Wood Ear Mushrooms: A Delicate Treat – Gardenista

Wood ear mushrooms are one of the delights of a cold-weather walk, whether it’s a damp day in early spring or when the temperature is kind enough to hover above freezing in deep winter. Their dark caps, tender as velvet and disconcertingly alive between the fingers, cling to logs and sometimes to injured, living trees, upon which they feed. It is easy to dislodge them with a gentle tug. They are pliable after rain or under snow-melt, but shrivel up in the absence moisture, turning as rigid and brittle as old sea shells. As soon as any fresh precipitation occurs, they plump right back up again, resilient and—to the people who know and love them—irresistible.

Photography by Marie Viljoen.

In the United States wood ears are sold almost exclusively at Asian markets. They are one of the oldest mushrooms in cultivation, grown for centuries in China, where they are held in esteem as a functional food. The mushrooms of commerce are sold dry, sometimes labeled as black fungus or cloud fungus. Rehydrated, they behave exactly as they do on their favorite log after rain, becoming floppily tender. But they are at their most opulent softness when fresh, which is why my eyes light up when I see a log frilled with the brown and black caps that are sometimes frosted with a fine layer of fuzz on their upper surface.

Wood ears belong to the species complex Auricularia. For the average mushroom hunter, narrowing down a wood ear find to a particular species is difficult, and I don’t try. They belong to a group of mushrooms known collectively as jelly fungi, whose unifying quality is…? Yes! Their gelatinous nature. Wood ears are wobbly.

Despite their association in standard mushroom literature with elderberry shrubs (Sambucus species) I have only once seen wood ears growing on dead elder wood. Mostly, they are on logs, large and small, whose identity has been stripped along with their bark. In Brooklyn they also appear on living street trees—more than one London plane in my neighborhood has a seam of wood ears growing up its trunk, fissured by trauma or disease.

Unlike most other mushrooms, which tend to be associated with a particular season, wild wood ears can be found year-round, as long as conditions are humid enough: floppy and huge when mature, or pertly cupped when very young.

Somehow the wood ear flush of the cool months are the most choice. Perhaps because they seem so alive when everything else is resolutely hibernating or dead.

When I first began gathering wood ears I turned to traditional East Asian recipes for guidance, adding the mushrooms to Chinese-style hot and sour soups where they took on the flavor of the liquid.