Winter Oyster Mushrooms: A Forageable Succulent Treat – Gardenista

It is not just the briny bivalves that taste good in months with an r in them. Viewed where they are stored in the Cloud, my photographs of winter oyster mushrooms foraged from a log frosted with ice nestle beside images of neat packages of fresh taro leaf, steaming in our kitchen that night for dinner. The pictures were taken just hours apart on the same freezing day last January. The oyster mushrooms, I discovered as I traveled a couple of miles on foot across Prospect Park in Brooklyn en route to Labay Market, a Grenadian grocery that sells taro leaves, fresh roselle, and other West Indian produce (I visit for a midwinter, culinary staycation, a fix of sunshine, minus the airfare). The happenstance mushrooms, spotted well off the beaten path, were a surprise.

Winter oyster mushrooms are a prized find. Here’s why.

Photography by Marie Viljoen.

I only saw the mushrooms that day because the usual, obscuring thicket of summer mugwort hiding the large log, mid-slope, had been stripped of leaves by the cold. The narrow stalks now stood brittle and bare. Winter grants a more penetrating, longer view. The oysters were perfect, arranged in tan layers, their caps’ texture disconcertingly alive and pliable in a frozen landscape.

Mature winter oyster mushrooms yield more than enough for a meal, with plenty left over for the basic stuffing that I cook, then freeze to deploy later in everything from picnic-favorite mushroom rolls to a heat-singing vegan mapo tofu.

Years before, on a frigid walk on Staten Island, a dead tree standing in shallow water at the edge of a pond bristled impossibly with golden oysters. Luckily, I was wearing tall rubber boots, and could reach them. I learned then that oysters mushrooms can fruit year-round.

Cold-weather oysters are choice, for two reasons. The first is all about texture: Winter oysters are dense, whereas the fast-growing mushrooms of a humid summer are flaccid. Second, oysters that appear in winter are delightfully bug-free, while in summer or early fall they come with guests: tiny larvae hatched from eggs deposited by small, black beetles. These are easily evicted by submerging the caps in a salt water bath, but I prefer to avoid them and to wait for winter’s gift.

Oyster mushrooms, which belong to the Pleurotus genus, recur on the same dead logs, and sometimes living trees (which they kill, slowly), year in, year out, often at the same time of year. Discovering them is about luck and timing—re-visiting a spot where they have appeared before.