Mushroom Madness

There is a box of freshly-picked pine mushrooms in the basement, by the back door, and a small shopping bag of fresh chanterelles. Both are waiting to be cleaned. We brought them back from the coast yesterday evening.

Mushroom lovers will not find it odd that we made a special trip to the Sunshine Coast to find pine mushrooms in early November. (The chanterelles were a happy surprise.) For years our friend A. has been luring us down to visit with the Promise of Pines. We finally took her up on it. 

Pine mushrooms, also known as matsutakes, are so prized by aficionados and gourmands that a single, fresh specimen weighing 220 grams was recently for sale online for $70.46. The aroma is unique and famously hard to pinpoint—mushroom expert David Arora calls it “a provocative compromise between Red Hots and dirty socks.” (Red Hots are a spicy cinnamon candy beloved in the States.)

Before this trip I had never seen a pine mushroom, let alone smelled one, let alone tasted one. Our pal had been out mushrooming the day before we arrived, and there was a pile of washed pines on the counter when we got to her place. She handed me a knobbly, white, solid specimen that had lost its veil; the cap was a couple of inches across. I inhaled deeply from the gills.

The hype is accurate—the smell is next to impossible to describe. I didn’t get the much-touted cinnamon. The best I could come up with was a very clean cement bathroom by the sea at the edge of a forest—bracing, mineral, a hint of conifer, a touch of brine. The next day, A. nailed it: petrichor—the smell that is released from dry earth or pavement, just after the first drops of rain hit the ground. 

That night, A. cooked a pan of sliced pines in olive oil with a bit of sliced garlic. The flavour, to quote writer Kate Harris, was “like discovering a new element.” It’s like nothing else in the taste lexicon. Again, best I can do is conifer, brine, mineral and a chewy, meaty texture. Foragers and cooks advise that you don’t mess around too much with pines, just eat them on their own or in an environment where you can really taste the mushroom, like risotto or an omelette. 

For two days A. led us up logging road after logging road, through rain, mist and wind, to deke off into likely woods and look for the telltale sign—a hint of creamy white peeking out from the moss, a bump in the earth under a Douglas fir. I didn’t find a single pine until the morning of the second day, when I found two. That was my total haul. Luckily, my roommate is a demon mushroomer, quick on the uptake. With the help of his eagle eye, we came away with about three pounds. 

We amused ourselves all the way home with calculating how much our mushrooms would bring on the open market. Five hundred dollars! No, a thousand!

Now, while those mushrooms await cleaning, I am gearing up, practising recipes to make sure my mushroom cooking chops are up to the challenge of pines.

First up, a frittata made with our own homegrown morels, picked in the spring of 2024. These choice mushrooms are nothing to sneeze at—rich, musky, nutty, with a deep umami flavour—and a frittata is the perfect way to fully enjoy them.