What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edible Puffball Mushrooms
Where do you find Puffball Mushrooms?
Giant puffballs (Calvatia gigantea) are found in the central and eastern USA and Canada. During late Summer and Fall, look for them in meadows, under small stands of trees, and around forest openings. Puffballs are round or pear-shaped fruiting bodies that contain spores. They sit directly on the ground or on rotten wood.
Common Puffball Mushroom (Lycoperdon perlatum): The common puffball mushroom is a small to medium-sized mushroom that is typically found in grassy areas or woods. It has a round shape and a white, smooth surface that becomes brown and scaly as it ages.
Western Puffball Mushroom (Calbovista subsculpta): The edible western puffball mushroom is native to North America and is typically found in dry, sandy areas. It has a round shape and a brownish color with a rough, scaly surface.
Always be 100% certain of your identification before consuming any wild mushroom.
Historical uses of Puffballs
Puffballs are well-known by all the Native American tribes of North America. Some used them as a styptic (stops a wound from bleeding) by mixing the spores with spiderwebs and bark and applying it to wounds.This practice was adopted by homesteaders from the 1700's onwards where it was common practice for a family to have a mature puffball in a bucket outside the home to use for scrapes and injuries. Many tribes collected them for food. Some wore dried ones around their necks to help ward-off ghosts and evil spirits.
The Blackfoot Native American Indian tribe historically stretched across much of the mid-western prairies of the U.S. There, puffballs often grow in rings (some people today call any ring of mushrooms a “fairy circle”). Their legend held that these puffballs were stars that had fell to the Earth during a supernatural event. They would use dried puffballs as a reliable tinder to get a fire going strong. To help ensure a hearty fire within a tipi, they would sometimes paint representations of puffballs on the exterior canvas.
The use of Calvatia gigantea in folk medicine led researchers to to investigate it further. In the 1960's they isolated the substance calvacin, which was shown to inhibit sarcoma in lab mice. Calvacin is now cited as one of the first substances with antitumor activity isolated from a mushroom.
Cooking with Puffball Mushrooms:
PUFFBALL MUSHROOM MOZZARELLA STICKS
INGREDIENTS
- 1 pound of puffball mushrooms, sliced into sticks
- Enough vegetable or peanut oil to submerge sticks in fryer or pot
- 1 cup Italian breadcrumbs
- 1 cup panko
- 1 cup flour
- 4-6 eggs, depending on size
- 1 quarter cup olive oil
- Marinara sauce for dipping (either homemade or store-bought)
SPECIAL EQUIPMENT
Deep fryer or heavy-bottomed pot
PREPARATION
- Heat oil in either a deep fryer or heavy-bottomed pot to about 350 degrees.
- In a shallow bowl, mix together Italian-seasoned breadcrumbs and panko. Put flour in a second shallow bowl. Beat eggs in a third shallow bowl.
- Slice puffball mushrooms into strips, roughly a 1/2-inch wide and 3 or 4 inches long. They should be about the size of single-serving string cheese.
- Lightly coat mushroom strips in olive oil. Working one at a time, dredge each strip in flour, then egg, then breadcrumb mixture, and drop them into hot oil.
- Fry in batches without overcrowding the pan or fryer until sticks are golden brown, about 5 minutes. Serve with Marinara sauce.
How to identify Puffball Mushrooms
There’s a lot of variety with puffball mushrooms. They may be as small as a ping pong ball or, in the case of giant puffball mushrooms, reach sizes comparable to a soccer ball. And while usually round, they can also be pear-shaped. Puffball mushrooms can as small as 1 inch and up to 24 inches across. Mature giant puffballs can even weigh up to 10 pounds
Puffball mushrooms are usually white or light in color. They can have smooth outside skin or skin that’s more lumpy and uneven, similar to a wart. These mushrooms have white flesh when young (and edible) , although as they age and mature, they can turn tan or be a shade closer to olive-brown which you should not consume.
What makes these mushrooms unique is how they disperse their spores and lack some of the typical characteristics associated with mushrooms, such as stems, caps, and gills.
Instead of having spores underneath a mushroom cap, these mushrooms produce all of their spores inside the fruiting body.
A puffball will disperse its spores (about 7 trillion of them!) similarly to other mushrooms that disperse their spores when they come into contact with rain, a breeze, or animals.—hence the name PUFFBALL.
How To Identify Inedible Puffballs and Poisonous Look Alikes:
Although puffballs are edible, Make sure to rule out poisonous look-alikes before eating any! Cut puffballs in half from top to bottom and look closely at the cut surface. The outer rind should be as thin as an eggshell; if thicker, the fungus may be a poisonous Scleroderma sp commonly known as the common earthball, pigskin poison puffball, or common earth ball. .The interior of an edible puffball should be white and completely uniform. If a small mushroom shape is folded inside like the photo below, the specimen may be the 'egg' stage of a deadly or dangerous species such as the death cap, Amanita phalloides. If the inside is yellow or brown, the specimen is too old and bitter to eat. .
