Chinese mushrooms

I was trying to pin down these various wood ears, golden ears, straw mushrooms you see in recipes and the Chinese supermarket. Never knew Chinese mushrooms could be so proliferous, distinct and wide-ranging until so informed by Foodpia. East-Asian fungus foods include, gratifyingly, a lobster and a hedgehog mushroom. Lovely year planner for mushroom picking at Foodpia too. There's also an Asian mushroom cornucopia at the Cook's Thesaurus.



On a less savoury note, this guide to common names for species of the Auricularia genus features the epithet 'Jew's Ear' in more languages than you need to know, or alternatively as 'Judas Ear'. Wood and cloud ears are said to be the big and small Auriculariae, and we'll stick to those names in this house.


Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of multicellular, respiring and fermenting fungi, whose corpus lies in mycelia strung sometimes for miles through the soil substrate. I posted some about the biochem below, in relation to single-celled fungi like our yeast domesticates/commensuralists, essential to food production by brewing, cheese-making and baking.

And because it's off-topic and I like its creepy crypto-fascism, here's Plath's Mushrooms

Overnight, very whitely, discreetly, very quietly
Our toes, our noses take hold on the loam, acquire the air.
Nobody sees us, stops us, betrays us; the small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on heaving the needles, the leafy bedding,
Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless, widen the crannies, shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water, on crumbs of shadow, bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!
We are shelves, we are tables, we are meek, we are edible,
Nudgers and shovers in spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning inherit the earth. Our foot's in the door.