves and the arrival of a delicate crispness in the air: They selected September as National Mushroom Month.
Here’s the thing about mushrooms: They are weird. What other category of food can thrill your tongue, repulse you, kill you, or provide you with a long hallucinatory trip?
Unless you foolishly decide to tromp into the forest, pluck bushels of mushrooms you know nothing about, and feast on them (or unless you buy your mushrooms from a drug dealer), the deadly, the disgusting, and the trippy ones aren’t your concern. You care about ones you buy somewhere – chanterelles from Hazel Dell Mushrooms in Fort Collins, say – which you’ll sauté in butter, shower with salt and pepper, confetti with parsley, and inhale.
But it’s the whole mushroom package, the blend of magic and myth, of forest-foraging and danger and delight, that gives mushrooms their one-of-a-kind mystique.
“Mushroom people are a tribe of their own. It’s a passion,” says author and part-time Western Slope resident Eugenia Bone. “There are so many mushrooms we don’t know if they are edible, they grow in places we don’t expect, some rarely come up at all. They are very odd, very mysterious.”
Bone belongs to the New York Mycological Society (she lives in New York for much of the year), and has even been to “mushroom camp.” She says, “it’s like a Trekkie convention for mushroom people. It’s very nerdy.”
But Bone, who, among other things, writes cookbooks, is in the game for the flavor, not for scientific inquiry.
She calls herself a “belly feeder.”
“We hunt for the pot,” she says. “It’s like caviar. They all get fetishized. People just go crazy over this.”
In Colorado, they go especially crazy for chanterelles and “boletes,” which are more commonly known as porcinis.
Plenty more mushrooms rise above the soil in Colorado mountains, but these two dominate the landscape.
“Last year, I probably collected 150 or so pounds of chanterelles, and gave away many of them and ate tons and tons of them and dried enough for the next few years at the very least,” says Roger Kahn, a long-time Crested Butte resident who helps organize the annual Crested Butte Mushroom Festival.
David Teitler of Carbondale, a mushroom expert and the owner of Dr. Dave’s Herbal Medicine, a business developing and selling herbal products, grew up in Crested Butte, learning about mushrooms from old-timers, he says.
“You went hiking with people who picked mushrooms, and you pick up on the excitement,” he says. “It’s a good excuse for a walk in the woods, that’s for sure.”
Teitler likes hunting for porcini mushrooms in pine forests, looking for larger specimens “that you can grill like a steak.”
“That’s the best way to have a (porcini),” he says. “Marinate it in oil and vinegar for a few hours, and slap it on the grill. To die for.”
We hope not.
Unless you know what you’re doing, you’re not going to comb mountainsides looking for fungi. Even experienced hunters, like Kahn, can get stung.
One time, he accidentally prepared poisonous mushrooms for himself, his wife, and a friend. They all became violently ill. A specialist in mushroom poison told him, “I would not die, which was reassuring, but I might wish I had. For three days I was so sick she probably was close to right.”
Ever since, Kahn has put only mushrooms in his mouth that he’s sure about.
Colorado isn’t mushroom heaven – wetter places like Oregon rank higher for the spectrum and volume of mushrooms. But it does support a serious mushroom culture, from the foragers dotting the mountain towns to the chefs who use them to the state’s handful of festivals.
All of which helps remind us that fall is coming, and we’re not out hunting for mushrooms. We’re dreaming of mushroom caps stuffed with blue cheese.
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
