Foraging & Cooking Dryad's Saddle

Description

Foraging for Dryads Saddle Fungi, cooking on an open fire.

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Video Transcription

either guys it's a very damp spring morning as you can see in our last video we had a look at ransoms the wild garlic and we explored it from an edible perspective and in this video I thought we'd have a look at another wild edibles but it's going to be a fungus and fungus is generally associated with awesome that this one is very very abundant all through spring and all through summer and it's definitely one worth having a look at so let's go take a look so I've arrived at this ash tree and this ash tree is worse for wear parts of it are aligned and other parts of it are dead and if you look at the base you'll see a fungus growing there and the fungus is called dry and saddle remember the poly pricey I family so the same family is chicken of the woods if you're familiar with that fungus as well the term dry and saddle comes from Greek mythology where a wood nymph will dry add dried the fungus a bit like a saddle that fortunately is not riding it today is we're going to be eating it other names for a pheasant of the woods or pheasant back fungus simply because of its look the top of it looks a lot like a female pheasant feathers on the female you'll find this fungus growing on deciduous hardwoods mainly from the end of April start of May and sometimes all the way through to water its abundant pretty much in woodlands like this where you've got trees that'll get infected with parasites and become a little bit ill and worse where and the fungus takes this whole growing out the heartwood of the tree gradually killing it and parts of this tree of breaking down as you can see other parts are still alive but I can't imagine they'll keep living for very long certainly because you can see the fungus taking its hold almost all the way around the tree and it will continue to grow on the wood reparative time providing the nutrition is still there the parts of the world you'll finally spung us in well it's very very common all throughout the British Isles you'll find in Western Asia all throughout Europe and has very broad coverage all over North America so a very very common fungus difficult to find and very easy to identify but we're going to pick some first and head into the woods we're getting rained on pretty hard here when you approach the fungus and you're sure you've got a good ideal and you know what it is just have a look at the age of the little talked about ID a bit later and I have to move into the wood and set up a talk and get out rain once I pick some but for the time being before you pick them you want to assess their size

if they're any bigger than your palm I'd leave them alone because when they get big they get very tough they get papery and they do make a good paper substitute in some cases because the inner core becomes very hard and chewy and your body can't really digest it so you want to make sure they're young no bigger than the palm of your hand like these ones here on this tree and they grow very fast so if you come back a week later they're probably the size of a dinner plate so we'll get these ones picked because they are a good size and you can check them as well by touching them seeing how firm they are and pushing your finger on the underside of the bracket to see if it's squidgy because when they get old they're come full of maggots and they become very squidgy but when they're young they're still nice and firm they're ready for picking instead of pulling the fungus off the tree which is something I often have a habit of doing I'm going to cut it off and what that will do is it will just take away the fruit body which is what we want to eat and obviously preserve the root structure beneath giving it a better chance of reappearing next year you can see there the white flesh very very soft you can see the paws on the underside and as this bracket gets really old these paws will really open out and become like a sponge and they'll get pretty maggot infested so you want to touch them and just make sure it's nice and firm just check the top top and just make sure the bracket is quite rigid and that way you can tell it's ready for eating but this part will be tasty too so if our funghi here it's of a perfect size just right for the eating I left this earth a few more days probably be a bit too big and the others might have been worth picking on them but they're very very small I'll leave those and come back to them another day but we'll make our way into the woods we'll get this guide fried up and I'll get a shelter up so I put a tarp up just to keep me company allow me to stay dry but we've got the fungus here with us and I thought before we do some cooking we've have a look at it a bit closer and a point of view of identification talked about its nutritional content and also whether there might be anything that looks similar will be poisonous so if we have a look at the top of the fungus you'll see why they call it pheasant back fungus you've got this patterning all over the bracket that looks like a female pheasant and it's very very nice and it makes it very easy to pick out and they will grow very large four five six times as large as this they can grow absolutely gigantic to determine whether the fungus is ready to eat check the base it leaves a white spore print if you are interested but by squeezing it you should determine whether it's ready because if moisture pulls I it makes squidgy noise you don't want to eat it because the inside would have formed a papery hard shell on the inner that'll be almost impossible to digest and you'll be chewing it for a very very long time if we look at the base of the stem you'll see some scaling and that scaling is very typical of this kind of bracket fungi the neck is often described in field guides of being dark and woody and sometimes is but rarely so don't let that put off your idea if it is most of the time this will be white and when you cut it it should be very dense white flesh that can be eaten as well and these scales are very typical and the fungus fortunately there are no fungus that look like this that potentially poisonous the only one you may mix it up with a very young age egipto for a special dinners or birch polypore which can look a little bit similar but to be honest we do the top the poly ball is combat so there's this one a bit like a saddle goes in towards the Sun there is however some concerns of eating raw fungus that you've picked just off the ground and certain people will have sensitivities to it so best to cook it all fungus contains a chemical called hydrazine and that it is mildly carcinogenic and cooking that chemical neutralizes it so it is something that you need to remember the firearm makings relatively small so I'm going to have it under the tarp and risk it hopefully the flames won't go above there a little polyurethane part you've got to be careful the kind of wood you use as I found out in the past if you use larch and Colin Furze and woods that spit a lot like sweet chestnut you're going to have problems but hazel is a relatively safe word to use if you want to keep a fire controlled

obviously not have it rising too high what I'm making is just a handle my frying pan this is just a titanium plate the life adventure titanium plate it's called the nice thing about the handles to kill me quite strong so they don't tend to fall out you can obviously make them as long as you want you can sit right back from the fire the triangle just above the bundle just allows you to pick the bundle up and get some oxygen in there if you're unsure whether you're going to smother the fire or whether the tinder is going to burn out and not ignite the wood simply just pick up the triangle and wait for the flames to rise in the smoke above the bundle and when the flames rise in the smoke above the bundle you'll know you've reached the right temperature and you can sit it back down and your fuel wood is now it is lit you can see it there we can drop this now forget about it I've got a bit of bacon grease with me here so what I generally do let's take a bit of that and just prime the pan first you can put that in you don't need a huge amount we can get this pan primed up doesn't take much heat you see this fungus cooks very quickly there we go pan is ready if you've used your knife for other things you may just want to give it a clean and really got too much on this is very clean sharpened it the other day so we'll get this guy cut off normally what I do is take away the fragile end bits of the bracket it's because they tend to be a bit weak then you're left with most of the meet of the bracket the thicker stuff that can just be sliced thinly and popped in and you can obviously mix other edibles with it as well doesn't just need to be the fungus on its own it's just this is what we're focusing on in this video there are plenty of wild edibles that could go with this and you can add it to a salad as well provided you cut the fungus first and the nice thing about this fungus is that if you don't have any meat it fills you up and they're much more than leaves and things like that will fill you up if you are out foraging or camping you've decided not to take any food with you these n bits as well understand almost like fried potato can make little scallops with them if you are going to make some cooking implements and this goes for the handle the frying pan as well just make sure you take the bark off if it's coming into contact with food or in the cooking area simply because there is a bit of bacteria in the bark and you don't really want that getting into the food although the risks are very minimal but it's better to be safe than sorry as far as looking pretty good to cook on there it's mostly just Anders if you don't want the fungus to boil its own moisture as it will produce a lot you can angle the pan slightly it's all the moisture builds up at one side and the funghi remains a bit drier and you can fry it and it's easier that way this is looking pretty good and I've been cooking these for just about 5 minutes not for very long just enough just to soften them up a bit let's try one mmm I seriously good I seriously give the remind me of steak I have that same taste recommended

you can tell if they're not done enough simply because they're too chewy it should be pretty soft and easy to eat it's much like the mushroom meaty commercially

I was delicious I'd almost forgotten what it was like it's been so long I'll make sure I'll be out this year foraging a few and in terms of storage you can actually drive that entire fun game that's what I did last year brought them into the house and actually put them on a heater and they just dried completely and they were just about dehydrated mushrooms and the need to throw them just in a pan or boil them and rehydrate them make soups you could grind them up into a powder for soup and carry that with you there's a lot of different things you can do with it but if you're outdoors and you want to dry them for long-term storage and say the best way to do it would be to cut them very very thinly and hang them over a fire just you've got that warm air flow going up and you could shroud it with leaves much like you do a normal smoker just to make jerky if you're drying the whole bracket it's going to take some doing so that could be a way of storing it long-term so in terms of nutritional content what are you getting from that mushroom well you're getting a little bit of protein a little bit of carbohydrate some vitamin D a good amount of potassium magnesium and also some iron as well so it is a very rich bracket and there's quite a lot else in there that you could benefit from as well I'm sure but if you're out and you don't know what the mushroom is just don't bother with it the thing about mushrooms is they can be very dangerous obviously and generally a lot people are put off like picking them simply because all the horror stories that come alongside them and it shouldn't be ignored caution should be taken so guys I hope you've enjoyed this video about dry and saddle it's very easy to identify it's worth foraging for and pick it when it's young and it will taste delicious tastes a lot like steak and mushrooms together so which is really nice to actually have something like that that you can forage for when you're spending sort of time out doing some wild camping or so on but uh yeah just take care of see when you do forage for mushrooms there's a lot of them a dodgy and take a field going with you if you're unsure and you should be fine but thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed the video hopefully I'll see you in the next one