Mushroomers mine Sisters forests

There were curious goings-on earlier this month in the vacant lot behind Richard's Produce as a dozen migrant workers from Laos and Cambodia sat hunched over plastic bins piled high with ripe mushrooms, freshly harvested from the Cascade foothills.

They grinned and laughed in their native tongue in the afternoon warmth, recalling the day's events while wiping down and cleaning the pale brown mushroom caps.

If it's summer, it must be wild-mushroom-picking season in Central Oregon, and this year's bounty of edible fungi was presented and graded for local field buyer, Galen McConnell.

"These are king boletes we're going through now," McConnell explained, slicing open a fat specimen to check for quality and color. "They're the big ones. The season runs from May to July 15."

McConnell, AKA "The Pinecone Man," owns Wildwood Pinecone Co. out of Redmond, and has been in the mushroom business for close to 25 years. In addition to his organic fungus enterprise, he also buys bulk cones for specialty crafts and floral companies. He ships and distributes mushrooms all over the U.S. and overseas.

The super-sized boletes are one of the three most widely used mushrooms in the world, along with the morel and chanterelle. In Italy they are known as the porcini, or "piglet." They are used as fresh products for restaurants, as well as simple eating, cooking, and dried for use in compound powders for female cosmetics and beauty care items. They have an earthy, nutty flavor with a meat-like texture, and pale hat.

Many mushrooms have a symbiotic, or friendly, relationship with trees and other plants. Mushroom mycelium receives carbohydrates and other nutrition from trees while delivering back vital minerals and water.

McConnell came with his truck and chopping table to inspect and grade the boletes recently plucked from the ground by the families and friends from Southeast Asia.

"These people travel all throughout the Northwest; some of them have been doing it for 20 or 30 years," he said. "They spend a season or two in the woods, then go back home. Every individual picker is an independent contractor and needs a special permit from the Forest Service to harvest off government lands."

Mushrooms are cut open and hand-graded, one through four, with the best samples being pure white to cream in color and their caps curled down nicely. Those with worms or discolored and moldy get the worst grades.

Say Sy Deng had just arrived from Laos after his father fell ill and had to return home. His mother is on the crew and has been picking for nearly 20 years. This was his seventh season. Deng was full of smiles and eager to talk about the vagabond life of a mushroom miner.

"I like it, being in the mountains," he said. "We have fun at the camps, and at night we cook good old American barbecue, whatever is in the stores."

He told The Nugget that king bolete mushrooms were named for the King of France, who was the first to ever eat them.

Foragers may find boletes living under pine trees or beneath beds of pine needles. Also, cuttings where wood was harvested a few years earlier have lots of stumps where various types of mushrooms may grow.

Debbie, a picker from Springfield who travels with the group, has been doing this for two years. She watched her 72-year-old Laotian partner wipe off the mushrooms and look for worms.

"You find your lucky spots and pick as much as you can haul. All day long. This year is not looking so good. The prices are way down," she said. "It's hard work and most people think we're crazy for doing it."

Most of the pickers barely break even during the season, sleeping and cooking in tent city base camps set up just outside Sisters off Jack Creek Road. Many of the pickers expressed frustration this year as the wholesale price of the boletes had plummeted to $4-$5 a pound, half of the going rate last year.

Some were not selling their bounty, but instead will travel down to Eugene where they may get $12-$15 a pound dried. Since mushrooms are mostly 80 percent water, drying them greatly reduces their weight, but concentrates their flavor as an ingredient in soups, stews, and sauces.

After the bolete seasons, migrant workers will travel to Trout Lake, Washington and set up a new base camp for huckleberry season and will stay until September, then on to Crescent Lake, Oregon for the pine mushroom harvest.

"That's the 'big money' mushroom, " Deng said.

During the 1980s and '90s heyday of Nouveau Riche cuisine, pine mushrooms garnered up to $600 a pound, satisfying the discriminating palates of Wall Street investment bankers and Hollywood glamour queens.

"Most people don't even know they have this exotic food right in their own backyards. It's like the modern day gold."