Morel Mushrooms

If you have eaten morel mushrooms at a fine restaurant anywhere in the United States, you most likely ate "burn" morels taken from the mountainous West.   They were probably harvested by a commercial picker amid the charred and utterly blackened remnants of what was once a dense forest.

Burn morels, according Jennifer Frazer, writing for Scientific American, and citing studies following the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park, are specific in their habits.  First, they appear in almost ridiculously huge numbers during the spring and summer of the first year immediately following a forest fire.  More interestingly, the study revealed that morels did not appear in plots where only 50% of the ground surface burned.  Morels only appeared in study plots where the earth was burned between 50% and 99%. 

Morels actually prefer to grow where full-on scorchers have blown down trees and swept bare the slopes, where fire bakes the earth and fizzles through the roots underground for days after.

Funny thing: morels are delicious.  They have a taste other than of dirt (as I perceive most mushrooms).  I find them to have a flavor not for removed from that of steak.

Morels are one of precisely two types of mushrooms I like.  I really like them.  I also like shaggy manes.

Sadly, my stomach does not appreciate morel mushrooms nearly as much as my taste buds.  The last two times I ate them, I found myself violently ill within an hour.  Over the years, I have been sickened by other mushroom types palatable to others. 

Yesterday, on a high mountain drive north of Helena, that girl and I came upon the remnants of a great forest converted to scorched earth and black sticks by a forest fire last year.  On a whim, we scampered lightly into the after-rain black trying not assume the same color.

Amid the broken and blackened trees and charred earth, we found a half dozen fist-sized morels.  We harvested them.  This evening I may try a very small taste.  They really are that delicious.

--Mitchell Hegman