Before I saw a man in the middle of the woods cheerfully offering me a fungus called Balls of the Bull on the tip of a machete, I don’t think I’d ever said to myself, “Mexico…that’s that country with all the mushrooms.” But then I actually went to Mexico.

Oaxaca, nestled in the country’s southern mountain ranges, is a wonderland of culinary delicacies: cheese, chocolate, mescal, an entire rainbow spectrum of mole sauces. Plenty has been written about all of these foods, though, and I wasn’t sure I’d be inspired on our recent vacation to add another blog post to the literature. But something I wasn’t expecting to find at the markets around town were the heaps of dried chanterelles and big bags of the delectable corn fungus that Mexicans call huitlacoche. Soon we were in a pleasantly fungal state of mind, so when our friend Joel, whose family we were visiting, suggested we take a guided hike up into the mountains to mushroom hunt, we jumped at the chance.

Our point man for this excursion was a small sinewy man of indeterminate age named Ilario. I told him, in my shaky Spanish, that I liked his hat. He told me, in his shaky English, that he used to live in Indiana. And then we packed into the back of his pickup truck and headed for the hills.

Mushrooming is really less of a hunt and more of a mental game, a slow construction of invisible mushroom goggles in front of your eyes.

Joel and his daughter, Indigo, intrepid mushroom hunters at work

Grasp too hard and they’ll disappear under the leaves. Relax into it and they’ll start to pop into your field of vision. Soon we were seeing them everywhere, dozens of different kinds: bright red chile mushrooms, buttery yellow chanterelles, alarmingly-blue-but-surprisingly-edible azules, little branched growths called “old man’s beard.” Ilario declared each one edible or inedible, and we separated them into Joel’s mesh bags: one bag of “eaters” and one to simply admire for their very existence.

The discovery of the Balls of the Bull caused quite a stir because of its massive size and impressive color, but I think my favorite moment came when Ilario wandered off the path for a few minutes and came back holding what looked like a big ol’ handful of snot. “Muy sabroso!” he crowed with glee, and gave us the Spanish name, which I’ll translate here roughly as The Trembler. Frankly, we were all a little terrified of The Trembler, but we took Ilario’s word for it and headed back to the cabins where we were staying that night.

The cook took one look at our haul and immediately listed various ways we could use the edible ones: scrambled into eggs, combined into a flavorful broth, added to a thick tomato-based soup or even frozen for later. We sampled them in multiple dishes over the following twenty-four hours, and there wasn’t a single one that I didn’t find tasty. Even The Trembler, when added to the broth, had the pleasing texture of a good rice noodle. Now that I’m back in Brooklyn, will I ever come face-to-face with The Trembler again? Probably not, but I’ll keep my mushroom goggles on just in case.