Harvesting - cut or pluck?
By Daniel Butler, author and forager
The question of how to harvest wild mushrooms is a surprisingly heated subject of debate among foragers. In one corner are those who believe passionately in using a knife to harvest the haul, slicing carefully through the stalk. Opposed to them are people who feel it is much better to twist the prize carefully from the soil.
Should one always use a knife when harvesting mushrooms?
(Photo: author’s own)
There is often a cultural basis for the love of knives when mushrooming. Suggest to a German or Austrian that one can simply pull up a mushroom and they are horrified. This is because in many parts of Central Europe they are a legal requirement. The theory is that a simple cut across the base of the stalk encourages the mycelium to regenerate from the stump.
This cepe was twisted from the forest floor
(Photo: Ric Graham)
Elsewhere, for example in much of Italy, people prefer to gently pull the fruiting bodies from the substrate, preferably with a twisting action. This was Antonio Carluccio’s preferred method. Again, the reasoning is this causes less harm to the mycelium.
So who is correct? They can’t both be right.
The simple answer is they are both wrong.
In my last blog I talked about the impact of harvesting on future cropping and cited a Swiss study. The same paper also looked at picking versus cutting. It’s abstract states:
Long-term and systematic harvesting reduces neither the future yields of fruit bodies nor the species richness of wild forest fungi, irrespective of whether the harvesting technique was picking or cutting.
Mushrooms have been around far, far, longer than knives
(Photo: author’s own)
These findings surprise many people, but they shouldn’t. Mushrooms have been around for at least a billion years, while knives were invented yesterday in comparison. Also, if one technique was superior to the other, after centuries of collection you would expect to see a very visible link to local yields in, say Germany versus Italy.
More importantly, however, human harvesting represents only a tiny percentage of fungal consumption. No boar, deer, squirrel or slug has ever used a knife – nor taken care when removing a mushroom from the forest floor. Despite this, both mushrooms and animals clearly happily coexist.
Chicken of the woods requires a knife
(Photo: author’s own)
The species of mushroom is also highly relevant. A knife is effectively essential when collecting chicken of the woods, for example, but is pointless with chanterelles – the latter just pull out of the ground before the stalk is cut through.
I once asked a mycological professor for his preferred harvesting option: ‘When I am gathering for scientific purposes I tend to twist because I actually want a bit of the mycelium,’ he said. ‘But if it’s for the kitchen I use a knife – that minimises the amount of soil and leaf mould and reduces the time spent cleaning them at home.’ There is a good YouTube video on this subject presented by a range of top mycologists and, broadly, they confirm that in most cases the use of a knife makes no difference to the fungi.