Rex Trulove
Many people, myself included, feel that this is the tastiest mushroom of all. Morels look rather like a pointed sponge stuck on a stick, except that the ‘stick’ or stem is hollow. The cap is as well. These grow wild throughout the temperate regions of North America, Europe, and Asia, though those in North America tend to be much larger than those that grow elsewhere. I love these mushrooms cooked in many ways, including stuffed with meat sauce.
Around here, the best place to look for morels is in areas that have been burned by forest fires, about 3 years earlier. It takes that long for these mushrooms to mature and grow. However, they can be locally plentiful.
I once filled three 5-gallon buckets with morels in just a few hours.
Buying morels is quite expensive, though. Every year, we have morel buyers in town here that pay $30-50 per pound for the morels. They then dry them and resell them for a hefty profit. I don’t pick them commercially, though. I like eating them too much.
There is no other mushroom (again, technically a fungus) that looks like a morel. Even false morels, which I’ve included below, don’t look like true morels. This was the first mushroom I taught my children to identify, back when they were 6 and 8-years-old.
There are also several colors of morels. The one shown is a black morel, because the outside of the head is black. There are also yellow morels, brown morels, and white morels.
