Oral History Feature | Alek Schober

Alek Schober is the executive chef at Reid's Catering and an avid mushroom forager. Alek forages mushrooms for his restaurant and for himself. He told us it started out as a family affair:

"My dad was gifted a mushroom identification book when I was little, and he really got into it, and as a result I followed in those footsteps and took it a little bit further. So I’ve been picking mushrooms now for 15 to 20 years.

You can pick a few mushrooms for yourself and it’s way easier, but to hike 10 miles into the woods with your water, and everything that you need, and to hike back out with potentially another 10 or 20 pounds of mushrooms, in July it’s super-hot, you know, you get tired easily, there’s bugs everywhere, you see a lot of snakes, you get poked in the eye with sticks a lot, it’s harder than you expect. It’s also very, very rewarding. When you have a big pile of mushrooms that were collected from the same spot for eight years in a row now, it’s kind of like having money in the bank, you know they’re going to come back next year in the same spot because they were picked correctly, it’s a really good feeling."

Try Alek's food @reidscatering reidscatering.com

Read Alek's full interview here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/64eWv9eATscTsuu8tz2Jrn?si=8lJbTs9sQYCdB2yGYdhlZw

Photo by Ashely Warren @naturalcraftphoto
Photo title: Smells Like Apricots