Preserving your fungi

Mushrooms preserved in a mushroom-shaped jar. Not a suggestion but quite cute.

Fungi can be so amazing when they're fresh, with their strange fleshy forms and frequently bright colours. It's not surprising that over the years people have tried many ways to preserve the edible ones. Fungi have been pickled, preserved in oil or honey, dried slowly in ovens and desiccators...

The good news is that some species preserve really well. The bad news is that some of them don't. Sometimes it's hard to predict which category yours will fall into.

Some fungi dry beautifully all by themselves; they just need to be left somewhere reasonably dry and warm. The best for this are brackets, puffballs, cup fungi, King Alfred's Cakes... often the ones without gills or pores, or at least the less 'mushroom-shaped' ones.

You can dry 'mushroom-shaped' fungi like this - but the slow process tends to leave them looking a bit shrivelled and sorry for themselves.

Some don't like this method at all - for example Coprinus will probably deliquesce and disappear into an inky stain.

Jason Hollinger air drying some mushrooms

 But - we have a freeze drier that I can dry your fungi in, and often they emerge looking really very similar to the way they went in.  They end up practically devoid of moisture, and very light (rather like the raspberries in your breakfast cereal) - they can also be quite brittle and fragile, though.

If you'd like your samples treated this way, just come and see me. You'll have to bring your IDENTIFIED mushrooms in, and then we'll put them in a freezer. (You really must identify them first, because they will lose so many of their distinguishing characteristics in the process).

Don't freeze them at home, and then bring them in, because they'll defrost on the way, and that is not going to help them. Just bring them in fresh and pop them in the freezer here.

Once they're frozen, I transfer them to the freeze drier, which runs at about -60 degrees C. Then I pump the air out of the chamber so they're in a vacuum. Because of this reduced pressure, the moisture in the mushrooms sublimes - it goes from the solid ice form to a gas, and is taken away.

One more thing to remember - you'll need to think of a way to keep track of which mushroom's which while it's in the freeze drier. Because, of course, you've already identified it.

After your fungi is preserved, you'll want to keep them that way until you display and hand them in - keeping them dry is the most important thing.

How you present your fully labelled fungi is somewhat a matter for your own creativity. You might want to use some kind of single case or box (or lots of little boxes), or perhaps just secure them on a large sheet of card with glue or wire (a popular and successful option). Others have gone for more naturalistic approaches (the Mushroom Diorama, a little like this). Here are a few pictures from the 2016/17 collections. Whichever you use, remember to keep the species' taxonomic relationships in mind and include all the who, what, where and when information on their labels.

Back to identification information 
and thoughts on collecting fungi. 

Mushroom jar image with CC license by Beatrice Murch