Hunting for Easter eggs or searching for hidden treasures can be so fun! Hunting for the Dancing Maitake Mushrooms can be a delicious, healthy and fun adventure!
1) What is the Dancing Maitake Mushroom?
“Maitake” means dancing mushroom in Japanese. The mushroom is said to have gotten its name after people danced with happiness upon finding it in the wild, such are its incredible healing properties.
This mushroom is a type of adaptogen. Adaptogens assist the body in fighting against any type of mental or physical difficulty. They also work to regulate systems of the body that have become unbalanced. While this mushroom can be used in recipes for taste alone, it’s considered to be a medicinal mushroom.
The mushroom grows wild in parts of Japan, China, and North America. It grows at the bottom of Oak, Elm, and Maple trees. It can be cultivated and even grown at home, though it typically won’t grow as well as it does in the wild.
Although maitake mushroom has been used in Japan and China for thousands of years, it has only gained popularity in the United States over the last twenty years. People are praising this mushroom for its promises of health, vitality, and longevity. The Maitake mushroom, also known as a Sheepshead or Hen of the Woods mushroom, is a mushroom that can be found annually in the fall.
The Maitake (Japanese for dancing mushroom) is a shelf/bracket mushroom due to how it’s meaty leaves (conks) are stacked. The Maitake mushroom is also a polypore which means that instead of having gills on the underside of the conks, it has a solid system of pores or tubes. These mushrooms can’t weigh upwards of 50+lbs so when you find one, you may be set for a while! The Maitake mushroom makes excellent eating and is much easier to find than the springtime favorite, the Morel mushroom. In addition to its delicious taste, the Maitake is a powerful medicinal mushroom. The polysaccharides or beta-D-glucans in the Maitake mushrooms have been known to help the body fight cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS symptoms, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure.Hen of the woods, maitake, sheepshead, hen of the forest, and delicious Maitake mushrooms have lots of names. These are the king of Fall mushrooms in the Midwest, at least in size. I say Fall mushroom because they come out in earnest post Summer, but you might see an occasional one in midsummer, although they’re rare that early. These can grow to be massive, and some Maitake mushrooms have been picked in clusters that have weighed thirty pounds or more. Even with their large size, these can be a frustrating, elusive mushroom to hunt.
2. Hunting for Dancing Maitake Sheepshead or Hen of the Woods Mushroom
Study the following tips to ensure you find your fair share of Maitake mushrooms this fall.
Timing is everything. Like with other mushrooms, certain environmental factors have to be right for the Maitake, sheepshead or hen of the woods mushrooms to grow. The growing season depends mainly on moisture and 60-65 degree temperatures, so in the US, focus your efforts from September to October especially after rainfall. It is best to check an area multiple times so you don’t miss the short growing period.
HABITAT
A large old red oak, this is what you want. Dancing Maitake mushrooms are technically a parasitic mushroom that lives off of a host tree. Hunting in Minnesota, the easiest way to look for these is to go to areas with old white and red oaks, with red oaks seeming to be their preferred host. It might seem counter intuitive, but you don’t need to be in the deep woods for these, although some of my best patches are very secluded. Here’s the best tips I can think of:
- Look to your nearest park that has big old oak trees, it doesn’t have to be “woodsy” open and grassy with a playground is fine, just try to not look like a stalker, and make sure the grass isn’t being sprayed if it’s a golf course or something similar. if it’s at the right part of the season, they won’t be that difficult to find at all. Be warned though, you won’t be the only person looking at local parks, lowest hanging fruit and all.
- You don’t have to hike! I have a couple of friends who hunt on bike, biking helps you cover a lot of area quickly, and snatch low-hanging (read as obvious) hens along paved trails. As a bonus, you can have less competition going to areas less hunters think to go, since most will hunt on foot.
- If you find one, there’s more! If one tree has a hen, then the whole grove has likely been infected. Keep looking around at the base of trees, and keep coming back after you get some rain, rest assured, if you find one hen, you’ve probably found a spot to go for years to come.
- Look for death and decay. Hens are a parasite, and aren’t good for the trees they feed off of. It’s not a rule, but a good way to start out hunting is to find woods that have lots of fallen oaks, stumps, and dead matter or base of a maple tree.
My favorite way to hunt hen of the woods is the old fashioned way- on a secluded trail away from prying eyes, and competing hunters. After you find a couple spots, all you have to do is waltz in and check to see if they are fully grown
.Look at the base of oak trees.
The Maitake, sheepshead or hen of the woods mushrooms grow at the base of large oak trees. Oak trees are pretty easy to identify due to the presence of acorns, their deeply grooved bark or their leaves’ pointy/jagged lobes. Find large oak trees and the battle is half over!
Look in old, mature woods.Get yourself into some well established hardwood forests for the best luck. Are the trees large in diameter? Is the woods somewhat dark due to the impressive oak canopy? If so, you’re in the right spot.
Vary elevations to find the right moisture content.
Rainfall totals vary from year to year and certain elevations may be dryer than others. Search different elevations and take note of where you are finding your mushrooms. Some years this may not matter much, but in drought years, you may notice a pattern. Search oak trees from the creek bottoms to the hilltops to see where the Maitake are hiding.
Look on all sides of the tree. Although some report that the Maitake mushrooms prefer the north side of oak trees, the dancing Maitake mushroom can be found all around oak bases and even in the middle of the tree! It may like hoe down dance, but go from oak to oak and do a complete circle around them.
Search the hard to reach areas.
Maybe you are not the only one that is going to hunt Maitake, sheepshead or hen of the woods mushrooms this fall. You, however, can reach those harder to reach mushrooms that others will pass on because they are too far off the beaten path. Put in the hard hunting work and you’ll reap the rewards.
Keep a diary of known producing Maitake Mushroom trees.
If an oak tree produces a Maitake mushroom one year, chances are, it’s an annual event. Bring a GPS and mark the trees where you find Maitake mushrooms. Utilizing a GPS will give you a proven route to take that will bring you many pounds of success.If you know trees that are hosting Maitake mushrooms, they’ll come back year after year in the same location. It’s interesting because they grow specifically on one tree, but if you find one in an area, look around, because there are probably more nearby. Once you know an area has them, you can bet other trees will become infected, remember,Maitake mushrooms are a parasite. If you have an area that’s rich in Maitake mushrooms, you should go there regularly once they start to fruit, since different trees will give Maitake mushrooms at different times throughout the season. Maitake mushrooms can be discovered at the base of white oak trees, red oak trees, and very occasionally on maple.
Cut the Maitake, sheepshead, or hen of the woods at the base of the mushroom.
It’s best to cut the dancing maitake mushroom while leaving the base rooted into the ground. Carry a long filet knife to allow for an easy harvest and you’ll help to ensure the spot will be a repeat grower in the following years.
Bring a very large duffle bag.
Dancing Maitake or sheephead mushrooms can be large and take up a ton of space. You’ll need a good strong duffel bag to bring your harvest home!
When to harvest
When you find a young dancing Maitake mushroom, it might be tiny, the size of a golf ball or your fist, or it could be larger. There’s a natural urge to wait for it to get huge, thinking you will get more Maitake mushroom for your hunt, but that is wrong thinking as the young and tender Maitake mushrooms taste much better than the large, old and tough Maitake mushrooms.
How Big is Big enough?
The biggest thing to know with these dancing Maitake mushrooms is that while you can come across huge clusters it does not absolutely taste better. Most of the time when I find a dancing Maitake mushroom I take it, unless I can clearly see that it’s just starting to poke it’s head out of the turf, and then I might wait a few days or so. Other mushroom hunters might not find your dancing Maitake mushroom if you greedily wait a week for your dancing Maitake mushroom to balloon to behemoth size, but beetles, slugs, and fly larvae will.
Another thing not often discussed with these is that waiting and watching them can compromise their cleanliness. Dancing Maitake mushroom can be tricky enough to clean as it is, but if you get a nice rain, and dirt splashes up on the dancing Maitake mushroom and dries, the mushroom will physically absorb the dirt into the flesh as it grows. To avoid breaking your teeth. Pick the dancing Maitake mushroom young, and pick the dancing Maitake mushroom clean.
Cultivated vs Wild
You may have seen little plastic bags of dancing maitake mushrooms at specialty grocery stores. The flavor of a dancing maitake mushroom resides in what it consumes, so to speak. A wild dancing maitake mushroom is like a naturally raised and fed animal, and has a rich, particular flavor. Dancing maitake mushroom can be cultivated though, and, like you might suspect, the growers are not creating the same mushroom diet as their wild cousins. Over the years, I would source cultivated dancing maitake mushroom from suppliers here and there, but they taste like a button mushroom with the shape of a dancing maitake mushroom. But, I do know at least one company that’s created a more natural substrate for theirs to grow on, and, it follows that the more natural the substrate, the better the flavor will be, but it will still never taste as good as a wild dancing maitake mushroom, period.
Happy Dancing Maitake Mushroom Hunting!
Hopefully these tips will help you to find some Dancing Maitake mushrooms this fall. They are an abundant and tasty mushroom that possesses great medicinal qualities. Happy Prosperous Hunting for the Maitake Mushrooms!