Liv Sisson: Aotearoa’s fascinating and freaky fungi

Aotearoa’s fungi are fascinating, freaky and fantastical according to Ōtautahi based forager and food writer Liv Sisson.

We have 22,000 species, including one that hunts bugs, a lichen named after Jacinda Ardern, the famous bright blue mushroom, and a couple that even glow in the dark.

Some are delicious but others can kill you, liquefy your liver or send you to outer space. 

Sisson has just released Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide, a resource to help find, identify and use mushrooms and other fungi found in New Zealand.

At this time of year, as well as field mushrooms, Shaggy ink caps are out around the country easy to identify and find, Sisson told Kim Hill.

“The shaggy ink cap, which also called the shaggy mane, and it's a really eager, tall white mushroom that usually grows in the grass, I see it a lot in the red zone in Christchurch, it's got kind of a hairy cap.

“And if you find them early in the morning, before they've opened, they are really, really nice if you cook them down with butter and garlic and add a little bit of cream and make a risotto out of them, a personal favourite, and they're out at the moment.”

You must catch them early, she says.

“They start decomposing really, really quickly. They have a short ephemeral life, just 24 hours in some cases, and as they decompose, they almost turn to black goo, and you can actually use that as ink.”

Wood ears or hakeke were once a big export from New Zealand to China in the 1880s, she says.

“It’s a jelly-like fungus, it's brown, you can find it on dead wood and it grows up and down the country. And it can rehydrate many, many times.

“So, it can live for quite a while and in the same spot.

“It was quite a large export coming out of the Taranaki area. And at one point, I think surpassed wool exports in that region.

“Chew Chung was an immigrant from China who set up that industry and that export trade to China, where it's frequently used in many dishes.”

The porcini or bolete is identifiable by having pores rather than gills, she says.

“And then the stem, also called the stipe, is usually kind of bulbous and it's got a beautiful lacy texture on it, which is called reticulation.

“It's got a chestnut brown cap and usually found in a growing in association with oak trees or pine trees.”

Slippery Jacks are also in the bolete family and are often abundant, she says,

It’s a good species, I think for drying and powdering. They're not the tastiest on their own, but they can add some umami depth to broths or soups.”

Giant puffballs can be seen in paddocks around the country, she says.

“They are quite fun to forage. You just want to make sure that when you cut it all the way that it's white all the way through.

“If it's brown or green or even yellow, it means the spores have started to form and at that point you don't really want to eat it, it might upset your stomach.”

She’s used them in a variety of dishes, she says.

“I've put them on the barbecue with a miso adobo glaze that was one of my best ever forage dishes. I've made a puffball parmigiana, put them through curries and a laksa on a tramp one time. So yeah, they kind of have a tofu texture.”

Other fungi are less appealing however, she says.

“Slime mould (aka dog vomit) are not fungi, but I included them in the book because they're just so incredibly beautiful.

“They're sort of these single-celled, amoeba-like organisms.”

Despite having no central nervous system, they display intelligence, she says.

“The thing that really got me interested in slime mould is called the Tokyo study, it was done at Hokkaido University.

“The researchers put a slime mould into a maze that resembled the Tokyo subway system. And they put some wheat germ on the other side of the system.

“And they wanted to see how quickly the slime mould could rearrange itself to find that source of food.”

It took just 24 hours to find the most efficient route to the food, she says.

“It lays down a chemical marker as it travels to remind the larger organism that it's already been down that path. And yeah, in just 24 hours that found the most efficient route from A to B. They can solve these quite complex problems.”

Mycelium is an intelligent fungal network, she says.

“Suzanne Simard, who's a forest ecologist in British Columbia, coined that phrase and she's done a lot of work to understand how forests work and how mycelium plays a part in that.

“In her view, mycelium acts very similar to neural networks in our brain, or the internet even, in the sense that they pass information and resources from A to B, and just move information and resources around to where they're needed on the forest floor.”

Mycelium is a white branching substance that can often be seen in woodchip mulch in the garden, she says.

“Around 90 percent of plants, have their roots enmeshed and with these mycelial wisps in the soil, she says.

“The two are passing nutrients and trading nutrients between them.”

Tree roots can't access enough nutrients on their own to stay alive, so they rely on their mycelial partners to access a much wider surface area in the soil, she says.

“The nimble mycelium can get into even the narrowest tiniest pockets of soil space and get the nutrients there.”

The native tawaka fungi is particularly delicious, she says.

“They have this amazing almondy, cookie scent, and they're huge. So, you can really make a meal out of just one. So, once you find a tawaka spot, you're feeling pretty, pretty lucky and just very easy to cook, super delicious.

“They're 20 percent protein by volume.”

Another rather beautiful native is the werewere-kokako which is on the $50 note, she says.

“It's got this incredible, brilliant aqua colour. And it's just absolutely stunning.”