Fungi foraging, best mushroom accounts and recipes

Posted by: Coral & Tusk

We love the variety of mushroom decor sprouting up everywhere and wanted to go behind the design and share our love of the fungus itself!

Mushroom Table runner and dinner napkins

Making meals with mushrooms

We have several vegetarians and plant-based enthusiasts at Coral & Tusk, so mushrooms are a go-to staple for cooking with.

Recipient of the James Beard Emerging Voices award, Sophia Roe is an incredible cook and creator who forages and makes inventive vegan meals frequently around mushrooms. Try her recipe for Creamy Sun-dried Tomato and Roasted Mushroom Pasta and then check out her mushroom musings in this Thrillist interview on ways to cook mushrooms and conservation. She also talks about her love of mushrooms in an interview with Mushroom Revival here.

Image via Joy the Baker

While a vegan cream of mushroom soup might not sound exciting, Joy the Bakers' version using cashew cream is beyond delicious!

If you have an Instant Pot, this is the tastiest and easiest recipe for Mushroom Risotto we've found.

Expand your mushroom variety and cooking methods with this expansive guide from The Chef & the Dish.

Mushrrom and Hedgehog with Mushrooms tea towel

Our favorite fall hosting snacks are tasty crackers and a mushroom brie cheese.

If you want to match your meal to your decor, at the top image are our Mushroom Forest table runner with coordinating Mushroom Forest dinner napkins, and Foragers cocktail napkins. Above, our Mushroom and Hedgehog with Mushrooms tea towels are great to have on hand.

Stephanie Housley Mushroom Pic

Photo of wild mushroom by Stephanie Housley*

Learning to forage

This online guide by Mushroom Mountain of mushroom species for harvesting is a handy site to keep bookmarked for quick identification.

An expert and self-taught mycologist, the late Gary Lincoff wrote several books on mushrooms, but this classic guide Audubon Mushroom Book is one of the most comprehensive and considered a go-to.

TikTok is also an excellent resource for foraging because you can see the details of fungi and the environments they're growing in to help guide your harvest along with being part of the foraging community.

Alexis Nikole

We love Alexis Nikole, a forager who has the most enthusiasm for mushrooms. Her incredibly fun videos about the identification of fungi and edible plant safety are educational but also hilarious. Read this article on Code Switch to see how she builds on the tradition of her cultural food heritage.

Stephanie Housley Mushroom pic

Photo of wild mushroom by Stephanie Housley*

Follow Wellfedwild, Samuel Thayer, to learn about every edible plant. Besides his TikTok, he also has a series of books on foraging, and this one, The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plant, is a great go-to reference.

*We do not know if these are edible, please check the guides and resources to ensure plant safety!

Tools for your toadstools

Giuliana Furci is a mycologist, National Geographic Explorer and founder of the Fungi Foundation, an organization around everything fungi from ecosystem education and conservation to curriculum and activities for kids, podcasts and even a Fungipedia of all mushroom terms!

Why not try growing your own? Forest Origins is an urban farming mushroom grower that has a great selection of at-home mushroom kits so you can try the process yourself. These would be great to do with kids and note the progression of the fungus each day.

Farm Steady forager

The company FarmSteady makes this Foraging Took Kit to get any beginner started.

The Chestnut School of Herbal medicine has a comprehensive guide on useful tools from pruners, to root cleaners and hand lenses to identify your spores.

For more links and all of our fungi favs, head to our Pinterest board!