In fall, after I transfer my potted citrus bushes indoors till spring, I do know that it’s time to begin hurting blewits. These fairly edible autumn mushrooms pop up in lawns and in woodlands after a serendipitous mixture of a chilly snap and rain. Blewits feed on fallen tree leaves and evergreen needles (they like wooden chips, too), and the mushrooms seem in the identical spot yearly, typically in fairy-like rings, or clustered carefully. Within the Northeast, they fruit in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Mildly flavored and substantial, their juicy nature makes blewits a succulent substitute for canned mushroom soup (sorry, Campbell’s), in that icon of the Thanksgiving desk: the inexperienced bean casserole.

Right here’s a information to figuring out blewits, and a recipe prepared for the season.

Pictures by Marie Viljoen.

The title “blewit” typically refers to 2* species of mushroom. One is the so-called wooden blewit, labeled as Lepista nuda and typically as Clitocybe nuda (the names are synonyms). The opposite, the sector blewit, Lepista personata (additionally known as Lepista saeva), is related extra with Europe. Regardless of two frequent names that appear to decree the place your blewits should develop, the so-called wooden blewits I discover develop in broad lawns (close to leaf-dropping bushes) that look so much like fields, to me.

For mushroom-hunting cooks wanting dinner, the precision of names is much less vital than understanding what a blewit appears like, and being certain that its spore print is white, or very pale. That’s a vital inform, when distinguishing blewits from a doubtlessly poisonous lookalike.

* Because the science of mycology evolves, extra blewit species could also be parsed.

Blewits are chameleons. When they’re younger the colour of their cap, stem, and gills can embrace swoon-worthily deep or ethereally delicate shades of amethyst and lavender. However these vivid colours could fade to pale buff and cream, typically pale tan.

Observing that coloration transformation is vital to studying easy methods to determine blewits, a view endorsed by MushroomExpert’s Michael Kuo.

Important to figuring out blewits is the colour of their spore print. A blewit’s spore print is white or very pale. By no means brown.

To make a spore print at residence, slice the mushroom’s stem from the cap. Lay the cap gill-side down on paper (a recycled purchasing bag is ideal), foil, or cardboard. Cowl the mushroom with an upturned bowl, or a material when you’ve got heaps, to guard the dust-like spore from drafts. Go away in a single day. Until the mushroom is historical  and has already shed its spores within the area, within the morning its spores will likely be superbly organized within the form of the gills.