Foraging Chicken of the Woods Mushrooms

For whatever reason I have always wanted to try foraging my own mushrooms since I was in middle school. While morels will have to wait, I encountered my first chicken of the woods.

Foraging for wild mushrooms can be dangerous if you are not careful. Please proceed with the following information at your own risk. I am not responsible for any harm or injury from false identification of mushrooms!

Chicken of the woods (the layperson’s term for several species of the Laetiporus genus) is a fall mushroom noted for its meaty, chicken-like texture and taste. According to several sources¹², it is a bright orange to yellow mushroom in layers (brackets) that is found on decaying trunks of hardwood trees, especially oak. On a walk around the campus of St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, we found this fantastic young sample growing on the stump of a felled tree.

Chicken of the woods mushroom growing out of a tree stump. Notice the intense yellow coloration on the undersides of the brackets of this specimen.

After some quick Google searches and texting, we decided that this was indeed a chicken of the woods, specifically Laetiporus sulphureus because of the intense yellow coloring on the underside of each bracket. This sample in particular was very young as we hadn’t noticed it when walking around that area two days prior. There was also a lot of water seeping out of the mushroom when it was poked (another sign of freshness, as opposed to thicker growth which can be tough and woody). Safe foraging practices recommend thoroughly cooking and eating a small bit of the mushroom to check for anaphylactic reactions in the first 15 minutes and stomach upsets for the next 24 hours while leaving behind some of the mushroom for poison control. I put some vegetable oil in a frying pan, sliced some of the mushroom into thin slices, and fried them with some salt and pepper on medium heat until most of the moisture was gone.

I smelled a faint meaty/chickeny odor from the cooking mushrooms.

The mushrooms turned into a brilliant orange/red color as they cooked on the stove and gave off a pleasant, meaty smell. The taste was indeed somewhat meaty/chickeny, and the slices had a nice crunch to them; it was almost like eating chickeny french fries. When I washed the mushroom, sectioned it, and stored it wrapped with paper towels in a plastic bag, it seemed to lose a lot of its flavor compared to when it was freshly harvested, so I recommend eating it fresh or only cleaning off dirt chunks and storing it in a paper bag rather than washing it (I wonder if that took away a lot of the rich chicken flavor). I also tried a couple of different recipes but found that frying thin slices in oil with salt and pepper was the way to go. This was a lot of fun and I hope to find more chicken of the woods to try cooking soon!

1. Benitez B et al. Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sulphureus species complex). URL: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/PP358 ↩

2. Margulies E. Eating the Chicken of the Woods. URL: https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2006/10/31/eating-the-chicken-of-the-woods/ ↩