By Mike Sherr
Editor-in-Chief
From hurricanes to the existence of bears (huggable creatures that will eat you), Mother Nature knows how to ruin a good time. The natural world can be very scary and full of horrible things that are out to kill and eat you. But every once in a while there is something wonderful that makes you forget all about the danger in the woods.
Maybe it's a sunset or a snow capped mountain. Maybe it's your dog or a rushing waterfall. Or maybe it's the ridiculous looking giant puffball (Calvatia gigantea) mushroom.
These white balls can be humorously found in open forest clearings or on the sides of roads or trails. While some mushrooms are parasitic and attach to a host they slowly kill, the giant puffball simply decomposes already dead vegetation.
Giant puffball mushrooms can grow to have a radius of about 20 inches and can grow in patterns that look like some college kids threw white volleyballs around a peaceful forest grove.
I can be confident in claiming that mushrooms like the giant puffball are the pandas of the mushroom world; cute, goofy and definitely won’t kill you. That being said, eating past ripe giant puffballs will give you digestion problems not worth having.
A giant puffball mushroom casually sitting in a cow pasture in Belgium (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons / "Calvatia gigantea" by Hans Hillewaert. CC BY-SA 4.0. September 7, 2008).
These mushrooms pop out when foraging in a forest or in a meadow. When harvesting giant puffballs, make sure to take note of the color of the mushroom before picking it up. The white giant puffball may be edible, but only cutting it open to look for developing spores can make this certain. As it starts to slowly turn yellow and brown, the mushroom is getting ready to spit out billions of spores into the air. Being close to a spouting mushroom or deliberately disturbing the mushroom in this state may reward you with a trip to the hospital.
A group of teens from Wisconsin found this out in 1967 when the wannabe hippies thought they could get high off of the mushroom’s spores. When they ingested some of the giant puffball’s 7 billion spores they instead spent a month in the hospital as doctors tried to stop the mushroom’s germination process in their lungs.
After you double (and triple) check that a giant puffball is safe to harvest and eat, peel off the skin and add it to any dish you’d like. Critics of the giant puffball (how can anyone genuinely be a critic of something that looks like this) say that it does not taste like anything, but I think that adds to the excitement. One minute it can be used in an Italian dish like puffball parmesan and then in sweet and sour puffball the next. The lack of flavor drastically increases the versatility of this mushroom in a similar way it does for tofu.
This deceivingly large mushroom is an easy start for beginner mushroom foragers. Check out your local forests in the summer after a heavy rain to take advantage of these free edible puffballs.
