cooking with Amanita muscaria
This past Sunday I conducted a culinary experiment which provoked strong reactions on a couple of forums, and I feel I should write it up here as not a great deal of info about this exists online. Amanita muscaria, the familiar, iconic bright red fly agaric mushroom, is classified as “poisonous” in most field guides. It contains two alkaloids, muscimol and ibotenic acid, which can be toxic at sufficient doses and produce a range of effects at modest doses (not to be confused with psychoactive mushrooms of the psilocybe
But my present interest in it is culinary…
I’ve heard tale of boiling the mushrooms to render them safe to eat, the toxins being highly water soluble (muscaria tea is one commonly referenced method for intoxication). On his website, food writer William Rubel has a good article describing techniques for safely preparing the mushroom that I used as my guide.
Before I go further, a disclaimer… Don’t attempt anything like this unless you are very familiar with foraging and identifying wild mushrooms. There are non-detoxifiable mushrooms in the genus Amanita that can kill you. Amanita muscaria is not difficult to distinguish from its lethal cousins, but they appear in similar climates during the same season and I wouldn’t want to encourage any of my readers with poor eyesight and poorer judgement to take unnecessary risks. Further, the intoxication caused by the more benign Amanitas is not always described as a picnic, and experiencing it is a risk if you screw it up in the kitchen.
The mycologist David Arora, whose essential
Amanita muscaria’s beauty is unreal, like a cartoon come to life. My first encounter with it, poetically enough, was while bicycling through the woods in my ancestral hometown in the Netherlands. My dutch grandmother was a mycophobe, having had a bad experience with a wild mushroom in her youth, and I now wonder if this was this one. Living in Seattle, I encountered it often with many reliable patches along my usual routes in Capitol Hill. Every year I was tempted to go beyond taking photos and experience eating one, but never did. And besides, it’s bad etiquette to pick mushrooms from along trails or anywhere they serve as a scenic resource.
These specimens were encountered Saturday hiking in Marin County, not too far north of San Francisco.
As per the article, I sliced the mushroom thinly.
I set a large pot of salted water to boil. I boiled the mushrooms for about 13 minutes. Sadly the bright red color I imagined feasting on faded quickly and the water took on a yellowish hue. A more effective method would have involved using more water, or better still, boiling it 3 times for a few minutes each time and changing out the water.
I sauteed the boiled mushrooms with some butter and olive oil and a bit of salt.
I proceeded slowly and cautiously to eat my lunch. The texture was okay but would’ve been improved by a dryer sautee. The taste reminded me of pine nuts, subtle and a bit sweet and building with each bite. Not too exciting, but certainly good and worth the trouble if wild mushroom foraging is squarely in your comfort zone.
After eating about a third of the plate I started to feel slightly odd. I figured it was overactive imagination combined with an unbalanced breakfast that consisted mostly of delicious farmers market clementines. But it persisted and intensified, a noticeable mood elevation and body high. I’m a cheap date when it comes to most psychoactive substances, but this seemed implausible given the solid pedigree of this preparation method. I rode it out for another half hour or so, feeling no nausea or discomfort, just a pleasant buzz equivalent to a half glass of wine or sip of cough syrup. Surely it was all in my head. In the interest of science I pressed on and finished my plate.
This light euphoria continued into an afternoon spent mostly on hanging out on the couch.
So I think my experiment was not entirely successful. Either A) I tricked myself into falsely ascribing a stupor induced by clementine overdose to the diluted psychoactive power of Amanita muscaria or B) I failed to completely detoxifying these mushrooms.
After doing more reading, I’m going with B). My mistake was letting much of the water boil off before I added the mushrooms (chalk it up to the situational autism I’m afflicted by whenever there are mushrooms around and a camera in hand) and not doing subsequent boils with changes of water. Likely my boiling did succeed in removing most of the alkaloids, but sauteing converted much of the lingering ibotenic acid into the more bioavailable muscimol and the resulting lunch had just enough residual magic to tickle my sensitive brain. I’ve always been bad at following recipes.
In the further interest of science, I may need to try this again with a more solid boiling protocol. I might also need to try a more active preparation of the mushroom to compare to Sunday’s mild experience. After all, some would consider detoxifying Amanita muscaria a sin of the same magnitude as decaffeinating coffee or skimming of milk. But if I do, any report will most likely appear here rather than this blog.
Tags: amanita muscaria, cooking, edible, food, fungi, mushrooms, poisonous, psychoactive
December 3rd, 2009 at 4:39 am
Nice idea, I’ve always been advocating the idea that these mushrooms can be detoxified and eaten without problems if one knew the right method, but I’ve never got around researching the problem.
If you try the “no-toxic” and “a-bit-more-toxic” versions of this recipe, one interesting thing would be to send of a sample of both dishes to a laboratory for testing what the result actually do (and doesn’t) contain. If such testing can be had for little/no money of course (do you know any chemists by any chance?) =)
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
I find this hilarious and I’m SO glad you shared.
December 4th, 2009 at 3:15 am
Ha! Lately I’ve been seeing muscarias all over the place around here. There is a sizable patch a mere block from our house, growing from the grass near the street, right where no one could possibly miss it. Another patch was growing a few blocks farther, but has since fallen apart. We’ve found other patches here and there all over the place this autumn. Seems much more abundant this autumn than in previous ones.
Also T and I have been making efforts to learn more about mushrooms in general, especially how to ID them. We’re still mostly lost on most mushrooms, but have at least been getting the hang of spore printing. Since aminitas are so common around here we talk about them a lot and research the various types. I’m now more convinced than ever that panther aminitas are by far the most common around here. There’s a huge patch across the street right now. And I think I’ve finally gotten a decent sense about Death Caps and Destroying Angels–which are more dangerous and what they look like. But it has been the muscarias I keep being drawn into learning more about. I’m not about to go try something like you did, but it’s clear that the “poisonous” label is inaccurate. Sure, if one eats a LOT it could be, but the same goes for lots of things not usually called poisonous. Perhaps toxic is a better word. Even then, the psychoactive reports sound… intriguing, except for the feel very sick part. I also love the theories that connect muscarias to Santa Claus, flying reindeer, and “Santa’s helpers”, which clearly are some form of machine elves. Still, all my interest is purely intellectual. So to read your post just now amazed me. You rock!
December 5th, 2009 at 11:07 am
I’m glad this wasn’t your last post :)
December 5th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Richard…why would it have been his last post even if they weren’t detoxified? These mushrooms are not inherently deadly even when eaten raw but that’s also not to say that you’ll be feeling all that peachy either. Did you read the article he referenced just beneath the second set of pics? It outlines the widespread public misconceptions about the toxicity of this particular species of mushroom within the Amanita genus.
December 8th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
When I saw you photo on Flickr I was a little freaked since I don’t know much about mushrooms. Thanks for dropping the knowledge. Very nice.
July 3rd, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Hi Tony,
I am scrolling thru various links online about muscaria eating and came upon yours. Nice job in describing your experiences, and it sounds as though you had a bit tweaky, but mostly positive, outcome. Even if your dish didn’t knock your socks off, culinarily speaking.
But not everyone has your experience, and even your experience was less than ideal. Muscaria can indeed be a dangerously toxic mushroom, but is rarely fatal. Of course, that’s cold comfort for the two young men in Western North America who recently died (from freezing and aspirating vomit) while in muscaria induced comas (as reported to the Rocky Mountain Poison Control Center, the largest in the Nation).
Although muscaria can be rendered mostly non-toxic when properly prepared, I think it also safe to say that many folks have trouble following a recipe, not just you (and me!), a point that I brought up to both Rubel and Arora when this study was first published.
In his paper, Rubel also compared the elaborate detoxification of manoic, a third world staple, to muscaria as a justification for eating the also toxic muscaria. But this is a poor analogy. Nobody NEEDS to eat muscaria to survive. Fresh or dried, dangerously poisonous, cyanide-containing manoic is often the only high quality starch available to millions, mostly across Africa, where it can be grown in poor soil and under drought conditions. But it can have faulty preparation as well, and cause some very serious illnesses.
As to Arora having served muscaria to “hundreds” as a justification for its safety as an edible…well, that’s probably true. But I’d lay wager that almost none of them had a platterful like you did…and the kitchen prep for their muscaria tastings included thin slicing, several boilings, carefully measured waters (thrown out between batches) and a good splash of vinegar at the end. IMO they don’t have the best texture at the end of all that, any more than your dish did.
I was at the first CA foray, back in the 90s, where Arora served about 70 of us boiled muscaria (a few declined), and I participated in about a dozen forays after that, and most folks, with a bit of peer pressure and with the safety assurances of the “god of Mushrooms,” would try a piece or two. But several folks that I have talked to who had attended one of those Arora forays did not wish to repeat the experience of eating parboiled muscaria, and who knows how many others, over the years, also felt the same way?
To further complicate things, every population of muscaria seems to have differing amounts of toxins, and as you demonstrated, individuals have different tolerances to those toxins. And of course that doesn’t even address the whole issue of potential mis-identification of your edible (or not) wild mushroom, so I’m glad that YOU did! :)
Because of some of these inherent dangers, and because there are plenty of other wonderful and truly safe wild mushrooms you can learn how to identify for the table, I do not recommend that folks eat this mushroom, certainly not casually or as though it is a common and well accepted practise. It is not, despite what some may have you believe.
Yours in Education,
Debbie Viess, aka Amanitarita
Bay Area Mycological Society
www.bayareamushrooms.org
ps to learn more about wild mushrooms and to find a mushroom club near you, go to the North American Mycological Association website:
http://www.namyco.org/clubs/index.html