Sunday, November 20, 2022 Day 14 of the beginning of winter
The winter chill sets off the steaming heat in the dumpling restaurant. Walking into the Northeast Dumpling Restaurant, in addition to dumplings, the biggest "popularity" in the museum is the first dish in the Northeast - chicken stewed mushrooms.
But in the northeast dumpling restaurant in Hunan, it is actually difficult to taste authentic chicken stew mushrooms. Connoisseurs know that it is not chickens that make chicken mushroom stew at the top of the "four major stews in the northeast", but mushrooms. And the most authentic chicken stew mushroom, must use hazel mushrooms, also called oak mushrooms.
As the name suggests, this is a fungus that prefers to grow on hazel and oak trees, and the humus of broadleaf forests provides them with a substrate for growth. The vast temperate jungle of the northeast is the ideal environment for hazelnut mushrooms to grow.
In the alpine dense forests in northwest Xiang, from summer to autumn, hazelnut mushrooms also emerge endlessly. This mushroom has a small yellow-brown umbrella on top, and the surface of the cap is so smooth that it seems to be coated with a layer of honey, and there is a bacterial ring about 1 cm below the cap, so it is named honey ring fungus.
Compared with most edible mushrooms, honey ring mushrooms are richer in fiber, produce a slightly wood-like fragrance when cooked, and the smell of the forest and the deliciousness of chicken inject an unusual "soul" into the chicken mushroom stew.
The strength and fresh fragrance of honey ring mushrooms are actually the essence of the earth. The small yellow umbrella that people see is only the fruiting body of the honey ring fungus, in the trunk and underground, they have countless hyphae, many hyphae closely arranged with each other, forming a reddish-brown, root-like structure of the mycelium, not only looks like the root system of the large tree, but also the vigorous vitality of strong expansion.
In 1998, a honey ring fungus that had been lurking in the jungle for more than 2,400 years was discovered in Oregon, USA, with a total weight of more than 600 tons, and the mycocable expanded to nearly 1,000 hectares, becoming the world's "largest monomeric organism".
In Hunan, the natural distribution of honey ring fungus is limited, but the artificial cultivation technology is quite mature. It is incomprehensible that the Xiang people, who love food deeply, did not use this mountain treasure that gathers the essence of the earth to create the signature Hunan dish that is comparable to chicken stewed mushrooms, but only invested almost all of them in cultivating the precious Chinese medicinal herb Tianma.
【Small Business Card】
Armillaria mellea, a fungus of the genus Basidiomycetes in the order Umbelus, cap 3 to 14 cm in diameter, pale earthy yellow, honey to light yellowish-brown, tan after aging, with small flat or erect scales in the middle; Flesh white; The pleats are white or slightly fleshy pink, and dark brown spots often appear when they are old; Stalk slender, cylindrical, with the same cap color; There is a white ring of bacteria on the upper part of the stalk. Greenish fluorescence after maturity.
In summer and autumn, it grows in temperate broad-leaved trees or decayed wood, and its hyphae and mycocords are more destructive to the forest, and luciferase will release yellow-green fluorescence. The cap and stem are edible.
Text/Peng Yahui Photo/Tan Jiming Design/Li Zhenming Think Tank/Tan Jiming Comprehensive Coordination/Zhang Hui Coordinator/Zhou Yuegui Special Support/Hunan Forestry Bureau
(First instance, Zhou Yuegui; Second instance, Li Weifeng; Third instance, Deng Meihui)