Around ANZAC DAY in Victoria I go foraging . This is my latest harvest of saffron coloured, pine mushrooms (Lactarius deliciosus), also called saffron milk caps and red pine mushrooms.
There are 3k of mushrooms in this bag above.
We have eaten some twice already.
Above = with taglatelle.
Below = as a vegetable side dish with Italian pork sausages.
And these jars are in my freezer.
These mushrooms bruise very easily so I cook them as soon as possible after I have collected them.
Unfortunately the mushrooms’ gills when bruised discolour to a very unattractive green-grey tinge. I ignore most of the bruising and cut off the worst bits of the discoloured mushrooms that show too much wear and tear or obvious decay.
Most of the time the saffron coloured, pine mushrooms I collect cannot just be wiped clean with a damp cloth and I often have to clean them under softly running water to remove any sand, soil , grass or pine needles. I always completely remove the woody hollow stems because I have often found some bugs harbouring inside the stems. Having said all of this I make them sound as if they are not worth the effort but they are!
How do I cook them? …..very simply. I have written about wild mushrooms before.
See:
WILD MUSHROOMS ; Saffron Coloured, Pine Mushrooms and Slippery Jacks
PASTA WITH MUSHROOMS Pasta ai funghi
Simple recipes for cooking any mushrooms:
FUNGHI AL FUNGHETTO (Braised mushrooms)
FRICASSE DE SETAS CON ANCHOAS (Spanish, Wild Mushroom and Anchovy Fricassee)
May I ask you where are likely to find pine mushrooms in the wild in Australia? I enjoy your site very much 🙂
It all depends where you live. In Victoria I find many in the Mornington Peninsula.
I find using a large cardboard box and not stacking them more than 2 rows high keeps them from bruising. They are so good fried with butter, garlic, pepper & sea salt! I’m in the NW if Vic and you can find them over this way in the pine plantations of Daylesford, Macedon, Spargo etc:-)
Thanks Lee. I know plenty of places where to collect the slippery jacks and the saffron pine mushrooms. I hav never peeled the slippery, what a lot of work!
My favourite way of processing slippery jacks has been to wipe them clean. When i lived in Adelaide I had a powerful fan heater and i used to wipe the mushrooms clean, slice them and dry them..
These baby slippery jacks I wrote about were particularly grubby because they were very small and very close, if not buried, in the cut grass and pine needles that they were growing in.