I think the first question I ever asked on a mushroom discussion forum was something to the tune of: how can I find blewits? Ever since I first read that purple mushrooms existed, and that I could eat them, I needed to find them. In hindsight, there were easier quarries, but who could blame me?
Look them up in any field guide and you’ll find pictures of elegant, deep purple mushrooms and comments that they smell like fruit, frozen orange juice, perfume, lilacs, etc. Sounds like a fun mushroom to hunt and eat right? Yes, but one that confused me for a couple years.
Blewits I picked 2 years ago under pine needles, some of the caps are nearly white. Its been hard for me to find the young, purple buttons in the woods.
Originally I put up a post on these a few years ago, but took it down because I felt the pictures weren’t thorough enough. I had picked what locally were known as blewits with other hunters on forays and by myself, but I just couldn’t find any that were the deep purple like the pictures of them I saw in guides and online.
I wanted picture perfect mushrooms like the books had, and I just couldn’t believe what I was picking could be the true Clitocybe nuda / blewit until I’d found the purple ones.
Overthinking and poring over David Arora and other field guides even convinced me for a time I must be picking a cousin called Clitocybe brunneacephala. Try as I might, I just couldn’t find purple blewits. I would find some with a soft lilac color, but that would fade after a day in the fridge and then I would be questioning if I had the right mushroom, even though every other characteristic fit them to a T:
A few blewit characteristics:
- I find them in cold weather, typically around October in Minnesota, one of the last mushrooms of the season
- They have tightly spaced gills, with a notch before they touch the stem
- Growing exclusively in leaf litter or other organic debris, not growing in harmony with or infecting specific trees
- Delicately fruity aroma
- A thick, wavy edge on the cap when young
- Pale pinkish-white spore print, never brown (Cortinarius) or deep pink (Entoloma)
- Clumps of debris usually come up attached to the stems when removed from the ground
- They never any remnant of a cobwebby ring over the gills
All that was missing was the purple color. What was I doing wrong? Do true blewits even grow in the Midwest? I was confused. I asked around and talked to some of my friends in the local Mycological Society, basically the jist I got was that they can have their color vary a bit. I was still confused.
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- L: mature blewits R: young blewits showing their purple color.
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- Cap color comparison
The next thing I did was try to teach myself by cooking some, like I did with the mushroom of St. George. I called a purveyor of mine and asked them to send me some cultivated blewits from France, and told them to make sure the Latin name of what they were sending was Clitocybe nuda, the true blewit. What showed up kind of looked like what I was expecting, but a little different, and It definitely didn’t have the slightly fruity smell I was used to with the blewits I picked.
Maybe it was the cultivation and the substrate it was grown on, more likely I think they were a cousin called the field blewit Clitocybe saeva, found in Europe (both species can be cultivated on mulch or debris) Either way, I knew I liked eating the ones I picked better. It wasn’t the first time I’ve had purveyors mess up the identity of mushrooms they’re selling, either. Back to square one.
Last year, I finally cracked the code and had that aha moment. I remember reading Hank Shaw’s article on them, then Micheal Kuo’s page and book on these, which are both great. What caught my attention was when Kuo said the color transformation of blewits is one of their distinguishing features. Finally, for some reason the pieces clicked and it finally hit home.
The variable color is one of their trademarks.
That doesn’t make things any easier when you’re picking things to eat in the woods, since as the color changes from beige, to tan, to brown, the list of potential nasty look alikes gets lot bigger.
Eventually I found blewits with the deep purple color I’d been craving too, the problem was just finding a large patch and hunting down the young ones. Even some young ones may be white-ish or tan, but there’s a much better chance of them being purple than if they’re mature. For the best chance at getting tiny, delicious buttons, find yourself a blewit patch and check it regularly during the season when you expect them in your area. After you pick a flush of mushrooms, keep going back, especially after rainfalls to harvest the young buttons, which will be the best eating, with less chance of any bug infestation.
And more color variation. Here the more mature-ish mushrooms are purple, and the younger buttons in the back are light tan/white with a hint of lilac. Like I said, the variability of color is one of their trademarks.
How do I make sure I have real blewits?
Here’s my opinion. Take their color into consideration, but moreso, step back a bit and let your instincts guide you regarding not how they look, but how and where they’re growing. The biggest thing that helped me was to go around to places where I knew a particular type of organic “debris” was growing: wood chips. You don’t necessarily need to go to the woods for these.
In the past I tended to pick them in pine needles here and there and occasionally scattered in leaves, but they were always older, since those were the easiest to spot. Once I started checking spots with landscaping, it seemed like I couldn’t find a place with woodchips and not find them in quantity. It turned into hunting exercise, I’d go up to every area where I could see wood chips and play spot the blewit. They even turned up on my doorstep outside of my apartment. But, with all man-made habitats, make sure where you’re picking has not been treated with chemicals.
My advice is to turn your blewit hunting into a game, notice how they grow and what sort of debris they like to grow on in your area. Bring home mushrooms of different ages, shapes and color patterns, spore print them and don’t feel the need to eat them just because you found them. Keep going out and playing spot the blewit until you know them like an old friend, oh, and don’t forget to study your field guides.
They love wood chips. Also note how much debris comes up when you harvest a clump of mushrooms, and how these caps are smushed from growing under pressure from the packed chips.
Cultivation
If they weren’t cool enough, you can grow blewits in your backyard, and you don’t need to be a mycologist. It’s a gamble and you’re basically hoping for volunteer mushrooms. Their love of organic debris means that you could basically take some old or buggy mushrooms, or just extras you’ve found, bury them in a compost heap or big piles of leaves in your backyard, and wait to see if they start to form a colony. In his book 100 edible mushrooms, Michael Kuo says they can even be grown on a pile of old newspapers.
After just a day or two in the fridge, your blewits will lose that beautiful purple color.
Cooking
I saved the best for last. I’ve read a number of places that people think blewits are a very strong flavored mushroom, to me it depends on the age, a chanterelle or a black trumpet are much stronger in flavor to me. I find them to be mild, delicate, subtle. Gentle flavors will do them justice, too much creativity and all you will taste is the texture of a mushroom, instead of the mushroom itself. Instead of reaching for the garlic right away, try a shallot.
The younger the mushrooms you can find, the better, and with blewits, more flavorful, especially cooked whole. Just like with chanterelles, buttons keep their fairy tale shape and squeaky texture, so I say resist the urge to chop them up unless they’re mature with flat caps, and even then I prefer to cut them into quarters or halves as opposed to mincing or slicing, unless I’m going to make duxelles.
Keep little blewits whole to concentrate their flavor and show off their shape.
Excellent post about blewits. I am a lifelong mushroom hunter (inherited from foraging with my Italian grandparents, and I can say that I have been similarly bedeviled by the blewit color iteration issues. The cort scare was an issue at first, but easly solved by veil and spore identification. I used to also get confused by 2 very tasty look-a-likes: the purple laccaria and the winecap. It has taken me many years to feel comfortable that I really have gathered blewits.
Congrats on a great post which, for first time, has solved the blewit color conundrum. As an amateur cook, I also want to commend you on your superb and adventuresome recipes. i do, however, draw the line at Phallus Ravenelii !!
Glad I could help, thanks Frederic.
Loved this articles, Alan. Just found my first blewits this year and in my compost pile at my cabin. Some had given me some the year before, and the cleaned blewit leftovers were tossed in the pile. This year, I found close to 100 blewits in the pile. Such a delight and used an earlier recipe posted by you on them. Delicate taste, delightful texture. Can’t wait to see what my compost looks like next summer given the 100 blue blewit scraps that went into it this year!
Love your blog. Let me know when you make your next move as chef, please. Miss knowing that you’re at Lucia’s.
Elizabeth
Hi Elizabeth, I noticed you were picking them on the FB group 😉 As far as restaurant work, I putting together things slowly, closing Lucias was *brutal*. I’m probably going to take a consulting gig after Feb (I’ll probably put a post up). Planning on taking the Spring off for sure to hunt mushies though. Best of luck getting through the winter.
Just an anal note: “… pouring over …” in the prefatory paragraph s/b “… poring over …”
Regards, and just sayin’
Heard, and thanks!
Hello !
Thank you for your blog, it’s been a great source of inspiration to read !
I gonna try to use the best english i can to give you a little trick to help distinguish real blewits
from most of the look-alike lepista species.
If you point the cap of a blewit (lepista nuda) in direction of a light source (or the sun if you’re
lucky enough) you will never see it thru. A lot of other lepista species have such a thin cap that you can
actually see the light thru it. If that can help …
Greetings from Europe !
Thanks Thomas, sounds like a fun trick to try. Greetings from Minnesota.
I have foraged mushrooms for 6 years or so. Your deliberation about identifying Blewits according to their color draws the *perfect* picture of what it was like for me learning any new mushroom. People who know I am a mushroom hunter will ask me what is the best i.d. book, and how do you know when you have the right species, etc, etc, I think what people don’t realize is that learning to identify any particular mushroom can take time and practice. Your advice “Keep going out and playing spot the blewit until you know them like an old friend” is great. I’m going to quote you if you don’t mind!
I have collected, cooked and eaten Bewits several times. They taste like kittie kibble to me. I’ve never focused on getting buttons, though. I might have to try that. Thanks for your post!
Fun article. I have a list of mushrooms that took me a while to get over being intimidated by their seeming ambiguity. Lyophyllum decastes, Laccaria laccata, Pluteus cervinus, and Melanoleuca are ones that come to mind. Your blog is my favorite. Keep it up.
As maddening as it can be, you know the ones that you study and study won’t be forgotten. Thanks Kelly. Nice work on the Melanoleuca too, that’s a trich I definitely haven’t picked. I’ve been cautiously sampling some T. equestre for the past 2 years, wish there wasn’t all the hubbub about them being potentially harmful.
I ate a few Tricholoma equestre just some minutes ago, for dinner. I am the only one who eats them in the family, even if people here (Catalonia, Europe) have consumed it for centuries (not in my region).
In my country every region, even village, have it’s own mushroom traditions. We don’t use to pick up blewits, even if there are lots and lots of them here. We find them too strong flavoured even to mix with others. In fact, some mushroomers use to make jelly with them.
I’m struggling with some other shrooms as you did with blewits, exactly the same. But for the L. nuda I have to say that it was really easy for me. Once smelled the first one and found the aroma as descripted in guides, its impossible to confuse them.
This is the first year that I read and exchange opinions about mushrooms with Americans and Brits. Being used to Catalan, French, Italian and Spanish mushroomers and mycologist books and websites, the only big difference that I can relate is the treatement of the odour as a distinctive Id value. This is a generalisation, of course, but I think we pay here more attention to this aspect.
Just wanted to share mi thoughts and congratulate.and thank you for your web.
Thanks Carles. I know that Eastern European mushroom hunters in my area will eat T. equestre. I’ve eaten it a few times by myself, but have been pretty cautious about sharing since the jury seems to be out on the edibility from a safety perspective.
Thank you for your post. I am in America but I have a friend who has friends in Catalan, so it’s very interesting to me to hear about mushrooming in Catalan, as well hearing about your experience with odor, taste, and identification.
I love blewits but I don’t find them that often. The first ones I found were growing in a well-composted leaf pile in my yard; I wouldn’t have seen them had I not been raking the pile up to transfer to a compost bin.
With blewit season rapidly approaching, I reread this post. Blewits are one of my favorites when they are young. I love them pickled. I have a suspicion that many of the blewit haters have been picking young Laccaria ochropurpuea (blah!) instead, as I did years ago the fist time I thought I’d found blewits.
Pete I think you’re right on there with the L. ochropurpurea. They’re pretty mediocre. My problem was that I had been finding blewits and bringing them home for years, but they weren’t purple so I would just practice ID and chuck them in the garbage. Good luck this fall, were getting to the thick of it. A
How do you pickle them, Pete?
And, I will definitely try the butternut squash, sage, and blewit recipe you’ve created Alan. Maybe for me, Blewits are better mixed with other vegetables.
Lauri G., I believe Alan has a good pickling recipe on this site. Not too acidic, and meant to be kept refrigerated.
I forage for mushrooms Spring to late Fall but had never found a Blewit. But last year I found them in my backyard where we dump our Fall leaves. They were picture perfect- blue to lilac in color. I made sure to dump the leaves again in the same spot and this year I was just rewarded with another handful. Based on your advice, I will let 1-2 sporulate, and will bury in another area under the leaf litter. Foraging in the woods is great but just having to go to your backyard is even better. Thanks for the article.
Back in England, Blewits were my first mushrooms, I found them averywhere on leaves from what is called a “sycamore” in England, (it’s not the “Plane” tree of the USA i.e. Platanus, but the Norway Maple) which is considered a weed species as it is invasive and fast growing. I once found a single spore had grown on a leaf into a nickle sized perfect circle, it was the same color, and had the same smell as the blewits I had been collecting. I put it into a pile of leaves, but this shows how agressively they can grow in a single season, with this much growth in a few weeks it would compete with shaggy ink caps for fast production. I would find some of those big maple leaves before they can dry out and put them in a bag with the first blewits you find in the year, or if you don’t cut them off when collecting, the bases of the stems. You should see growth the same season and if you’re lucky more blewits! Another idea would be to crumble dry maple leaves and make a bed for blewits, Crumble at least 8 inches of dry maple or other “soft” leaves in an area that is shaded, wet it down and compress it, then add spores, you could do a spore print or several directly onto maple leaves, and bury them in the crumbled leaves, then bury the whole thing in a foot or so of loose leaves to protect through the winter and to further feed the mushrooms. I wish I could find them in Chicago, I wouldn’t mind the maple dropping those winged seeds from a neighborhood tree landing all over my garden if I could use the leaves that come later to grow blewits. Perhaps I’ll find some while working in Minneapolis this year. :o)
That’s great Doug, I’m going to have to try bringing some of the leaf substrate to other places.
Thank you for this article, Alan, that answers the question I had about these!
I have encountered these on a market this spring mixed with wild Pleurotus eryngii (apparently, they grow in similar habitats at the same time here in Kazakhstan) and was initially uneasy about them.
There aren’t any notable poisonous mushrooms quite like these here and I strongly suspected that they were blewits, but since local mushroom hunting websites showed either blurry low-res pictures, competition grade photos of pretty pristine purple mushrooms, or obviously unrelated species, I hadn’t been able to positively identify them.
This article confirms my suspicions, your beige colored mushrooms look exactly like what I saw.
Glad I could help. Yes, I had the same problem, most pictures are art directed and very purple, and while pretty, they don’t do justice to the widely variable color blewits can take on as they age. Rarely do I see them vivid purple.
Thanks for this, I picked my first lepista saeva today and although I was positive of the ID and asked some experts on a forum too I was still a little doubtful because the stem wasn’t purple like the 100 + images I’ve seen on Google and in books. Your post is very helpful, thank you.
Really great read!
I have been picking Lepista nuda all week. I am an intermediate forager and this article really hit home. I found my first for sure-no doubts- its purple!- mushroom today! Finally feeling comfortable enough to chow down 🙂
Great. Yes as I mention for me the key was understanding the variability of the color. Enjoy your well-earned mushrooms.
Thanks Alan. I’m adding you to my favorites. The bard would say that your article and blog are a good deed in a naughty world. I just found my first blewit in a small maple grove I have for making syrup. I usually find wine caps there. The leaves are just turning and ready to fall. After doing an ambiguous and changing spore print. I finally did a google and found you. I was able to see the changes from button to flat out floppy over a 4 day period which left me wondering it it was the same mushrooms. Your article cleared that up.
I’m also located in Minnesota, I grew up on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
Thanks Duane, yes, I think my experience understanding blewits here has helped a bunch of people feel more comfortable with them. Glad to help.