Friday Fungus: Snow Mushrooms

Seemed appropriate given the current weather to talk about enoki - Japanese Snow Mushrooms (Flammulina velutipes). If you've an interest in Chinese or Japanese cookery you will have encountered these delicate mushrooms but I bet you didn't know they grow wild in the UK where we call them velvet shank. In the wild they do not look like the picture above but are yellowish brown and rather larger - the cultivated version is produced in huge quantities in the far east (over 100,000 tonnes annually).

The snow or winter mushroom description comes about because these fungi fruit very late and can survive a temperatures close to freezing. Golden Gourmet Mushrooms * describe them as follows:

"...enoki are found in the mountains often right at the snow-line growing in clusters on deciduous logs. Under outdoor conditions, wild specimens of this mushroom are short-stemmed with caps as wide as the stems are long. The lower portions of the stem have a darkened, velvety fuzz, hence the common name "The Velvet Stem" or "The Velvet Foot". Under artificial cultivation conditions first developed by Japanese growers, cultivated varieties of this mushrooms look entirely different. Manipulation of light, carbon dioxide and temperature conditions creates a beautiful bouquet of delicate, white, long-stemmed (4-5 inches), small-capped (1/3-1/2 inch) mushrooms."

*There's a recipe for smoked oysters, fried spinach and enoki on the Golden Gourmet web-site that looks good although I haven't tried it so can't vouch for it!

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