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Nature's
Bounty Hunters BY ROGER J. PORTER If you run a seafood restaurant, the ingredients for dinner are as close as your neighborhood fishmonger. But if you're the chef at the finest mushroom restaurant in America, you must take to the woods armed with cunning, stealth, a sound mycological memory and an eye that pierces through the densest forest cover. Taking along a physician who knows his anti-toxins isn't a bad idea, either. But when you're a seasoned pro like Jack Czarnecki--with 40 years of mushroom hunting, mushroom identifying, mushroom chefing, mushroom-recipe inventing and mushroom-cookbook writing behind you--the doctor will defer to your judgment. Two weeks ago, after the first rains had kissed the slopes of Mount Hood just enough to nudge the blooms of chanterelles through the forest soil, Czarnecki and some friends lit out for the woods on a dawn raid, equipped with wicker baskets, knives and a determination not to return empty-handed. They included the editor of Mushrumors (the newsletter of the Oregon Mycological Society) and his son; the winemaker from Christom; the pastry chef from Czarnecki's glorious Joel Palmer House restaurant in Dayton; the doctor, an old friend of Czarnecki's from his Andover Academy days; and myself, a rank amateur on my first mushroom expedition. Just in case the fungal gods proved unkind, we had in tow a little picnic lunch Czarnecki had whipped up the night before: mushroom and duck pâté, assorted cheeses, porcini and bolete tarts, fresh tomato and tarragon soup, cold salmon with a fiery Argentine sauce, roasted vegetables with venison sausage, ziti with matsutakes, a raspberry cobbler and a dozen bottles of Oregon reserve pinot noir. If we got lucky, we'd flesh out this feast with the day's catch, for the reward of dedicated stalking was a retreat to the physician's cabin deep in the Mount Hood National Forest, where Czarnecki would concoct a supplement from the fresh booty. A restaurateur needs suppliers, of course, so Czarnecki has reliable men who prowl the slopes of the Cascades and the Coast Range, and he's been known to buy mushrooms from further afield. But during the growing season he's out daily, partly for the restaurant but largely for the sheer joy of discovery. A new arrival to Oregon, he is learning where the treasure troves lie. He and his wife, Heidi, moved to the Yamhill wine country from Pennsylvania, where his father and grandfather taught him to hunt wild mushrooms for home and for their restaurant in Reading. Now Czarnecki is in mycelial heaven; the Big Bolete in the sky is right here in Oregon earth. Like serious birders, mushroom hunters keep lifetime lists, and Czarnecki has spotted over 200 varieties in his career. But so abundant are the local yields that he's stepped on valued matsutakes he would have killed for back East. On our way to the forest, the talk is of shiitakes, pleurottes, morels, blewits and porcini. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Morels rests on the dashboard, a conversational compass. Spending a day with Czarnecki is like getting a Latin lesson--that is, when you're not getting a cooking lesson (on how to make syrup out of an anise-flavored mushroom, for instance). He and his friends reminisce about great mushroom dishes, though Czarnecki, who has published three cookbooks, including the James Beard Award-winning A Cook's Book of Mushrooms, has us all beat. He's the man who has made fried oyster mushrooms pressed with walnuts and chipotle, soft-shell crabs with chanterelles, enoki salad with cèpe oil and one of the great dishes at his restaurant, sautéd morels in kataifi nests. But still he plans. What mushrooms might go with the black bear he's contemplating for next season's menu? (This is the chef who once served lion in Pennsylvania.) As we approach the semi-secret logging road, Czarnecki assesses the dryness of the forest, his nostrils dilating, all systems on alert, like a pointer with his prey. The nice thing about mushroom hunting is that you needn't be quiet; "talking," not "stalking," is what our little group does, spreading out but encouraging one another, crying out "Bingo!" on sighting a mother lode. Within two minutes we discover a family of white chanterelles, hundreds of them poking up under the duff, or mounds of pine needles. "Chanterelles are gregarious," says Czarnecki. "You find one, you find others, unlike with the solitary mushrooms." After frenzied digging and picking, we have reached the edges of the mycelium, the thread-like network of filaments that produce the fruiting body of a fleshy fungus. When we tease the mushroom from the soil, we carefully slice a piece from the stem and bury it for regeneration; mushrooming teaches you sound ecology. We empty our baskets into bins, careful not to break off the fragile edges of the fruit. Now our lust for picking is aroused, so we drive to a new spot to look for other types. The veterans in our party remember the very slope that yielded treasures last season ("our patch"), and several even recall a particular tree with a bountiful crop of oyster mushrooms at its base. We find the tree but this time come up empty. Nearby, however, someone spots a suillus bolete, a large reddish-brown mushroom that demands delayed gratification since it must be dried, proving too mushy when cooked. As we walk down the road, looking for the wetter ground that signals a mushroomy presence, one of our party, as if sensitive to a mycological poltergeist, said he felt a moist curtain of air passing across the road, and Bingo!--we hit on another patch of chanterelles to complete our haul. Czarnecki has an almost sensual feel for mushrooms, cradling them with care and passion. Above all, he knows some things can't be rushed, that mushroom years are like vintage years for wine and that conditions must be right to coax the spores from their summer sleep into full-fledged mushrooms. He tries to help things along, imagining "the Angel Stomp," a kind of mental rain dance sending vibrations along the ground. If some people move to Oregon despite the rain, Czarnecki came here in part because of it; for him rain is "mushroom sun." "When I pick in the rain," he says, "I feel as if I'm catching mushrooms in the process of being born." Lunch beckons, but we linger for some last-minute hunting. After all, Czarnecki has restaurant customers to satisfy. As Robert Frost might have said, "But I have promises to keep/And mouths to feed before I sleep."
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