Best Mushrooms

My preferred method of consumption is fried in a conservative amount of oil, on toast if there is a large amount of mushroom. IMHO, frying is itself an great experience as the amora of the mushrooms wafts straight out of the pan and into your face. I also like to dry out surplus and lower quality specimens to add to my "mountain mix" --- a mix of dried mushrooms, herbs and salt that I add to couscous when camping in the mountains. Mushroom identification is as much about ruling out poisonous mushrooms as about ruling in edible ones. Most of my experience comes the UK, so I can't speak for the ease of identification in other regions.The Orange Grisette --- the best a soul can get. Tastes amazing, like scrambled egg. Symbiotic with Birch trees. Fruits in summer. Volva, large white squamules on an orange cap, but no ring! Be careful to avoid confusion with other (potentially deadly) members of the Amanita family. Not edible raw!The Orange Birch Bolete --- Taste is good, but I prize it for its great texture, something like pork belly. Also symbiotic with Birch trees.  Like other members of the Boletus family it has a sponge instead of gills, and (as the name suggests) an orange cap. The scabers on the stem are also a key identifying feature of this and other members of the Leccinum sub-family. Less maggot prone than other Boletii including the well known Porcini. A relatively easy and safe mushroom to identify since few members of the Boletus family are poisonous and none are seriously poisonous. Not edible raw! The Horse Mushroom --- Quite reminiscent of the common cultivated mushroom (agaricus bisporus), but bigger, meatier and with a characteristic sent of aniseed emanating from the cap. Grows in grassy fields in the summer. Be sure to avoid confusion with the poisonous "yellow staining mushroom", members of the ink cap family (poisonous when consumed with alcohol), and the Destroying Angel. The Fly Agaric --- the classic mushroom, with a bright red cap, white squamules, a ring, volva --- everything you could want from a mushroom. Grows with Birch  and Pine from summer to fall. Very common and easy to identify. The standard classification as "poisonous" or "hallucinogenic" overlooks the fact that it is incredibly tasty and edible when cooked properly. Unfortunately, it loses taste with cooking, so you have to walk the fine line between a delicious meal and feeling a bit sick. Dry it out, grind it up and add to soups, stews and pasta. Birch Polypore --- Not for eating, but useful for its medicinal properties. The skin of the fresh mushroom makes a natural, anti-septic and styptic plaster (helped me to recover from my fight with a Belgian Shephard). The dried mushroom makes an anti-viral, anti-bactieral, anti-parasitic worm, anti-inflammatory, anti-tumor, anti-fungal (don't ask me how), anti-all-things-bad tea. I like to think that the gallons I drank contributed to my speedy recovery from Covid.  Next time I travel from UK to Hungary I'll be carrying my bucket for dried 'polypore with me.The Chicken of the Woods --- Mark Galloway (known affectionately in my family as "Galloway" due to his authorship of the Galloway Wild Foods website) says it perfectly, "a genuine textural substitute for chicken". The taste is (IMHO) not too dissimilar from chicken either. Grows on deciduous trees in the spring and summer. I sang and danced for joy when I first found one -- whilst cycling to the SGPE conference in Crief. Relatively easy to idenity. Not edible raw. The Beefsteak Fungus --- if you see a steak growing on an oak tree in summer then it's probably a beefsteak fungus. Looks like steak, bleeds like steak tastes nothing like steak. Doesn't taste much like other mushrooms either. Edible raw so it can make a good snack if you're walking in the forest. Rare in Hungary but even rarer in the UK (in my experience). I'm not aware of any similar looking mushrooms.