The first thing Bryan Jessop did when I met him in a parking lot was say hello. The second thing was request that I disable geotagging from my iPhone camera.
Those in the mushroom foraging scene, it seems, must strike a balance between camaraderie and secrecy. Theirs is a passion that can be shared, but easily ruined. For Jessop, a professional wild food forager for some of San Francisco’s premier fine dining restaurants, the stakes are high.
Luckily, he was still willing to let me tag along to an undisclosed (and un-geotagged) location, so I climbed in the passenger seat of his car and swore myself to secrecy.
His dashboard was decorated with pinecones, a sprinkling of dirt, and two fuzzy mullein leaves baking in the sun. He’d just foraged them from the Sierra Nevada mountains per the request of a chef in Sacramento seeking unusual napkins for a finger-food course.
On the drive, he pulled up his phone to show me our to-forage list. Listed in quarts: radish flowers, nasty (short for nasturtium), lobster mushrooms, yerba buena mushrooms, borage flowers, to name just a few. It seems like a tedious and laborious list for one day, let alone every, but he’s finally sought some help. After a decade running the show solo, Jessop this spring enlisted three foragers to assist him. Each morning, he synthesizes the orders from chefs that trickle in throughout the night prior (some, chefs being a largely nightblooming species, as late as 2 a.m.) and divvies up the duties.
On any given day, Jessop fulfills orders for a broad list of flowers, grasses, lettuces, herbs and garnishes found growing wild below foot. His business, Morchella Wild Foods, has a Michelin star-stacked client list including Lazy Bear, Quince, Sons and Daughters, and Californios. He and his team deliver to about 25 restaurants a week, up to three times a week. But this is all supplemental labor to support his greatest love and the inspiration for his business: mushroom foraging.
“Mushrooms are my favorite part. It's what got me into this,” Jessop said. “It was kind of the dream; like, maybe I could hunt mushrooms for a living. Just do this all the time and travel all over the West following the mushrooms.”
He does. Winters are spent foraging in the Bay Area, which grows rich with fungi in the wetter months. In the spring and summer — from April to October, or so — he heads to the Sierras weekly. In fall, Jessop makes trips to Humboldt county and the southern coast of Oregon, but this year’s early rains have kickstarted mushroom season ahead of schedule.
Arriving at the first of two locations, we set off to find the greatest of his great loves: porcinis. Jessop played it cool, but I could sense the anticipation in the air. While many San Franciscans lamented our record-cold summer and early fall rains, the mushroom foraging community was following meteorology maps with bated breath.
Early rains can yield more mycelium diversity and longer seasons, like a “multiplier,” for the year, Jessop explained. It’s a fungi fanatic’s wish come true, on top of being good for business. He and his buddies had been painstakingly following the fall’s first storm like a spectator sport. They’re interpreting the rainfall that came in September and October (already about 2 inches in the Bay Area) as a critical indicator of a great season ahead. “If we get normal rain from here on out, it'll probably be a once-in-a-decade mushroom event,” Jessop told me, eyes wide.
Jessop got into mushroom hunting in 2009 with his brother. With the help of Mushrooms Demystified, a useful guidebook by mushroom guru David Arora, and the knowledge of a generous mentor, the brothers learned the ropes and grew into outright devotees. One particularly plentiful foraging season, the brothers came upon a large amount of morels and, having far too much to eat themselves and share with friends, went door-to-door selling them to various chefs in SF. Soon enough, Jessop realized he could start a business. He named it Morchella after the genus name of morels, and officially opened shop in late 2015.
But it’s the delectable little porcinis, or Boletus edulis, that are his favorite. There was a time not long ago in Europe when foraging was regarded as famine activity and animal behavior, save for the sexy truffles and porcinis. These gourmet mushrooms (their name translates to “little piggies” in Italian) are brown and white with thick stems and spongy, as opposed to gilly, undersides. Their nutty, savory flavor enlivens any pan.
Just make sure they’re not Amanita phalloides, which make for an effective last meal on earth. Mushroom foraging has long carried this risk: Certain fatal species can be easily mistaken for the tasty ones by the untrained eye. But Jessop says spooky stories of mix-ups, like the deadly jack-o’-lantern mushrooms being mistaken for delicious chanterelles, adulterate the work of seasoned professionals and tarnish the reputation of these subterranean gems. Jessop is confident, but not careless. Selection is the blessing of foraging as a purveyor, not a survivalist; if a mushroom doesn’t look right, he doesn’t risk it.
Eventually, we pulled off the road and got to hiking. I carried a small empty pack soon to be filled with porcinis, while Jessop donned a backpack stuffed with a five-gallon bucket of mushroom scraps. He often returns cuttings and unused bits to the earth to stimulate the fungus networks of his spots. He led me off the trail to a very particular tree grove and got on his hands and knees to push little buttons in the brush. Sometimes, a tiny mound is just a tiny mound. Other times, it's a porcini.
Much to this amateur’s delight, we found some precious porcinis! The largest had been besieged by hypomyces, a parasitic fungus. In some cases, hypomyces are safe: It’s what turns a russula mushroom into a lobster mushroom. But in this case, the hypomyces makes the porcini toxic to eat. We also found a few less-than-perfect porcinis, not handsome enough for the Michelins but certainly sufficient for Jessop’s home kitchen.
When we got back down to the car, he stored the haul in one of three large boat refrigerators in his trunk that he’s rigged up with solar panels. On trips to the Sierras, Jessop sleeps soundly to their white-noise hum.
Our next location was an empty lot between some roads. It didn’t look like much, but dozens of edible plants grow there: chickweed, oxalis, speedwell, and radish flowers, among others. When it comes to making a living off the land, Jessop adheres to the standard rule of sustainability: Take no more than a third of what’s growing. However, chefs, as you may guess, are incredibly particular, so Jessop and his team painstakingly pick out only the most uniform and perfect flowers, an arduous and almost maddening process. If a chef wants 2.5-centimeter nasturtium leaves, Jessop will go out and measure each individual leaf with a ruler. On top of uniformity, chefs are hoping for no blemishes, no bug holes, slug trails, or aphids.
They say love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life. An all-year full-throttle rain-or-shine wild foraging business is not for the faint of heart, though in Jessop’s case, “I think I enjoy it more now than when I first got into it,” he said. “In general, any day that I'm mushroom hunting, it doesn't feel like work.”
