Where can I buy morel mushrooms?

One of our patrons had a craving for morels but hadn’t been able to find any quality ones while foraging himself. He remembered that Giant Eagle used to sell them but he hadn’t been able to find them there. Rather than continuing to search the groceries – it’s possible that Whole Foods may have them, but their nearest store is in Chagrin – he came to the library to see if we could point him in the right direction.

As it turns out, there’s a thriving community of morel aficionados online. Morels.com includes a classifieds forum filled with people selling everything from the mushrooms themselves to hand-carved morel-shaped gifts, and many sellers have listed their mushrooms on eBay. However, our patron would rather purchase his morels in person.

A mushroom festival would be one place to find them. Unfortunately, some of the festivals had already passed by. The Shawnee Valley Campground Mushroom Festival in Chillicothe was held from April 30 to May 3, and the Mesick Mushroom Festival in Michigan had run from May 8 to May 10. (Their website already has a countdown to next year’s 57^th annual festival, which will run from May 6 to May 8, 2016.)

Eventually, we found the website of the Ohio Mushroom Society, which lists the contact information for all of its board members. Our patron decided to try and get in touch with them to see what information they could provide.

The Newton Falls Public Library has several field guides to help identify mushrooms, including Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of the World, Peterson’s Field Guide to Mushrooms, and Edible Wild Plants and Useful Herbs. For information on morels alone, Michael Kuo’s Morels is available through CLEVNET. 

What Kind of Mushroom Is This?

“My husband found this wild mushroom out in the woods. What kind is it?” The Newton Falls Public Library staff looked at the approximately 12” by 15” fungus in a bowl.  Large, ruffled, salmon, white, and orange it almost seemed to be something that belonged at the bottom of the sea.

The first places we looked were A Field Guide to Mushrooms, North America by Kent H. McKnight, The Mushroom Book and Mushrooms by Thomas Laessøe. Each of these books has a section that uses fruit body shapes and cap features to help identify mushrooms.  Upon initial examination the patron and the staff felt that her specimen belonged to either the family Corticiaceae or Polyporaceae. The photographs in the books were not exactly like her sample, so we continued the search online.

We did an image search for each of these families of mushrooms.  We found photographs from www.wildmanstevebrill.com for two Polypores which might be likely candidates, the Berkeley’s and the chicken. Continuing on, the chicken or Chicken-of-the-Woods (as per The Mushroom Book, p.69) looks almost exactly like the one sitting on the library counter. According to what was written this mushroom, when young, is safe to eat and supposed to taste like chicken.  As our staff members are not mushroom experts, we advised our patron to find someone more familiar with them to determine if our identification was correct and it was safe to eat.