On his way down from Sonoma County to the Mycological Society of San Francisco’s Fungus Fair, sous chef Mikhael Crystallah-Selk went foraging for honey mushrooms in Golden Gate Park. A parasitic species, honey mushrooms are sprouting all over, he noted, particularly at the base of dying oaks and pines.
“They’re a good beginner edible,” he said from behind a tablescape at the fair, held Sunday at El Camino High School, “because once you get used to it, it’s pretty simple to identify.” He showed off his haul, arranged to demonstrate the species’ full life cycle.
As Crystallah-Selk can attest, mushrooms are having a moment. In Chinatown, cordyceps are selling for $30,000 a pound. Psychedelic mushroom churches are proliferating. Longevity obsessives are downing adaptogens like lion’s mane, reishi, and chaga. Tech CEOs are microdosing psilocybin on workdays and full-blown tripping on weekends, as The New York Times recently reported.
But no one goes as hard as the die-hards at the Fungus Fair, which has lured hundreds of shroom-curious people — from veteran cultivators to the faintly horrified — to venues around the Bay Area every year since 1969.
Gavin Escolar, who attended wearing a mushroom sauna hat he found at a banya in Poland, is obsessed with chaga, which grows on birches and other trees in subarctic regions. Touting its alleged immune-boosting properties, he noted that his brand, the Chaga Company, offers coffees, chocolates, and powders. “It doesn’t have a flavor, so you can literally put it on everything,” he said. Chaga helped him kick a years-long dependency to Tylenol with codeine and lose more than 40 pounds.
Chaga is trending, but nothing compares to the popularity of lion’s mane, the shaggy white mushroom that looks like a sea urchin — or a hirsute cauliflower. “It’s been pretty popular for the last few years,” said Toby Garrone, CFO of Far West Fungi, “now that everybody knows it can boost our brain capacity.”
Educator “Myco” James McConchie of Haight Street Shroom Shop had also gone fungus-hunting on his way to the fair, finding his favorite species of all: Clathrus ruber, the basket stinkhorn. “It’s this amazingly beautiful geodesic dome that comes out, and it’s bright pink,” he said. “It looks like it’s from outer space. And I absolutely adore it, because I find it everywhere in Golden Gate Park’s Fuschia Dell.”
McConchie predicts that the next “it” mushroom will be a species many people already know: the yellow oyster. “It’s going to be a hot topic over the next few years, because we now know it has a huge medicinal value, but it’s also gourmet,” he said, adding that consuming it offers benefits similar to a cold plunge.
The takeaway from the fungus-obsessed is that there are a million ways to enjoy mushrooms — from eating them to hallucinate to adding the powdered form to coffee — but nothing compares to the thrill of the hunt.
To that end, Crystallah-Selk has lately been scouring the coastline for meaty, woodsy porcini mushrooms. The other day, he came upon his aromatic white whale: a matsutake, one of the most highly prized mushrooms native to California. He promptly put it on the menu at Della Fattoria, the restaurant in Petaluma where he works as a chef. “If I find a good enough batch, I run a special,” he said.