Somebody stumbled into this blog after searching How to find Lobster Mushrooms, so I’ll take a few minutes to discuss. Many of the mixed forests in Southern Ontario have lobster mushrooms. This so-called mushroom is what you get when a certain parasite fungus attacks a host mushroom. So, you need to have the Hypomyces lactifluorum organism present and you need to have suitable hosts, usually either Russula brevipes or Lactarius piperatus. for the parasite to attack.

Some forests have a lot of lobsters. They appear sometime in July and I find more and more of them into August and some right into September. There are a couple places I go where it’s possible to collect a basketful of specimens with little effort. One of those places has a mixed bag of trees and the other features a lot of hemlock. Sometimes you can spot lobsters from a long way off, bright red shapes protruding from the ground. In other places, they tend to hide in the leaf litter and all you see is a little bit of red in the duff. Once you find a few, you’ll adapt to spotting them and you’ll find more and more. These are among the easiest of mushrooms to identify.

Look for specimens that are scarlet red and firm and as clean as possible. Once they start changing from scarlet to fire engine red, they are past their expiry. If they’re spongy, forget it, they won’t be much good. Ideally, when you slice into one of these, you’ll get white flesh with a layer of scarlett on the outside. The reality is that it is rare that you can fill a basket with perfect specimens. More often, parts of the lobster have to be cut away and discarded.

Wash your lobster mushrooms under a spray of water, removing all the dirt you can. Then slice them into thin slices, perhaps an eighth inch or even thinner. Cut away anything that isn’t white or red or firm.

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