A mushroom hunting novice searches for elusive morel

MINNEAPOLIS — Dried leaves, bark scraps, fallen walnuts — just about everything on the forest floor looked like a morel.

I was roughly 40 minutes into a forest trek to find morel mushrooms. The prized culinary ingredient appears for only a few weeks when lilacs bloom each spring. But almost nobody in the foray I had joined had found one yet.

About 20 of us were picking through the woods in a state park an hour south of Minneapolis on a Saturday morning in early May. It seemed like almost everything on the ground was trying to trick the eye away from finding the honeycombed cap of a morel. Only our guide, Mike Kempenich, had found one tiny specimen. Its cap barely poked above the leaf litter, and he’d left it in the ground.

Kempenich calls himself the Gentleman Forager, and has made a business out of taking groups to search for edible fungi. Morel trips were some of the toughest for him, because there were few other edible fungi around that early in the year, if the group struck out. Minnesota’s real mushroom season, he said, starts in July.

I had never foraged before, save plucking one or two wild raspberries off bushes along hiking trails. Mushrooms felt like one of the more intimidating items to seek out, with the potential to mistakenly pick up something toxic.

The upside of morel season is that there was little outside that it could be mistaken for. I asked him about lookalikes. “We might find some gyromitra,” Kempenich said, referring to a group of mushrooms known as “false morel” that can be poisonous.

We faced spring conditions that had swerved hard from a cool, slow thaw to an abnormally hot and dry stretch. Those weren’t ideal conditions — but our group set off anyway, quickly diverging from groomed trails.

Pull of the forest

I’m not a fisherwoman, or a hunter (and I don’t eat most meat). But something about coming home with dinner from the outdoors still appealed to me.

“Foraging is an untapped activity that has a lower bar, for sure, because you don’t need a gun or a boat or anything like that,” said Peter Martignacco, president of the Minnesota Mycological Society. “There’s food all around us.”

Minnesotans have many long-held foraging traditions, whether picking berries, tapping maple syrup or ricing on a lake. Interest in mushrooms has been steadily growing over the past decade, Martignacco said, even before the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many people into adopting new outdoor activities.

A few years ago, the Department of Natural Resources even suggested putting a bag limit on berries and mushrooms collected on public land. The agency eventually dropped the proposal, and foraging groups, including the Mycological Society, are now hoping to create a task force to outline clearer rules for harvesting on state properties.

As of now, though, there is no limit to what can be taken off the side of a tree or the forest floor in a state park in Minnesota — provided you can get to it first.

Setting off

Kempenich asked that we not disclose the state park we visited, to avoid a rush of people searching for fungi. When I arrived at the picnic tables, I immediately noticed that almost everyone else had brought a woven basket. I had grabbed one of my many reusable grocery bags.

Some mushroom hunters insist that baskets help spread spores around the forest, reseeding new fungi. That doesn’t actually work in the case of morels, Kempenich said, but the basket would do a better job of cradling the fragile mushrooms than a bag.

As we set off down a trail, my eyes aimed upwards. Morels are found near specific dead and dying trees, most commonly elms. Kempenich pointed into the canopy, showing one slim elm with an elegant, branching “V” at the top. It was missing several leaves, a sign of ill health.

Once a tree is in decline, morels will appear near it for two to three years, but no longer, Kempenich said. So unlike some other mushrooms, “there aren’t really any secret honey holes,” or at least not for long.

When many elms across the Twin Cities were dying of Dutch elm disease in the 1970s, avid hunters could gather multiple bags full of morels in each go, Martignacco said. Now that so many elms are gone, the morels aren’t such an easy find — but can still be found around other hardwoods, like cottonwood trees or even apple trees.

Our group scattered off the trail and clambered over a stream toward the elm. It was by this tree that Kempenich found the first tiny morel. “Let’s see if you can find it,” he said to the group.

We all scanned the ground by his feet, and after a few seconds, he pointed to a quarter-sized, honeycomb cap. But there would hopefully be larger specimens worth picking ahead, he said.

Meager finds

As we pushed on into the forest, the group passed another person, plodding his way through the woods with a hockey stick and a woven bag. Kempenich wondered aloud whether the stranger had cleaned out some fungi already — and within a few hundred feet, we saw evidence that a large pheasant back had been carved off a dead tree.

Pheasant back mushrooms are shelf-like fungi that grow in clumps off of dead wood. They are also edible, though generally less prized. The tops of their caps have a brown and white pattern that resembles the feathers on a pheasant’s back. Before long, I had found a handful to place in my grocery bag.

But it wasn’t until another half-hour had passed, as we picked through blooming violets and briars at the damp edges of a vernal pool, that I finally found my first pair of morels. There, standing high among the leaf litter, the velvety brown caps were illuminated in dappled sunlight like tiny beacons.

I picked both and showed Kempenich their hollow interiors — an important feature that determines a mushroom is definitely a morel. In my case, I had found two half-free morels, a smaller variety of the edible.

Our group’s biggest find by far was made by Laura South, of Burnsville. Making my way up a hill and past a deer blind, I heard her exclaim from a distance at first.

She squatted down, with her back to an old, dying cottonwood, and held her arms out in a “V” shape in front of her. “They’re all right here in front of me,” she said.

Indeed, after about a minute of scanning the area, I spotted four gray caps covered in the gnarled lattice pattern. All looked relatively dry.

Looking online after the trip, I found many Minnesota mushroom hunters on Facebook and forums worried that the early-May heat wave had burned out what the forest had to offer. Many complained that their harvest was already dried out.

“Everything is just moving too fast! ... Seems the heat has really stunted a lot of them,” one Minnesota user wrote on the longtime message board Morels.com.

Kempenich later agreed in an email, though he said that with coming rain, there could be a “late flurry” of morels.

After I returned home, I resolved to keep an eye on the forecast, and hold out hope that rain might help stretch the season a bit longer.

My consolation prize was my two measly half-free morels, which didn’t taste like much when they were thoroughly sauteed. Raw morels can make you sick.

The pheasant backs, it turned out, were meaty, savory and unlike any other mushroom I‘d tasted before. I fried them in butter, and folded them into an omelet with cheddar.

Kempenich said his goal for forays was to inspire people to go out into the woods on their own. I intended to do it — for morels and pheasant backs, too.