Growing like fungus: Inside Santa Cruz’s wild mushroom culinary community

On a Saturday in early February, the scent of wet earth and pine needles enveloped my senses as I approached Beauregard Vineyards’ winery in Bonny Doon. While it wasn’t raining at that moment, the forecast promised wet weather later that day, as it had almost every day this winter. The ground was saturated, moisture dripped off leaves and cool fingers of fog tickled the tops of trees: the ideal climate for mushrooms. 

When it comes to seasonal foods, few elicit fandom like wild mushrooms. Many devotees describe being instantly hooked after discovering their first cache of porcinis, chanterelles or black trumpets, innocently poking up from the forest floor. The Santa Cruz Mountains are home to hundreds, perhaps thousands of species of wild mushrooms – even scientists don’t know exactly how many. Within that number, around 20 to 40 varieties are edible, and about a dozen are highly prized for their flavor and texture. 

The persistent rainfall and cooler temperatures over the past year have coaxed abundant numbers from this soil this fall and winter, and as the rain raises fungi from the woodland duff, a community of enthusiasts also emerges to enjoy these highly sought-after local delicacies. 

On Feb. 3, a group of 40 people wrapped in sweaters and jackets milled about in front of the winery, preparing to do just that at Beauregard Vineyards’ annual Wine and Wild Mushroom Lunch, one of the most elegant social gatherings dedicated to celebrating foraged fungi. Winemaker Ryan Beauregard has hosted this lunch with different chefs who specialize in preparing wild mushrooms for more than 10 years, pairing each dish with one of his award-winning, terroir-driven wines. 

When it comes to the world of mushrooms, Santa Cruz County has a spot on the map. Mycologist and former UC Santa Cruz student David Arora wrote one of the first widely published books on mushrooms, “Mushrooms Demystified,” in 1979. He also founded the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz, a mushroom club with an annual fungus fair that is still going strong after more than half a century. And long before Arora arrived, Indigenous Californians and Italian and Chinese immigrants combed the hills gathering edible varieties like porcini and coccora. 

For the Beauregard event, freelance chef Chad Hyatt incorporated 10 different varieties of wild mushrooms into five courses, all of which he had personally gathered locally and farther afield during his travels. 

The meal showcased mushroom flavors ranging from earthy to peppery to fruity, and textures that could be meaty, firm or slippery. Nutty porcinis were blended into a silky chestnut soup, followed by a Dungeness crab salad with sweet-tart kumquats and peppery yellowfoot mushrooms in a mild matsutake broth, paired with a lively 2012 chardonnay. Hyatt perched tiny roasted quail atop porcini and buckwheat stuffing, and a thick swipe of black trumpet mushrooms blended into an almost sweet, intensely woodsy sauce. 

For the main course, Hyatt piled plump chanterelles – collected with Beauregard in the woods nearby days before – over grilled lamb chops and flageolet beans simmered in a rich chanterelle broth, tasting of apricots and black pepper. Beauregard paired it with an elegant 18-year-old syrah from his library, grown in the Santa Cruz Mountains and brimming with pine and forest floor. The pairing exemplified the sense of place that both foraged ingredients and terroir-driven wines can give.

Mushrooms even shined in a rich flourless chocolate cake sweetened with maple-y candy cap mushrooms. A black trumpet and blood orange coulis emphasized the trumpet’s fruity character, paired with a 2010 zinfandel. The balance of tangy citrus, maple syrup-scented whipped cream and bitter dark chocolate was a strong finish to a dynamic and utterly delicious meal. 

Hyatt specializes in working with wild mushrooms and is an avid forager. Throughout the year, he chefs private events for people and organizations, including a kickoff dinner for the Santa Cruz Fungus Fair and the Big Sur Foragers Festival. He also wrote “The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen,” a book on cooking wild mushrooms, and is currently working on its second edition. A resident of San Jose, his work takes him all over the country, but Hyatt says there is a particularly large concentration of mushroom enthusiasts around Monterey Bay. 

“There’s definitely a lot of people in the Santa Cruz area, in the Monterey Bay area in general, who are clued into mushrooms,” says Hyatt, who attributes it to the large number of people who enjoy other outdoor activities in the area. “They at least know to go and look for chanterelles and porcini at the right time of year, and if they stumble across some they know what they have.”

For Hyatt, wild mushrooms are an endless source of culinary inspiration, with textures, smells and flavors that can’t be found anywhere in the plant or animal kingdoms. And, like other foragers, he is addicted to the hunt. “They’re so sneaky and ephemeral, hard to pin down, hard to understand and hard to find,” says Hyatt. “It’s just like a constant treasure hunt, wandering around in the woods looking for mushrooms.” 

Wild mushrooms have an air of mystery, says Hyatt: “Mushrooms are so fleeting, and so they’re really hard to study. Even the people who really study them full time really don’t know a lot of basic things that we take for granted, and I always find that fascinating.” 

‘Freddy the Forager’

One of the reasons wild mushrooms are so sought after is that many of the most beloved varieties cannot easily be cultivated. The only way to enjoy them is for the right environment to experience optimal weather patterns for the microscopic fungus spores living in the soil to send up mushrooms, the fruitbody of the fungus. After all that, someone still needs to go out into the woods and find the darn things. 

For Freddy Menge, walking through nature and foraging for mushrooms has become part of his life’s work. For more than three decades, he has found and sold wild mushrooms to chefs throughout the Monterey Bay region, and his pursuits have earned him the nickname “Freddy the Forager.” 

Menge was born in La Selva and still lives on a portion of his family’s property, where he runs a farm with his wife, Ellen Baker, specializing in avocado trees. But in 1989, when Menge was in his late 20s, his life changed forever when he was exploring the San Andreas fault line after the Loma Prieta earthquake and discovered a patch of chanterelles. He says he knew a good thing when he saw it, and ended up hunting mushrooms every day for the next month. He quit his job and arranged his life so he could hunt for mushrooms whenever he wanted. “It became my passion,” says Menge. 

But when he started knocking on restaurant doors in the early 1990s, wild mushrooms were a hard sell. “It was old-school. The fancy restaurants didn’t want to see a shaggy dude coming in the back door with wild mushrooms. They weren’t on the menu,” says Menge. By the end of that decade, the food landscape had changed. “The farm-to-table movement in the ‘90s bloomed the whole idea that you could use wild regional produce. That was new. That was exciting.”

At that time, restaurants started popping up all over Santa Cruz County that focused on local ingredients, like Gabriella Café, Pearl Alley Bistro, Star Bene and Bella Napoli. These chefs had an appetite for wild mushrooms and weren’t intimidated to purchase foraged foods. “Some corporate places would be terrified of the whole idea of buying undocumented mushrooms from undocumented mushroom hunters,” says Menge. “But for the most part, the people who were buying mushrooms from me were chefs who knew about them and who came from other culinary situations where mushrooms were important.”

Now, he says the desire for wild mushrooms is “tremendous.” And this year, due to the exceptional weather, that means Menge has been very busy. “All the wild mushrooms are symbiotic with native tree species and they thrived. Underground, the mycelium took advantage of that extra root growth. They’re all charged up this year,” he says. “I’m finding amazing amounts of mushrooms, it’s ridiculous. And yet I can’t even come close to saturating the market.” 

He typically hunts on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday so he can sell to chefs before they firm up their menus later in the week. This season, he’s found huge numbers and varieties, like porcini and white king boletes; chanterelles and black trumpets; matsutake, cauliflower mushrooms and lion’s mane; and two mushrooms he doesn’t sell to market, the springtime amanita and coccora, both edible but visually similar to the poisonous death cap. 

Now, Menge sells to around a dozen high-end restaurants throughout the Monterey Bay area, including The Midway, Bantam, Home, Gabriella Café, La Posta, The Dream Inn and Chocolate in Santa Cruz County; Alta Bakery, Cella Restaurant and Woody’s at the Airport in Monterey; and Michelin-starred Aubergine in Carmel-by-the-Sea.  

A surge of interest in foraging over the past five years has forced Menge farther afield and led him to abandon some of his sites as they’ve become overrun with people. He’s noticed people aren’t as tolerant of trespassing as they once were, and there’s less open land; he’s seen good mushrooming zones bulldozed, graded and developed. More interest means more bodies in fewer spaces with fewer mushrooms to go around. 

For Menge, the relationships he’s formed with local chefs over the past 20 years are more valuable than any mushroom score. He remembers Brad Briske, the chef/owner at Home in Soquel, when he first came in as a sous-chef to Gabriella, and Katherine Stern, who opened The Midway in Santa Cruz in December, was in her early 20s, says Menge. “Tom McNary, who works at La Posta now, was the first guy I ever sold a chanterelle to in 1989,” he says. “I’ve been friends with them since the very beginning.”

‘Before you know it, they want the odd stuff that falls off the back of the forager’s truck.’ 

Wild mushrooms are easier to get than ever thanks to local purveyor Far West Fungi. Depending on the season, the mushroom retailer sells around 40 varieties of mushrooms at its retail shop in Santa Cruz at 224 Laurel St., including 14 varieties that it cultivates at its farm in Moss Landing and a wide variety of wild mushrooms it purchases from distributors. 

In the light-filled shop in downtown Santa Cruz, glass jars of dried mushrooms line open shelves, while fresh varieties are displayed in refrigerated cases. Imported truffles, some selling for as much as $260 an ounce, can be viewed behind protective glass, their heady aromas permeating the air. 

Naomi Wolf has worked for Far West Fungi for more than 10 years and manages its Santa Cruz and San Francisco stores. While the family farm has grown mushrooms for 40 years, Wolf saw the popularity of mushrooms rise after the documentary “Fantastic Fungi” came out in 2019. “Right when it came out, so many people were discovering mushrooms and learning things about them they never knew before,” says Wolf. “I think specifically on the medicinal end, but it also just sparked curiosity in mushrooms and wanting to learn to cook with them.” 

There was another surge of interest during the pandemic. People cooked more, and could even grow their own mushrooms in their kitchens via Far West Fungi’s grow kits. “I’ve definitely seen customers find a gateway mushroom that they’re really into and then they want to get weirder and weirder,” says Wolf. “Before you know it, they want the odd stuff that falls off the back of the forager’s truck.” 

The shop’s customers span a wide gamut, from professional chefs to amateur cooks and foragers. Its vegetarian, mushroom-focused café is popular with students and the meat-free community, and parents often bring children into the store because of its interactive shopping experience with these fascinating and at times otherworldly ingredients. 

Medicinal mushrooms like reishi and wood ear are popular, as is lion’s mane, a toothy, crab-like mushroom said to have neurological benefits. But Wolf prefers maitake, a savory mushroom she compares to roasted chicken, and wild black trumpets and nutty morel mushrooms when they’re in season. 

Far West Fungi is celebrating four decades in the community by launching the Santa Cruz Mountain Mushroom Festival, a two-day event at Roaring Camp in Felton on May 4-5. Part educational event, part music festival, the family-friendly fair will feature panel discussions, cooking demonstrations, a mushroom-focused food court, guided walks, local art, wine, beer and live music. 

That brings the number of local mushroom festivals up to two, but Wolf believes there is plenty of interest to support both events. Says Wolf: “No matter what you’re interested in, in your personal life, there’s something about mushrooms that’ll fill that niche.”

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