Francisco Martínezcuello - Chilkat Valley News

A culinary treasure: How mushroom foraging enriches a local chef’s creations
by Francisco Martínezcuello - Chilkat Valley News October 11, 2024
 
Travis Kukull receives a lot of messages from friends, family, and randos up and down the Upper Lynn Canal every year around this time.

“People text me pictures of things all the time.” They take pictures of fungi and send them to Kukull’s phone to see if they’re edible. But Kukull is the first to admit he doesn’t know everything and that he’s not a scientist. 

“I’m just a chef, but I am a mushroom nerd,” he said.  

It’s true – Kukull has been a chef for 25 years. Right now, he owns Malo Nista Catering in Haines.  But his fungal fascination reigns supreme and the proof of that can be found by scrolling through his Instagram. 

 

Rachel Kukull harvests a chanterelle on September 29, 2024, in Haines, Alaska. (Courtesy/Travis Kukull)

“I started mushroom foraging up here in my early 20s,” he said. “I was a chef in the Seattle area, so in the Pacific Northwest for quite a while, too.”

At first it started with curiosity. 

“My wife and I [got] into it as a bonding thing we do.” Kukull said they would take books with them on walks and identify things. “[We] wouldn’t even really pick anything, but just identify mushrooms. And then after a while, we just started feeling comfortable.”

Soon the pair would pick mushrooms and eat them. “There’s just a bounty in the forest. If you go for a walk this time of year, and we have a dog, we go out pretty much every day, sometimes for longer periods of time.”  

Kukull said the foraging season is long if you consider when morels start growing, which is around May. “There’s not always a ton of them, so it’s fun to find them.” 

He said that there’s a little break around June but by the end of July, “We start seeing chanterelles and boletes pop up in the forest. Middle of August, [we] started seeing chicken of the woods and birch boletes.” 

And then September and October – think chef’s kiss – there’s an explosion of mushroom diversity in the Chilkat Valley, said Kukull. In the past, he’s harvested hundreds of pounds during these months. “September and October are just banging…I preserve them, put them away… dehydrate them, turn them into powders.”

He said he’ll consume them every single day. “It’s more than you know what to do with.”

Kukull has a catering business, so he’ll use them in recipes and save them for the Beerfest Dinner in May. “I’ll still have a bunch of mushrooms in the freezer that I can use on top of like the focaccia dish that I did last year, or use mushroom powders and the orange genie I did.” 
 

Travis Kukull holds a black chanterelle mushroom on Sept. 30, 2024, in Haines, Alaska. (Courtesy/Travis Kukull)

He’s got a catalog of mushroom dishes, from gnocchi with morels and nettle pesto to a chanterelle duck egg scramble with roasted carrots and beyond. 

Kukull said he doesn’t see many people foraging for mushrooms. “The people in this area that do mushroom forage, they don’t talk about it very much and they don’t encourage other people to go out and do it.” He said that people kind of keep to themselves. 

He said it’s like berry picking, hunting or fishing. “They have their spots, and it’s not as much of a shared knowledge thing.” 

But, there are people working to change this. 

Christin Swearingen works at the Northern Alaska Environmental Center and is a volunteer with Fungal Diversity Survey – a national nonprofit with the goal of describing, documenting, recording every single mushroom in North America. 

Swearingen is a mycologist – someone who studies fungi. “Mycology really lags behind zoology and botany as far as documenting what species there even are in the world.” 
She said that currently there are about 150,000 species of fungi described by science. “[But] from environmental samples, there’s an estimated between two to eight million species out there.” 

She said that there’s a huge gap of knowledge about their ecology, rarity and distribution. That’s where the Fungal Diversity Survey comes in, it’s a community science initiative.

Anyone can participate by using the iNaturalist app. People can take photos of mushrooms, upload them to the app and then it adds the location information and date. Though, Swearingen said there is a function in the app that allows people to “obscure coordinates” so they will not inadvertently give away their prized mushroom patches.

“Through that database, we can map what times of year different species of mushroom fruit and what their range is,” Swearingen said. 

The more people who participate, the more they can learn. It also helps scientists better understand climate change impacts. And, all that amateur mycology can help scientists locate some of the more hard-to-find fungus in the wild. 

Like, the rare ghost funnel or Stereopsis humphreyi. “It’s this really beautiful, delicate little mushroom. It’s all white,” Swearingen said. It looks a little bit like a chanterelle, in that the underside doesn’t have gills. “It’s more wrinkled, but instead of having veins, it’s just smooth, kind of like smooth with some slight folds in it,” she said. 

They know it grows in the Tongass, but the exact boundaries of its range haven’t been mapped. Do ghost funnels grow north of Sitka? Maybe, and they have a better chance of finding it if there are more people out there looking. 

Although Swearingen is based in Fairbanks, she has been to Sitka a few times as well as Juneau so she is familiar with the Southeast ecosystem. 

“In Sitka, there’s a lot of large conifers and a lot of those trees are old growth, [which] creates a really fantastic habitat for rare fungi,” she said.

Most mushroom foragers don’t need a permit or license like other personal use or subsistence activities and even though some are poisonous, Swearingen has some tips. For one: don’t worry about touching poisonous mushrooms. “Even if you touch a deadly, poisonous mushroom, the only way you can get poisoned by it is by eating it.” 

She also warns against eating edible mushrooms that aren’t cooked well. She said some people have had bad reactions to bolete and some other edible mushrooms if they are not cooked thoroughly. 

“I like to cook my mushrooms for maybe 15 minutes, they don’t get destroyed by cooking,” she said. 

That’s because plant cell walls are made of cellulose but Swearingen said fungal cell walls are made of chitin. 

“That’s the same thing that shrimp and crab shells are made of… so you can’t overcook them. They’ll stay nice and chewy, even if you cook them for a very long time,” she said. 
 
Swearingen also recommended a field guide – her choice is an outdated book called Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora. “What I’ll do is I’ll find an identification in [the book] and then look up (the current name) on a website.” She uses a free online resource called mushroomexpert.com. 
 
Back in the Chilkat Valley, Kukull is getting ready to head out on a hike on a late September morning. Things have picked up quite a bit since the valley went through a rainy spell. 

The boletes are finally up and chanterelles are everywhere right now. 

“I can just go around our block down here on Piedad and hike the woods back here and set a bunch of neighbors dogs off because they think there’s a bear in the woods and pick lots of chanterelles,” he said, with a laugh.”I did that yesterday.” 

Kukull encourages people to get out there and get some mushrooms. “So just go for a walk in the woods and get some light exercise. Anybody can do it.” 

With temperatures in the 40s, the Chilkat Valley has good mushroom hunting weather right now. 

“The mushrooms don’t really stop until it freezes,” he said. 

He said if people don’t feel comfortable, just go out and identify the mushrooms. “I think it’s an amazing pastime. Take your kids. It’s my favorite time of year and my favorite thing to do.” 

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with more information about the iNaturalist app and its capacity to obscure locations for mushroom foragers who do not want to give up information about their prized patches.