”This marbled meaty steak-like looking fungus is bursting out all over the place. Despite its look and texture it is far from an actual steak. It is a bracket polypore that looks like a deep pink to read tongue/liver shaped with textures like tastebuds.
GeorgeFlavour Fred
White/cream to pink/red pores on the underside over time. Loves oak and sweet chestnut (decaying or dead) and oozes blood when squeezed from its dense meatiness even more so with age. It can really look like a piece of waygu steak or raw tuna sashimi and after handling it can make you feel as I did like some kind of surgery has recently taken place.
It breaks my rule of cooking wild mushrooms and is edible raw but the sourness that comes through doesn’t make we want to do it all that often. It’s probably to do with the tannins in the oak/sweet chestnut that lends to the sourness. For this reason it needs a helping hand and many methods have been applied to address this and it often gets utilised like a slab of meat. My preferred method is jerky given the ability to remove the sourness and build on the flavour profile with other wild flavours. It sat in the marinade below for an hour before I partially dehydrated it before returning to the marinade several times and repeating the process.
Marinade
– Oregano oil
– Noble Fir Molasses
– Soy Sauce
– Elderberry Syrup
– Oregano
– Fermented Mushroom Powder
Seasoned with
– Fermented Wild Garlic Seasoning
Fistulina, the genus name of the Beefsteak Fungus, translates to ‘with little pipes or tubes’. What sets Fistulina fungi apart from other polypores is that the walls of each tube are distinct, unlike neighbouring tubes. The specific name hepatica is a nod to the liver-like appearance of mature Beefsteak Fungus brackets.
