Giant Puffball (4/8)

Again, this is a fungus rather than a mushroom, but these are hard to miss. The one shown is actually small. At times, I’ve found them that were easily larger than a soccer ball, which they somewhat resemble.

This is among my favorite wild mushrooms and I love slicing these into slabs and cooking them like steaks. They also make a fantastic cream of mushroom soup.

To tell if they are ripe, they are simply sliced in half. If the flesh is white all the way through, they are edible. If they start to turn brown inside, they are past their prime and aren’t very good eating. There are a few inedible mushrooms that look somewhat like an immature giant puffball, and these mushrooms only grow in a narrow altitude band, between about 4,000 and 5,000 feet.

As an interesting fact, all puffballs in North America are edible if they aren’t too ripe. Some are just so small that they are scarcely worth the effort to pick.