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. Continue reading →