Alek Schober - Mushrooms

Last year, the owner of Reid’s Cafe, Tina Houston, sent me down to a mushroom class in South Carolina to get certified on picking and using mushrooms in the restaurant. Eliminating any risk, really is what it was all about. It’s one thing if you slightly poison yourself when eating a mushroom…which I have done, (laughs) but when you have the opportunity to poison a full restaurant of people, you know, it becomes way more dangerous and way more real. So this class really focused on identification, and they set up a list of about fifteen to twenty species that we’re actually legally allowed to pick and sell, and those species are basically sure things if you know what you’re looking for. A lot of mushrooms have a relationship with trees, so you’re actually looking for the much larger tree that has a symbiotic relationship with the fungus, and that makes it kind of easier to locate the actual mushroom fruit.