The mushroom hunter
Someone occasionally asks, “How do you find stories for the back page?”
Most ideas are passed along by emails, calls or letters, but this one passed me on the street one afternoon.
As soon as I saw the specialty license plate, “MORELS,” on the silver Nissan 4-wheel drive pickup, I figured the driver must be a story.
A few minutes later, I shook hands with Wayne Yochum of Oldham County, a longtime employee of Buffalo Trace Distillery, who since 2010 has been hunting wild morel mushrooms every spring across much of Kentucky.
Webster’s defines a morel as “any of several pitted edible fungi,” but many who’ve sampled morels as table fare might add the word “delicious.” Morels are sometimes called “dry land fish,” but to Yochum they have a nutty, earthy flavor.
Their oblong, tapered caps are honeycombed with ridges that turn inward and vary from blond to brown to gray, and even black in some species. Their caps and pale, creamy stems are hollow. There is a false morel that is dangerously toxic and should be avoided. Its stems and caps are not hollow. So learn what to look for, and remember the mushroom hunters’ motto: “If in doubt, throw it out.
Usually about the time redbuds bloom each spring, morels may be found in some Kentucky woodlands from early April to late May. Mushroom hunters are so secretive about morels’ locations that a reporter friend from eastern Kentucky said he was once blindfolded before being taken to a site where morels had been found. Even veteran mushroom hunters haven’t figured out why morels grow in one place and not another.
“It’s a mystery,” says Yochum. “In our state you can go to a place and find a hundred under three or four trees in a certain area. And you can go for another 200 acres in the same environment with the same trees and find nothing.”
Before most ash and elm trees were destroyed by disease, morels were often found under those species. Now Yochum finds most of his morels under sycamores and tulip poplars, and has had some success under several varieties of maples. Other morel hunters claim to have luck finding them in apple orchards. Microscopic spores that are dispersed from the fruit are essential to the morel’s reproduction. But scientists are still trying to unlock many of the fungi’s secrets of reproduction, and Yochum says he personally knows of no one who has been able to successfully cultivate morels.
He advises cutting them with a sharp knife as near the ground as possible—and protecting the roots by not pulling them.
After gently cleaning them with water, he slices them lengthwise, covers them with flour (some prefer cornmeal) and fries them in bacon grease or butter.
Other information about hunting, harvesting and cooking morels will be available at the Mountain Mushroom Festival in the Estill County seat of Irvine on April 27–28. For more information, visit mountainmushroomfest.org.
