Chanterelle
Cantharellus cibarius
The best known and loved chanterelle is the common Cantharellus Cibarius, the beautiful egg-yellow, almost flowerlike mushroom otherwise known in France as the Girolle, in Germany as the Pfifferling, and in Poland as the Kurka or Liszka.
This pleasantly aromatic fleshy wild mushroom shines like an exotic golden flower when seen from a distance against the drab autumn forest background.
Chanterelles seem to be worth their weight in gold. They have golden looking, golden tasting, and golden priced ! The cap is fleshy, with wavy, rounded cap margins tepering downward to meet the stem. The gills are not the usual thin straight panels hanging from the lower surface of the cap, as we see in the common store mushroom. Instead, the ridges are rounded, blunt, shallow, and widely spaced. At the edge of the cap they are forked and interconnected.
Chanterelles will reapper in the same places year after year if carefully harvested so as not to distrub the ground in which the mycelium (the vegetative part of the mushroom) grows. There are yearly variations -some years more mushrooms, some less-. They fruit during the summer and the autumn, sometimes coming up in several flushes.
