By William R. Snyder | Photograph by Robin Broadbent
Saffron milk cap and black trumpet mushrooms, an exotic Spanish fungi, can cost upwards of $50 a pound.
This fall, in a matter of 72 hours, saffron milk cap and black trumpet mushrooms will be whisked from a hillside in the Spanish Pyrenees to the kitchens of discerning chefs across America. The price? As much as $50 a pound.
“Cooking with them is an exercise in restraint,” says Thierry Rautureau, award-winning chef at Seattle restaurant Rover’s. Rautureau says that the milk cap’s strong flavor is so good, it’s a standalone, worthy of entrée status.
Spores of the saffron milk cap have traveled the world and thrive in North America and Australia, but because of soil and climate conditions, the choicest ones grow at the variety’s place of origin along the Pyrenees where they have been sought since the Roman Empire.
Six weeks after the late-August rains, when an autumn chill falls over the Pyrenees, David Cunill loads his hatchback with woven baskets and drives from his village of Borreda to a steep mountainside covered in pine and oak.
His uncle told him years ago about this secret spot, indistinguishable from the hundreds of miles of woods around him. In this region, inheritance isn’t a house, but the lore of hunting wild mushrooms. “My wife and son know the places, but I’m worried,” he jokes. “The boy talks too much.”
For two months, Cunill neglects his job as a carpenter in favor of sweeping the forest floor, hunting for black trumpets and especially for the saffron milk cap. Progress can be slow to avoid rolling an ankle or missing milk caps, which, despite standing as bright as traffic cones, hide among the roots at the base of pines. With a staff in one hand to balance against unstable rocks, Cunill kneels to slice each mushroom at the base, careful not to bruise its delicate gills.
Although the deep orange cap can grow seven inches wide and up to four inches tall, the smaller ones are desirable for their almond taste and sweet milk-like juice. The mushroom’s Latin name, lactarius deliciosus, is fitting.
Cunill hunts from sunrise until midafternoon when he takes his haul to Bar Venado, the kind of tavern found throughout the region that becomes a makeshift fungi market in the fall. Bar owners serve as middlemen whom foragers trust to negotiate the best price with distributors.
Selling his mushrooms at 50 cents an ounce, Cunill can clear $8,000 during seasons of bumper fungal growth. That’s a huge bonus in Borreda, where the average annual salary is less than $20,000.
Once a price is settled over a couple of beers, distributors run trucks through the night, moving the mushrooms from the country to the mammoth wholesale market Mercabarna in Barcelona, where many are sold for export to Paris, London and the U.S.
“Turnaround happens quickly because a mushroom rots into a slimy mess,” says Eric Arnou, vice president of the American Mushroom Hunter Corporation, a mushroom importer based in Middletown, N.J. The final purchase price reflects that first-class handling.
Back in his kitchen at Rover’s, Rautureau, who’s known as the “chef in the hat” because of his omnipresent fedora, demonstrates his great restraint. “Never wash a mushroom, and don’t overdress them,” he says, slicing the top off of a milk cap. He drizzles it with olive oil, sprinkles on a bit of salt and pepper, then lays it gills-down on the grill like a hamburger. Rautureau’s final bit of advice: “Pair it with a Spanish sherry and you have fungi perfection.”