Mushrooms boletus: description and photo

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:54

It is considered a great rarity to find boletus mushrooms in the forest. This is a peculiar species of tubular called Boletus luridus, growing in deciduous forests and forming mycorrhiza with oaks and lindens. The boletus mushroom can be confused with the porcini due to its external resemblance. The fruiting body has a dense, fleshy stalk and a rounded cap. But there are a lot of differences, the main thing is the blue flesh on the cut.

In many areas, you can increasingly find a bitter analogue - Boletus radicans. But it has slightly different forms and is more like an overgrown flywheel. Distribution sites are the same as those of edible counterparts. Below is a bitter boletus mushroom (photo 2).

Edible boletus mushrooms begin to grow relatively early - from the end of May and the beginning of June. Then there is a break for two months, and in early August and before frost, they appear again. They are much rarer than other tubular species. Great luck to find them in the deciduous thicket. After all, boletus mushrooms have a pleasant taste and excellent aroma. And they are also very fond of forest rodents. And if you are lucky enough to find an uneaten boletus, then this can be considered double luck. Usually boletus mushrooms are lying around with a leg already gnawed.

The leg is a cylindrical barrel of bright yellow color with a distinct reddish mesh over the entire surface. The diameter reaches 2-5 cm, and the height is only 4-12 cm. The boletus looks like a very stocky and dense hero. At the point of contact with the ground, the stem is slightly thickened and has a very dark reddish tint, sometimes brown or black. The flesh is also red at the base, higher, closer to the cap, it is yellow. When cut, it turns green, and then turns blue. Has a subtle characteristic aroma.

The tannery can have different shades of cap: from light olive to bright orange, often yellow, brown, sometimes even red. The surface is smooth, without wrinkles, dry, velvety to the touch. In old fruiting bodies, it becomes bare, blue prints are clearly visible when pressed. At the very beginning of growth, the cap is tightly pressed to the stem, its edges are bent down. Later, it opens a little, but always remains spherical, rounded, with a yellow tubular bottom layer. In the largest specimens, the cap diameter reaches 20 cm, but usually the sizes are much more modest - from 7 to 12 cm.

Dark yellow spore powder. Tubular layer 15-25 mm long. The pores are free, olive-colored at maturity, in a young mushroom they are bright red, turning blue when pressed.

Polet mushrooms are edible, they are used in fried and boiled form and for making sauces. The first broth after boiling must be drained, re-cooking is necessary within 10-15 minutes.

According to some sources, cooked tanneries should not be combined with alcohol.

When processing Boletus luridus, the same bluish coating remains on the fingers. By the bluish pulp, the boletus can be distinguished from its counterpart - boletus. The external outlines of the mushrooms are very similar, but the colors will not allow an experienced mushroom picker to confuse them. The white never has a grid pattern on the stem, in the boletus it is clearly expressed, with a red grid superimposed on a yellow background. The flesh is also lemon-colored, and the mushroom itself belongs to the bluish tubular ones.