At Gourmet Mushrooms Inc. we love mushrooms. We work year-round to produce the finest exotic mushrooms on the market in the US (personal bias of course). When the season is just right, the nights are cool, and a rainstorm has just blown through, you might find us out in nature, searching the forest floor for wild mushrooms. However, when we aren’t growing, researching, or hunting mushrooms, we might even be reading about them.      

 If you share this same mycophilia, the fungi fever, the fungal itch (too far?), then I recommend picking up a copy of “The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America” by Langdon Cook. Langdon spent years in the field, harvesting mushrooms with some of the best in the business. A native of Seattle, he travels up and down the coast from Northern California up to British Columbia, and even out to Montana, Michigan, and New York, on the hunt for the ephemeral fruitings of nature’s most prized wild mushrooms. Along the way, the reader gets to know the characters that ply this trade, the locations, and business aspects. It’s a tale as gritty and earthy as the mushrooms he hunts, yet true to the experience of hunting mushrooms, the book is punctuated with sensual explorations of the tastes, textures, aromas, and fine cuisine of wild fungal consumption.

Overall, I found the book to ring of authenticity and as a mycophiliac, it read like a romantic excursion through the Tuscan countryside. Of course, it helps if you have a case of fungalaria. So give it a chance, let it spur your desire for fresh morels, matsutake, hedgehogs, truffles, porcini, and chanterelles, and get ready for Spring!