Savoring the City
Ryan Bouchard and Emily Schmidt with a haul of earthy black trumpet mushrooms. The couple launched the nonprofit Mushroom Hunting Foundation in 2016.
https://www.newportthisweek.com/articles/savoring-the-city-2/
Inspired by a shared love of hiking and nature, Ryan Bouchard and Emily Schmidt decided on a whim in 2009 to take a mushroom hunting class at the Rhode Island Audubon Society.
“We just loved learning about them,” said Bouchard in a recent interview with Newport This Week.
“Someone found a big chunk of Hen of the Woods,” he recalls of his first experience with a freshly foraged wild mushroom. “We took a piece of it home and found it fascinating to study the amazing colors, scent and texture. The taste was just shockingly different from the familiar supermarket mushrooms.”
In 2016, after extensive research and a deep dive into mycology, the pair founded the Mushroom Hunting Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to educating people on safely hunting for wild mushrooms. Rather than approaching the subject through a university lens, Bouchard and Schmidt took what they considered a more practical route, studying the topic via books and lectures presented by some of the leading experts in the field, and with immersive, hands-on classes and foraging expeditions.
“If we had studied mycology at a university, we’d have spent a lot of time looking into microscopes,” Bouchard said. “We shied away from that approach because that area of the science led away from the path we had chosen, which was to teach people that [foraging] was easy, safe and doable with just a knife, a brush and a paper bag.”
Among their mentors was Gary Lincoff, who The New York Times described in his obituary in 2018 as “the Pied Piper of mushrooms.”
“Gary was a major influence on us,” said Bouchard. “He wrote ‘The Audubon Field Guide to Mushrooms’ and was an amazing teacher. We had the opportunity to go hunting with him, [attend] his lectures, view his slide presentations … We learned from the best.”
Bouchard is the author of “Gourmet Mushrooms of Rhode Island,” the first book about mushroom hunting in the Ocean State. Released in 2019, the calendar style tome is a great resource of monthly information on varying species, marked by stunning photography and information.
Schmidt studies the health and nutritional values of local mushrooms, the multitude of ways they can be cooked, their uses in different cultures, and even the modern technological uses of fungi, which include decontaminating polluted soil.
Bouchard said that in Rhode Island and the surrounding region, there are thousands of species, including hundreds that are edible. In their years of mushroom study, the couple have consumed around 250 varieties, approximately 20 at area restaurants, while the rest were wild, discovered and identified on their own hunts.
The Mushroom Hunting Foundation offers private and public classes, cooking workshops and even children’s classes from spring through fall.
“It only takes a couple of hours to get a handle on the identification of a mushroom. The category doesn’t get sorted into edible or not edible,” he said.
Instead, beginning foragers learn to ID species, one at a time, recognize their characteristics, and then recognize dangerous lookalikes.
Year-round, the foundation provides free identification services to anyone unsure of a species they may have discovered.
The Mushroom Hunting Foundation recently concluded its season with a two-part class at the Norman Bird Sanctuary. Though foraging season has all but ended, mushrooms continue to play a critical supporting role in cold weather dishes like stews and soups, and if you’ve never tried mushroom Bolognese, you cannot imagine how meaty these morsels can be.
Fall picks include Hen of the Woods, black trumpet, lion’s mane and hedgehogs, according to Bouchard, and it’s a good bet that home cooks can source some of these and several other types of mushrooms courtesy of the RI Mushroom Company.
Founded in 2013 in a closet at Middletown’s Sweet Berry Farm by former New York City music executive Michael Hallock and his business partner, Robert DiPietro, the company is dedicated to providing the highest-quality mushrooms to retail stores, wholesale markets, chefs and home cooks. In just eight years, it has expanded to become the second largest exotic mushroom company in the U.S. But in a nod to the company’s roots, its harvests can also be purchased year-round at the Aquidneck Community Table’s weekly farmers markets.
“We have a lot of love for that market,” Hallock said.
Among the varieties sold up and down the east coast are blue and golden oysters, shitake, maitake, lion’s mane, trumpet, portabella, white and others, depending on supply.
“Right now, we’re at point where we’re sold out every day,” said Hallock. “The supply is tight nationally because there’s not enough production.”
He points to a labor shortage brought on by the pandemic. There are simply insufficient “pickers,” he said, and this is just one added factor that contributes to the already high price of the product.
“It’s expensive to grow mushrooms,” he said. “It costs a lot to maintain the indoor facilities, and there are many other pieces to it. But mostly, it’s time.”
For example, he notes that it takes 83 days of intensive indoor agriculture to grow a maitake mushroom.
Though a good portion of the company’s products are grown throughout the mid-Atlantic states, south to Florida, and as far north as Maine, the company cultivates its local mushrooms at a grow house facility in West Kingston, and Hallock said it’s this crop alone that can legally be sold at the local farmers markets.
“We’re strict about that and only sell what we grow here,” he said.
At any given market, that translates to anywhere from three to 15 varieties at a time. RI Mushroom Company products are also sold on the island at the newly opened FoodLove Market, and area-wide at Dave’s Fresh Marketplace stores, Belmont and Whole Foods.
https://mushroomhunting.org/index.php/classes/