There lives in our world an unusual mushroom, the dishes with which smell of chicken - this is the chicken mushroom or sulfur-yellow tinder fungus. It’s hard not to notice a mushroom growing on a tree.
The young mushroom has a dazzling yellow color - like a tree chicken - and is visible from several tens of meters away.
Those who have tried dishes with chicken mushrooms say that if you don’t know what they are made of, they actually taste very much like dishes with chicken meat.
The sulfur-yellow tinder fungus is found in many countries and grows in whole groups on tree trunks. Carrying such parasitic mushrooms is a heavy burden for the tree, because the size of a chicken mushroom can reach 40 cm and weight - 10 kg.
Polypore is a conditionally edible mushroom, and only young mushrooms are eaten, since adult specimens become poisonous. Before cooking, the tinder fungus must be boiled for half an hour, drained, and only then cooked in it. Chicken mushrooms are used to make soups, salads, roasts, casseroles, marinate, and bake pies with minced mushrooms. For long-term storage, the tinder fungus can still be dried.
In Germany and America, chicken mushroom is considered a delicacy, where it is also called “tree chicken” or “mushroom chicken”.
The sulfur-yellow tinder fungus is also used in medicine; it is a source of antibiotics resistant to staphylococcus.
But you need to remember that only young, pleasant-smelling mushrooms can be eaten. And adults, with an unpleasant, mouse-like odor, tinder fungi can cause poisoning, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and hallucinations.
The sulfur-yellow polypore (Laetiporus sulpbureus) is a wood-destroying fungus. Its spores penetrate through the damaged bark. The resulting mycelium settles in the core of the tree, causes brown rot of the wood and gradually destroys it. The wood becomes crumbly and breaks up into regular, almost rectangular pieces, permeated with whitish mycelium. After a few years, the first fruiting body of the fungus appears in a crack in the bark or a cut in the trunk, just one or two small “fans”. A young mushroom usually bears fruit after a year and in exactly the same place. In our botanical garden there are two mushrooms of approximately the same age. One of them begins to grow in early June, and the other only at the end of August, and this has been repeated for several years. The size of their fruiting bodies gradually increases. When the core of the trees is heavily damaged by mycelium, the mushrooms will begin to bear fruit annually, and at the very end of the trees’ life, even two, and sometimes three times per season - from the end of May to the beginning of October.
Usually the life of the sulfur-yellow tinder fungus ends with the fall of the host tree - its empty trunk cannot withstand the wind. At the same time, the outer tissues of the tree remain alive, and if the trunk does not fall apart when it falls, the tree can live lying down for several more years. The full development cycle of the fungus from spores to the death of the tree usually lasts more than ten years.
The English name for the sulfur-yellow tinder fungus is “tree chicken”, given not only for the “chicken” color, but also for the chicken taste of the mushroom when fried. But only young mushrooms that are in the “test” stage are collected for food. With age, the isolated “fans” of the fruiting bodies of the fungus become rigid.
Mushrooms collected from willow and poplar are not tasty and therefore almost inedible. These trees have a large amount of bitter substances in their bark and wood, which pass into the tissues of the fungi. In order for such mushrooms to stop being bitter, they must be thoroughly squeezed raw and simmered for a very long time (one and a half to two hours). From other trees, “tree chicken”, fried without prior boiling, really tastes like chicken meat.
You can boil the “tree chicken”. And if you add dill during cooking, the mushroom will taste like boiled squid. Several years ago, I canned boiled mushroom and for a long time fed my friends a salad with “squid”, and everyone wondered why these squids were not “rubbery” at all.
Of course, tree mushrooms cannot be collected near highways or on the streets of large cities, just like all other mushrooms. Harmful substances contained in exhaust gases are absorbed by the porous body of the fungus, like a sponge, and remain there for a long time.
In medicine, this mushroom is valued due to the content of some antibiotics that can fight resistant forms of staphylococcus.
Most of the mushroom, which is 70%, consists of resinous beneficial substances that have a positive effect on the respiratory system, bile ducts and liver. Japanese fungotherapists claim that tinder fungus is able to influence the liver in such a way that it will produce an enzyme that breaks down fats. For this reason, weight loss drugs are produced in Japan.
and the basis of this mushroom.
