Stalking the Wild Mushroom

Jeff Kramer wants me to swear an oath before he takes me hunting for chanterelles.

He makes me promise that I will not reveal exactly where we found the gorgeous yellow mushrooms.

It’s a deal, I assure him.

So I can only tell you that we went into the Santa Monica Mountains. Not very far in, if the truth be known.

And within five minutes we had harvested a dozen enormous chanterelles, the mushroom described by Los Angeles expert Steve Pencall as “most people’s favorite edible mushroom.”

Chanterelles are lovely looking fungi that smell like pumpkins. Indeed, that is one of the ways you can tell they are chanterelles. As Bob Cummings, botany professor at Santa Barbara City College and a major mushroom maven explains, “If they smell like mushrooms, don’t eat them.”

Unlike portobellos and oyster mushrooms, chanterelles can’t be cultivated. They end up on your plate only if someone with expertise is able to find them, hidden away, usually at the base of a coast live oak tree.

Since gourmet food stores sell them for as much as $30 a pound, finding your own chanterelles makes good sense. On the other hand, they are wild mushrooms, and only a fool eats wild mushrooms that have not been vetted by an expert.

In the immortal words of my colleague Wendy Miller, who recently went mushroom hunting in Ventura County, “After all, I wanted a lovely bowl of risotto with chanterelles, not a liver transplant.”

To find chanterelles in my own backyard--give or take 15 miles--I sought out Kramer, an active member of the local Mycological Society (devoted to mushrooms and other, less tasty fungi), who is also a chef. Kramer is a popular lecturer locally on where to find edible mushrooms, and what to do with them after you’ve found them.

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Kramer, who grew up in Woodland Hills, attended the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco after graduating from El Camino Real High School. He has worked at a number of well-known area restaurants, including Santa Monica’s Border Grill. Currently, he is the personal chef of musician Michael Feinstein.

“This is the most incredible year for chanterelles,” says Kramer, 32, who has been finding the much-loved mushrooms in places he never found them before.

The spot where we got lucky had been charred by a wildfire more than five years ago. The unusually rich crop of mushrooms benefited from last year’s heavy rains and a substantial downpour in the fall, Kramer speculates. He often leads mushroom forays, or hunting trips, for the Mycological Society.

Times photographer George Wilhelm joins Kramer and me in the field, and it turns out George has done this before. When he was a boy in Germany, he went mushroom hunting with his parents in the Black Forest.

Kramer explains that we need to examine the “duff,” or accumulation of leaves at the base of the oak trees. There we should look not for mushrooms, per se, but the bumps that indicate the presence of mushrooms under the duff.

Moments later, Kramer is carefully scraping the duff off a bump with his hands, doing his best to avoid the poison oak that is the constant companion of chanterelles. As the big, beautiful mushrooms are exposed, he uses a trowel to dig down and remove them.

George and I couldn’t be more thrilled if he had discovered a wild elephant down there.

“How do you cook them?” I ask.

“I like to cook mushrooms so you can experience the flavor,” says Kramer. He recommends a simple saute in olive oil, with garlic, basil and chopped tomatoes, all presented on a crisp salad, rice or pasta. You can add tangerine juice to the garlic, he advises, and some shredded roast chicken wouldn’t hurt.

I always think of mushrooms as fragile, but Kramer assures me chanterelles are sturdy, fleshy mushrooms that will last for weeks if washed off and stored in a closed container between layers of damp (not wet) cloth.

As to the dangers of eating wild mushrooms, Kramer would never dismiss them. Personally, he has never been poisoned by anything he gathered in the field. On the other hand, he is damned careful about what he takes. Almost every edible mushroom, he points out, has a toxic, even deadly, look-alike.

“If I can’t identify it, I leave it alone or bring it to a meeting or call a friend,” he says.

He recommends that anyone who wants to know more about mushrooms or the Mycological Society call the organization at (323) 292-1900.

Kramer is a relative latecomer to mycological thrills. He started stalking wild mushrooms about five years ago when he was in Northern California, helping a friend open a restaurant.

The northern part of the state is the Holy Land of California mushrooming.

“There’s more rain, more damp and more oaks,” Kramer explains.

As the photographer crouches over the chanterelles, capturing their exotic beauty, Kramer can’t resist wandering off, searching for more oak trees and more bumps. He was once a hunter, he confesses, and the urge to collect is still with him.

Gathering mushrooms is a nonviolent way to satisfy his hunter’s soul.

The chanterelles will soon be gone.

But next month, or the month after, the morels will begin to push up elsewhere in the Southland.

“Last year,” Kramer remembers fondly, “we collected almost 3,000 morels in two months.”