Fungi Friday - Spicy Wood Ear Chips and a UFO

Here is another mushroom experiment for #fungifriday by @ewkaw

Here's what my wood ear chips turned out like... I need work on the aesthetics a bit lol. The whole dehydrated piece could be picked up in one piece.

Here are the original wood ears that I bought from the Asian supermarket nearby.

Next I boiled them for about 30 minutes in a spicy broth that includes lime, soy sauce, peanut oil, cayenne peppers and bone broth.

Here they are after boiling and draining the broth. These wood ear absorb spices really well, by themselves they are bland and tasteless but they are like a sponge for absorbing spices.

Next I blended them up in a food processor so they would dry out more consistently in the dehydrator.

Next I spread out the mush and goo on a flat dehydrator sheet.

They dried out pretty funny. It almost resemble nori seaweed.

I broke them apart into tiny chip sized pieces. They don't look too spectacular but they crunch nicely just like a blue corn chip with an amazing taste. Perfect for dipping in guacamole. My next experiment with these might be to put the goo into some kind of mold shape so that they dry like that shape in the dehydrator.

The mushrooms have been sparse this season. This is the only one I have found out in the wild lately. It has a grayish silver crackled cap.

The gills were a blueish gray color. I'm guessing this is an amanita of some kind. I plan on going out in the wilderness of Wisconsin this weekend so hopefully I'll find a mushroom panacea of some kind this weekend for some new fungi material. Possibly even new mushroom recipes.

Happy #fungifriday :-)