Human SkillsCooking Mushrooms Without Dying
Which mushrooms to cook, how to cook them, and growing your own
6 minBeginnerUpdated
- Know which mushrooms are safe to cook and which never are
- Understand why cooking does not make a poisonous mushroom safe
- Cook simple mushroom meals and grow oyster mushrooms at home
The one rule
Only cook mushrooms that you bought, that you grew yourself, or that a qualified local expert has identified in person, mushroom by mushroom. Never eat a wild mushroom identified from a photo, an app, a book alone, or because it looks like one you know. The death cap and its relatives look ordinary, can taste pleasant, and destroy the liver and kidneys. Symptoms start 6 to 24 hours after the meal, often after the victim feels better for a day. A single death cap can kill an adult.
Cooking does not make them safe
The deadly toxins in death caps, destroying angels and the webcaps are not destroyed by boiling, frying, drying or freezing. There is no test with silver, onions, garlic or animals that tells you a mushroom is safe; every one of those folk tests has killed people. At the same time, even safe edible wild mushrooms such as morels and chanterelles should always be well cooked, because some are toxic or indigestible raw. Eat a small portion the first time you try any species.
Garlic mushrooms in a pan
Brush dirt off with a dry cloth rather than soaking them. Slice them, heat a pan with oil or butter until hot, and add the mushrooms in a single layer. Leave them alone for 3 to 4 minutes until they release their water and start to brown, then stir, add chopped garlic and salt, and cook 2 more minutes. Eat them on bread, with potatoes, or stirred into rice or eggs.
Drying for winter broth
Slice firm mushrooms 5 mm thick and dry them on a rack in gentle warm air or an oven at 50 °C with the door ajar until they snap, 4 to 8 hours. Store them in a sealed jar. A small handful soaked in hot water for 20 minutes gives both the mushrooms and a dark, savoury broth for soups and stews, adding taste to beans and potatoes in the lean months.
Grow your own: oyster mushrooms
The safest wild-tasting mushrooms are the ones you grow. Oyster mushrooms grow on used coffee grounds or chopped straw. Pasteurise straw by soaking it in water at 70 to 80 °C for an hour, drain and cool it, mix it with oyster mushroom spawn bought from a supplier, and pack it into a bag with small holes. Keep it dark and damp at 15 to 25 °C. In 3 to 6 weeks, mushrooms push out of the holes. Pick them when the caps flatten, and you have food you know exactly.
Check yourself
Smell, apps and animals prove nothing. Only a certain identification makes a mushroom food.
Amatoxins survive boiling, frying, drying and freezing. Cooking is never a safety step for an unidentified mushroom.
The delay is what makes it deadly: by the time you feel ill, the liver is already damaged. Get emergency help at once.
Oyster mushrooms eat straw, coffee grounds and wood. With bought spawn you know exactly what you are growing.
Try it for real: Mushrooms you can trust
- Buy a box of mushrooms and cook them in a hot pan with garlic
- Dry a few slices in a low oven and store them in a jar
- Order oyster mushroom spawn and start one bag on straw or coffee grounds
- Write down the one rule and keep it in your foraging kit
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Next lesson: One Pot From Dry Staples →
Written and checked by the Human Skills team against the sources below. How we check our content
- WHO poisoning prevention guidance
- UK National Poisons Information Service
- Portuguese Directorate-General of Health (DGS) mushroom poisoning advice
