Anyone else having a great year for puffball mushrooms?

[HereSince1628]

I'm in south central WI.

We missed a few last week as they came in a little early and weren't watching for them...so we had some beach-ball sized 'shrooms that were good for pictures and nothing else. B ut this week we've collected a couple dozen beauties as they reached size of 12 inch softballs. Today there were dozens more just starting to poke through the leaves.

Too many for us as we slice them into shroom filets then saute freeze them. We really can't spare room in the freezer for more...

We've had years where we didn't get anything. We've never had such a good year as this and it's really given us a chance to be choosy taking pretty much only those in perfect condition

[mopinko]

1. awesome. just getting into the wild shrooms.

have mostly been working on cultivating, with mixed results, but have a friend that is a good forager.
no puffballs, but lots of chanterelles. wish i had known this yesterday, tho, as i was up in madison.

do you ever dry them? i love my dehydrator. had a nice crop of winecaps last year, and they dried great. intensified the flavor.
dry a lot of tomatoes, too.

my mouth is watering.

[HereSince1628]

5. I thought the dehydrating was an interesting idea so I tried it before responding

cutting the puffballs into 1/8 inch thick filets and using the oven on 170 (I know that's high for dehydrating but electric oven's low temp choices are there or at 100F for rising bread) it took about 5 hrs to dry two cookie sheets full of filets.

I think dehydrating is a great idea but I think I may need a rather larger capacity solar powered dehydrator to make the cost work.

[beam me up scottie]

2. I didn't know you could eat them.

That's good to know, I'll have to google some recipes.

Thanks!

[HereSince1628]

3. Puffballs are a pretty good mushroom for beginning collectors...

there's a lot of guidance on that subject on the internet.

Everyone collecting mushrooms needs to be careful. There are bold mushroom hunters and old mushroom hunters, but Darwinian process generally eliminates the old bold mushroom hunters.

[beam me up scottie]

4. Yep.

I've had to curb my s/o's enthusiasm for wanting to bring home questionable fungi because he really has no idea what he's doing.

[mopinko]

6. there are some good fb pages out there these days.

pretty quick id. very knowledgable folks. who know the latin names. ugh.

puffballs are ok as long as they are white/light colored inside. the poison look alike is grey/black spores inside.

there are a few super sought after ones that s/o could focus on. know the look alikes, and be careful. thing like chicken of the woods are pretty definite.
some are tough, tho, koh testing, spore prints, sometimes even microscopes needed.

[fasttense]

7. I grow oyster mushrooms but I'm not confident in my

Identification skills to pick wild mushrooms...yet. I do collect morel mushrooms becuse the poisonous look alike is pretty distinctive. Sounds like you had a great harvest this year.

I find drying mushrooms gives them a different almost spicey flavor. It's like eating a whole new kind of mushroom when they are dried.