Nowadays, a huge number of people, for one reason or another, do not eat meat (including chicken): someone is on a diet, and someone is on vegetarian food. And, most likely, both of them sometimes really want meat, and the smell of fried chicken seems to them delicious and mesmerizing …
In this case, an unusual mushroom can come to the aid of such people, the dishes with which smell like chicken - this is a chicken mushroom or a sulfur-yellow tinder fungus. It is difficult not to notice a mushroom growing on a tree.
The young mushroom has a dazzling yellow color - downright woody chick - and is visible from several tens of meters away.
Those who have tried dishes with chicken mushrooms say that if you do not know what they are made of, then they really taste very much like dishes with chicken meat.
Sulfur-yellow polypores are found in many countries, growing on tree trunks in whole groups. Keeping such parasitic fungi on yourself is a heavy burden for a tree, because the size of a chicken mushroom can reach 40 cm, and its weight can be 10 kg.
Tinder fungus is a conditionally edible mushroom, and only young mushrooms are eaten, since adult specimens become poisonous. Before cooking, you need to boil the tinder fungus for half an hour, drain the water and only then cook their dishes. Soups, salads, roasts, casseroles, pickled, baked pies with minced mushrooms are made with chicken mushrooms. For long-term storage, the tinder fungus can still be dried.
In Germany and America, chicken mushroom is considered a delicacy, there it is also called "wood chicken" or "mushroom chicken".
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The sulfur-yellow tinder fungus is also used in medicine, it is a source of antibiotics resistant to staphylococcus.
But it must be remembered that only young, pleasantly smelling mushrooms can be eaten. And adults, with an unpleasant, mousey smell, polypores can cause poisoning, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and hallucinations.
The sulfur-yellow polypore (Laetiporus sulpbureus) is a wood-destroying fungus. Its spores penetrate the damaged bark. The resulting mycelium settles in the core of the tree, causes brown rot of the wood and gradually destroys it. The wood becomes crumbly and disintegrates into regular, almost rectangular pieces pierced with whitish mycelium. A few years later, the first fruiting body of the fungus appears in a crack in the bark or cut of the trunk, only one or two small "fans". A young mushroom usually bears fruit in a year and in exactly the same place. In our botanical garden, there are two mushrooms of approximately the same age. One of them begins to grow in early June, and the other - only at the end of August, and this is not the first year that has been repeated. The size of their fruiting bodies is gradually increasing. When the heart of the trees is heavily affected by the mycelium, the mushrooms will begin to bear fruit annually, and at the very end of the life of the trees even two, and sometimes three times per season - from the end of May to the beginning of October.
Usually the life of the sulfur-yellow tinder fungus ends with the fall of the host tree - its empty trunk cannot withstand the wind. At the same time, the outer tissues of the tree remain alive, and if the trunk does not fall apart when falling, the tree can live lying down for several more years. The full development cycle of the fungus from the entry of spores to the death of the tree usually lasts more than ten years.
The English name for the sulfur-yellow tinder fungus - "woody chicken" - is given not only for the "chicken" color, but also for the chicken taste of the mushroom when fried. But for food, only young mushrooms are collected, which are in the "dough" stage. With age, the detached "fans" of the fruit bodies of the fungus become rigid.
They are not tasty, and therefore mushrooms collected from willow and poplar are almost not edible. These trees contain a large amount of bitter substances in the bark and wood, which pass into the tissues of the fungi. In order for such mushrooms to cease to be bitter, they must be carefully squeezed raw and stewed for a very long time (one and a half to two hours). From the rest of the trees, the "woody chicken" fried without prior boiling really tastes like chicken meat.
You can "wood chicken" and boil. And if you add dill during cooking, the mushroom will taste like boiled squid. Several years ago I canned a boiled mushroom and for a long time fed my acquaintances with salad with "squid", and everyone wondered why these squid were not "rubber" at all.
Of course, you cannot pick mushrooms near highways and on the streets of large cities, just like all other mushrooms. The harmful substances contained in the exhaust gases are absorbed by the porous body of the fungus, like a sponge, and remain in it for a long time.
In medicine, this mushroom is valued due to the content of some antibiotics that can fight resistant forms of staphylococcus.
Most of the fungus, and this is 70%, consists of resinous nutrients that have a positive effect on the organs of the respiratory system, biliary tract and liver. Japanese fungo-therapists claim that the tinder fungus is able to act on the liver in such a way that it will produce an enzyme that breaks down fats. For this reason, weight loss drugs based on this mushroom are produced in Japan.