Mushroom hunting in the West Island

Pointe-Claire resident Tyler Gibb is an amateur mushroom hunter and, to my surprise, finds exotic varieties right here on the island. "I picked a batch of fresh morels in some woods around Kirkland that would sell for 11$ a pound at the grocery store," Gibb says over the phone hardly able to contain his excitement. Gibb, a filmmaker and Internet animator, developed a passion for mushroom hunting while spending his summers in Golden Lake, Ontario. "Last fall I found shelf mushrooms in Terra Cotta that had a real nutty flavour with a light chicken texture," he replied when I asked him about the types of fungi that he looks for. Gibb invites me to join him on his next outing and I could not refuse the chance of finding wild mushrooms 15 minutes from my house.

On the Montreal Botanical Gardens website they clearly indicate that, even though there are over 100 species of mushrooms available in Quebec, many of them are noxious to human beings. Studying the images from the site some of the most poisonous varieties, such as the Amanitas, can look very much like the mushrooms we buy for two dollars at the grocery store when they are very young. It was enough to convince me I was not going to eat anything that we would pull out of the ground.

I get out of the car and, with paper bags in hand, I follow Gibb into a patch of woods west of Boul. St. Charles in Kirkland. Walking along a well marked path where many surrounding residents walk their dogs, we jet off the trail into the woods where he has previously been lucky in finding fungi. Within about ten minutes of scouring the ground we come across a patch of young morels. “Watch your step,” Gibb warns me as he explains that mushrooms tend to grow in proximity. Sure enough, there were at least a dozen mushrooms for the picking in that one spot. The stocks were soft and hollow with the heads being a dark brown wrinkled texture. They looked nothing like the mushrooms one buys at the store.

We continue to walk somewhat aimlessly in the woods in search of more harvest when Gibbs urges me to look up. Not sure what to expect, I look to the top of the forest canopy and 15 feet above, growing out of a towering tree trunk, is a rounded fungi shelf. We grab a long broken branch and prod the mushroom a few times until we manage to fracture off a few good pieces. He peels it apart and asks me to take in the aroma. "It smells like watermelon don't you think?" When I tell him all I smell is dirt and grass he roles his eyes gingerly at my amateurness, seemingly wasting his efforts on a beginner.

As our scavenging comes to an end Gibb warns of the dangers and the delights of eating wild mushrooms. He tells me there is a variety actually called false morels, which are similar to edible morels, but contain enough toxins that make it dangerous for human consumption. Just as he’s reaffirming my previous sentiment about not eating anything we bring back, Gibb insists I take at least half of the 50 mushrooms we gathered. Though I tried to refuse, I got the impression that he would feel he has failed to translate his enthusiasm if he did not convince me to take some home.

Searching for the best way to prepare a wild mushroom I discover on the culinary connoisseur website ogourmet.com, dried morels sell for $13 a bag. “Morels are undeniably the king of dried mushrooms,” the site boasts. I reckoned I was sitting on $30 worth of equivalent produce. In a frying pan with melted butter I sautéed both the morels and the shelf mushrooms until they were dark and crispy. They tasted great and the texture was light yet meaty. Though I was feeling some bravado for having eaten fresh fungi, my wife urged that I would never eat wild mushrooms on my own without the council of someone like Gibb that knows what they are doing.