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Do IT this week: Layering
Ohio State class looks at earthy organisms, includes a meal or two
By Jim Chatfield
Special to the Beacon Journal
Published on Saturday, Oct 10, 2009
Last summer I talked about a class I was going to teach in the fall down on Ohio State University's main campus in Columbus — a class on mushrooms and other fungi.
At the time, one of the things I looked forward to was the strange and wonderful names of fungi, from wolf's milk slime to pig's ear gomphus. Well, now the class is under way. It is a gas, it is a great fall season for fungi, and here are some highlights.
Killbuck Valley
One of the delights in Week 1 was to cook up a mess of mushrooms I bought from Killbuck Valley Mushrooms in Wayne County.
Killbuck Valley Mushrooms is a great mushroom grower, spawning shiitakes, oyster mushrooms and lion's mane mushrooms.
I overdid it and the students and I ate up about four pounds of mushrooms, complete with garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar or soy sauce, onions and shredded Parmesan and Romano cheese.
The students and Northeast Ohio gourmet restaurant-goers will attest to the woodsy earthy tastes of these ultrafresh fungi.
Giant puffballs
Puffballs are fun mushrooms, starting out as little nubs in lawns and woods, but eventually different puffball species grow to sizes ranging from golf balls to bigger than soccer balls.
They are called puffballs because as they age, the mushroom grows from pure white interior flesh (most species are edible and bland to delicious at this state) to
yellowish (not good eating at that point) to masses of puffy spores that can be ''poofed'' out the top of the mushroom in a puff of dark, dry spores (don't try to eat these at this point).
At our class last week in Columbus,we came upon a little area in the woods with basketball-size snowy-white giant puffballs (Calvatia gigantea) and on Wednesday, the OSU Portage County Master Gardeners found a mass of small puffballs at Adell Durbin Arboretum in Stow, a great little park and arboretum where good friend Dave Roberts has tended the grounds for many years.
Wait a few weeks in Northeast Ohio and get a small thrill by poofing the spores out the cracks or holes at the top of the mushroom.
Dryad's Saddle
Now that people know I am teaching this course, I get more than the usual calls about interesting fungi.
Al Schauck, a Northeast Ohio arborist, called about a spectacular fungal-fruiting body growing on a silver maple in a yard in Oberlin. I stopped by on my way back from a talk in Findlay last week, and indeed it was quite a specimen, growing about 20 feet up, emerging from a cut branch that had been removed because of a cavity.
The fungus was Polyporus squamosus, known as the Dryad's Saddle, named for the cuplike pools in which Greek mythology imagined wood nymphs presiding over the forest.
The main body of this fungus is the strandlike mycelia inside the tree, acting as a serious decay fungus, which periodically reproduces sexually with large, kidney-shaped overlapping fruiting bodies, which we removed.
Removing the fruiting bodies does not remove the fungus, but once we positively identified the fungus, we did at least get to enjoy the gargantuan 19-inch caps in class and I sauteed a few slices of the fungus along the edges for some pretty good eating.
What are fungi anyway?
When biologists contemplated a two-kingdom world, plants and animals, fungi were considered plants, since they have cell walls and do not move around like animals. Then, when a five-kingdom world was the normal description for nature, fungi were given their own kingdom, since they lacked a key feature of plants, the ability to make food through photosynthesis.
Modern schemes of describing the living world make it yet more complicated, but one thing is clear: Fungi have a number of different lifestyles.
Most fungi are saprophytes, not making their own food, but deriving their energy from nonliving carbon sources.
Some fungi are parasites. Other fungi are mutualistic symbionts, a fancy term for an organism that intimately interacts with another organism to the mutual benefit of both.
Jim Chatfield is a horticultural educator with OSU Extension. If you have questions about caring for your garden, write: Jim Chatfield, Plant Lovers' Almanac, Ohio State University Extension, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691. Send e-mail to chatfield.1@cfaes.osu.edu or call 330-466-0270. Please include phone number if you write.
Last summer I talked about a class I was going to teach in the fall down on Ohio State University's main campus in Columbus — a class on mushrooms and other fungi.
Get the full article here.
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