Dreams of sourdough: Camping (2): looking for mushrooms in Oberon

Leaving Kanangra, we headed to Oberon for some mushroom picking. The nearby Vulcan state forest has several roads leading into the forest, where one can forage for mushrooms. We were so sad to see that blackberries were being sprayed in the area - they looked so plump and delicious!

Heading into the forest was like being in Hansel and Gretel. There was something magical about the slightly damp smell of the pine trees, the undergrowth crunching crisply, and the sunlight streaming through the trees. All the trees looked the same, and if not for the view of the road it could have been very disorienting. For the first few minutes, we saw no mushrooms at all. I started wondering if mushroom picking wasn't what I envisaged it to be.. like it was more like mushroom hunting.

Then we saw a saffron milkcap, surrounded by more.. and then in whichever direction we looked, we saw them everywhere! Many were hidden by the undergrowth, but the telltale bumps in the ground became more obvious to us as we picked more. Saffron milkcaps are easily identifiable by their distinct saffron colour, large round cap with an indentation on top, and clearly ridged gills on the underside.

At first we picked whatever we saw, but soon we realised there must have been thousands of mushrooms in the forest! We started picking only the "beautiful" ones, whatever that may be. We contemplated whether larger ones or smaller ones would be more tasty (well... we never found out), so took a selection of sizes.

We found only saffron milkcaps in the first part of the forest we went to, so we drove to a different part to see what we would find. What an interesting experience that was! As we wandered into the forest, I said wouldn't it be nice to see some poisonous mushrooms too?

And they were everywhere! I was fascinated by the magnificent poisonous mushrooms, which were the most vivid shades of orange and red. The toadstools looked impossibly like the ones on super mario.

In the second forest we picked lots of slippery jacks, which have a brown satiny cover (peeled before consumption) and a bright yellow smooth underside. Whoever sees these types of mushrooms in supermarkets?

The lady at the information centre told us that of the many varieties of mushrooms in the forest, these are the most easily identifiable non-toxic varieties and hence they are recommended. The field mushrooms which resemble mushrooms in supermarkets (white cap, white stem) can be confused with the toxic varieties, and so the rule is (somewhat surprisingly) don't pick anything that looks like a normal mushroom! Maybe this one was a poisonous slippery-jack lookalike?

Where's the mushroom?

The roads around Oberon were completely different to the mountain landscape - all pastoral scenes with lush green fields and grazing livestock. It was a beautiful day too.

We had decided to camp in Oberon, but the campground in Black Springs near the mushroom picking forest was basically a park in the middle of town, all windy and exposed. We decided to go to the millionth acre campground near Hampton State Forest, but unfortunately that area has been heavily logged and the campground now sits amidst sad looking tree stumps much like a wasteland. We didn't find either of them palatable so headed back to Perrys Lookdown to camp for our last night.

Alas at dinner time we took out our mushrooms and found that the saffron milkcaps were bruised and looking very sad with a greenish fungal sheen. If we had known we should have taken more care with storing them! We ended up feeding most of the saffron milkcaps to the bush, but the slippery jacks were sturdier.

The next morning we packed up and headed to Anonymous cafe in Blackheath for breakfast. This was a pretty chic cafe that wouldn't look out of place in Surry Hills. Our breakfast burrito was very In-the-Annex-esque, and their date & walnut sodabread was pretty damn tasty.

We went for a walk from Govett's Leap to Evan's lookout. It was a beautifully clear day and the view from Govett's Leap was expansive and just spectacular.