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Russian Information Guide |Rus-a| Life Style| Customs and Traditions | Mushroom Picking
Mushroom picking
For most of Russians mushrooms are not something you can easily buy in a shop or at food market. Since ancient time we were always fond of hunting. For us mushroom picking - mushroom hunting. Mushrooms inhabit our forests, it is difficult to find them and to much more difficult to understand whether you can eat them or they are poisoned.
Anyway picking mushrooms is our good and old tradition. Mushrooms will always help us during cold winter seasons, we know hundreds recipes how to cook them, dry and salt. In Russian forests lives many noble types of mushrooms such as white mushrooms or сchanterelles.
The best period to gather mushrooms is August and September, the best time - early morning. The far from the capital and other big cities you go the more mushrooms you can find. Some mushrooms grow in families and some mushrooms grow under some special sort of trees - aspens, birch etc. Anyway in our mushroom tradition is one strict rule. We hunt mushrooms with knives, we cut them carefully in order not do damage mycelium to let them grow again from this mycelium next year. We take care of our next year food.
If we are not sure whether we can eat or not some kind of mushrooms we do not pick them up. It is our second important rule. Because in our country there 20% of heavily toxic mushrooms, potentially causing death.
Picking mushrooms we also stay away from roads and industrial zones, where mushrooms may absorb dangerous chemicals. When we get home with mushrooms we clean them, through away some of them if we are not sure that they are edible.
We strongly recommend all foreigners living and working in Russia to take someone who has extensive knowledge of mushrooms with you if you want to go for mushroom hunting as it is not easy to spot the right ones. We also strongly recommend not picking up mushrooms if you are not sure in identifying the species.