Why I forage: Adi Staempfli
This week we meet Adi Staempfli who shares how his upbringing in a Swiss village nurtured his love for fungi
How did you start foraging?
I grew up in Switzerland and, being Swiss, foraging is really much more part of our culture. That’s not to say everyone goes foraging – in my family it wasn’t part of our tradition – but when I was 14 one of the other kids in our neighbourhood asked me whether I wanted to go foraging with his dad. That’s how it started and I was just immediately hooked.
In Switzerland every village or town also has a mycological association and, and at the federal level, there’s an exam people can take to become local mushroom controllers or in Swiss, “Pilzkontrolle”. It’s actually a really tough qualification and they are amazing people who then offer a free service where anyone can bring a basket of foraged mushrooms and they go through it with you, telling you what is safe and what each specimen is.
So, I started spending all the time I had in mushroom season just out in the forest exploring, gathering mushrooms and bringing the baskets back to learn all I could. By the time I was 18, they actually told me there was no reason to come back anymore and that gave me the confidence to go out and do it myself. Since then, I’ve been foraging.
Why do you forage?
I think part of what attracted me to foraging when I was a child, was having the opportunity to be on my own, just out in the forest and engaging with life. Every time you find a mushroom, especially if it’s one of your favourites, it’s just such a rush, like a dopamine hit or a cry of joy. I think it’s a kind of alignment and an immediate connection to an ancient way of being.
One essential you can’t go foraging without?
That would be my basket. My wife has given me plenty of mushroomy presents over the years including my basket, although I also always take my beautiful Italian mushroom knife. It’s got a folding curved blade and a clip with a brush on it so it’s just classic for mushrooms.
Biggest foraging faux pas?
I’m reminded of one by my partner all the time. When we had kids I became much more careful with the mushrooms I dish up, but this one day I decided to pick a specific type of ink cap.
Ink caps can be totally fine but there is a risk if you drink alcohol with them, they’ll act like the drugs you’d give to someone struggling with alcohol dependency. Essentially, if you do drink alcohol with them, you’ll soon be vomiting. Luckily, we didn’t that evening but I’m reminded of it enough that it’ll never happen again. It was a long time ago though and definitely an outlier!
Best foraging find?
Maybe the best story is that we used to take our kids on a holiday where we would pull a horse drawn caravan from village to village through France, just travelling through the woods. I’d always joke that I would go out and find three kilograms of ceps to bring home, as they’re my favourite mushrooms, and everyone would always laugh at me because it would never happen.
Then one year we got back from the holiday and I went to one of my spots outside of London and there really were kilos upon kilos of ceps. Sometimes you just get years like that and that was the best of my life.
What would you love to forage but haven’t found yet?
There’s one species called Horn of Plenty – they’re these little black mushrooms loosely in the family of chanterelles, and I had a great patch of them back when we lived in Switzerland which I could fill a basket from. So delicious. They have this almost smoky flavour when dried but I’m still looking for them here in the UK. They’re the elusive mushroom I’m always keeping an eye out for.
What’s your favourite way to cook foraged food?
I always like to eat the first ceps of the year raw in the forest – it’s a wonderful moment. It tastes all nutty and sweet but in terms of cooking mushrooms, I’d always just start with a mix of olive oil and butter and shallow fry them with salt pepper, and garlic to keep it simple. That said, I make and sell my own foraged mushroom jerky too. It’s great on scrambled eggs or pasta, but also fantastic on its own.
Top tip to foragers just starting out?
It can be really overwhelming when there are so many different mushroom varieties so I’d say start by learning how to differentiate between groups of mushrooms and the first I would recommend are boletes. These are mushrooms with a spongy underside to their cap. There aren’t many mushrooms in that group that will cause you trouble and certainly none that could kill you. So, familiarise yourself with one species in that family, like a cep or a birch bolete, and start from there.
My second tip would be to join specialist Facebook groups like Mushroom Foraging UK where you can upload pictures of your finds and where you found them. There, group moderators often help safely identify what you’ve found just like the Pilzkontrolle and there are featured posts and guidelines which can be good starting points. That said, always try and cross-check. If you know someone personally that’s always best and if you can, go out foraging with them or take a course to do in person because foraging isn’t just about identifying a single mushroom or its Latin name, it’s about the whole environment and getting a feel for the entire experience.