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Along the Natchez Trace

Saturday, May 7, 2016

The Morel of This Story Is.....

Nope, I didn't spell "morel" wrong...   Bill & I were at an Anderson's Store in Columbus yesterday.   An Anderson's store is something like a Walmart only fancier.  When I first found the Anderson's store it was more like an all-purpose store with emphasis on farm supplies.  Birds would be flying overhead in the store going after whatever loose bird or critter feed they could find in the aisles.  They sold everything from chicken feed to chicken brooders....  milking supplies....  horse tack...  that kind of thing.  But even back then the store had a wonderful wine and beer department along with gourmet grocery items I'd never even heard of.  However...  they've come a long way from loose bird seed....

So...  when I saw this item in the produce department, I guess I wasn't too surprised.... 
These Morel Mushrooms were packaged up...  labeled and ready to buy.
Morel mushrooms are kinda the king of the fungi ....  the truffle without the geese finding them...  the cream of the crop.  They are the prize of every mushroom hunter.  No one who ever finds a patch of morels will ever tell where they find them.  Everyone has their ideas of the ideal breeding grounds for morels and they'll take those secrets to the grave.

Look close at that package...  WoooHooo....  costs $28.20 for...  
less than half a pound!
Yes...  they really do cost $59.99 a pound!!!!!

If you've never seen a morel...
This is what they look like.
And these aren't even really clean (look at the stem)....  so you're paying for a little dirt here as well.
I looked the packages over...  some of them looked kind of old and dried up.  
Being a morel person myself, I know a good morel when I see it.  Yes, they can be dried and reconstituted later, but it's the fresh, plump, right from the woods to the skillet taste that is best.

I suppose you can buy the spores, insert those in the proper kind of woodsy stuff and grow your own.  You can do this with other kinds of mushrooms, so why not?  But it's a process that takes a year or so, so if these were "commercially" grown, it took some time.

They had about a half dozen packages...  I wonder how many will sell?

No, I didn't buy any.  I do think mushroom season is over down here in my neck of the woods, and it wasn't a very good year here for them anyway.  It was at least 25 years ago that I had my big year... found them by the basketsful!  Huge...  as big as a large hyacinth...  dense...  moist....  tasty!  And we had so many I sold them to a restaurant in town every day.  But not at $59.99 a pound...  more like $10.00 a basketful.

And the moral to my morel story...
Heck, do I really have to have one?

That's All For Today!

15 comments:

  1. Wish we could find a basket full of morels--a BIG basket! I bought Michael some morels at Pike Place Market in Seattle, hauled them home in my luggage, paid a ridiculous price for them, when I went to cook the mushrooms, they were full of WORMS!!! That was a lesson learned!

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  2. The best place we've found to buy morels was Berkeley Bowl in California. We had a recipe for Lake Superior whitefish and morels. It was wonderful, but what are the odds of finding both of these rare ingredients at the same time? I think we used some other kind of white fish.

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  3. That was fun. By the way - I truly love your new photo for the blog. It makes me happy just to look at it.

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  4. I'm sure our Waitrose will sell those when it ascends. It's known for upmarket. Interesting post. I didn't know they were up there with truffles.

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  5. Yikes! Those are spendy... We saw exactly two morels in the two summers we were at Farragut SP in northern Idaho. The locals knew where and when to go and they didn't last long in the wild!

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  6. Oh you sure did bring back memories of the first part of my life living in Pennsylvania. Always kept an eye open when in the woods to try and find morel mushrooms and any other eatable kind. I got a book from the University of Michigan on eatable mushrooms and spent many a happy hour hunting them in the woods up there in PA.

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  7. I have only found four morels in my whole life, and by golly I'll never forget how they tasted!

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  8. We went morel hunting on our place last year. The ones we found weren't very tasty. The locals told us to soak them in salt to clean them and pat them dry, dredge in flour and fry.

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  9. Wow that is amazing as good as they may be not in our budget.
    Keep searching and enjoy your finds.

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  10. Oregon everybody likes to go after chantrelles but there are morels here too. I guess at that price you could get rich if you knew some good grounds. You have to have permits here, and some hunters totally tear up the forest looking for truffles and other high end fungi.

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  11. Ne3ver had a morel, but now you've gotten my taste buds fired up. I might have to part with some serious money to satisfy my curiosity... :cD

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  12. For that price, they better taste like caviar ;)

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