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Bernice Chan

Vancouver-based chef Robin Kort loves foraging for mushrooms. “I like the treasure hunt. It’s been sort of a lifelong passion, and because I’m a chef, my palate has led me into the forest,” she explains. “Going into the forest and picking mushrooms is super fun and exciting, because they’re just weird little creatures. And as you’re walking along, if you approach the forest from that sort of way of finding treasure, walking slowly, it’s very meditative.”
She says the assortment of mushrooms in North American supermarkets is bland, usually limited to button mushrooms only, but in the forest there are many more such as matsutake, cauliflower and lobster mushrooms, which are red with a hint of seafood taste.

One of her favourites is the prince mushroom, which is related to the button mushroom but smells like anise or marzipan, and is meaty and rich like a portobello. She sautés them to enhance the flavour of steaks and pastas. “I also like to dry mushrooms, turn them into powder and add them in sticky toffee pudding to give it more umami,” Kort says.
Mushrooms not only amplify savoury flavours, but are also healthy ingredients to add to your diet – they contain a lot of nutrients beneficial to the body, such as vitamin D, which boosts immune function, reduces inflammation and helps build strong bones.

According to a meta-analysis by UCLA Research, eating as few as two medium-sized mushrooms a day may help decrease the risk of cancer by as much as 45 per cent. Further, fungi like shiitake, oyster, maitake and king oyster have high amounts of ergothioneine, an amino acid and antioxidant that prevents or slows cellular damage.
Mushrooms have a fleshy texture, making them a good alternative to meat because these vegetarian substitutes contain compounds that inhibit the production of cholesterol, and can also help stimulate a healthier gut and produce healthy bacteria. Fungi are also naturally low in sodium.
Taschen’s coffee-table book The Gourmand’s Mushroom offers a number of ideas on how to cook them, from cream of mushroom soup to mushroom stroganoff and mushroom fried rice.

The book also explores how fungi are portrayed in art, literature and music, from Disney’s dancing mushrooms in Fantasia to Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s colourful mushrooms in his large work Super Nova. Did you know that before she started creating wondrous tales about rabbits and hedgehogs, Beatrix Potter wrote a scientific paper on fungi complete with detailed drawings? Or that Czech composer Václav Hálek (1937–2014) was so moved by what he described as the “song” of the mushroom, he wrote 2,000 melodies inspired by it?
The tome would not be complete, of course, without delving into magic mushrooms like the fly agaric mushroom, or red-capped mushroom dotted with white-spotted warts. Consuming them can result in hallucinations, from euphoria to fits of paranoia.

That’s why it’s best to call on the experts for guidance on how to forage for mushrooms, just as Kort did many years ago when she joined the Vancouver Mycological Society, learning where to find mushrooms and, importantly, which ones are safe to pick.
“I started learning about chanterelles; they are a good gateway for people learning about mushrooms. There’s no deadly poisonous chanterelle lookalikes, whereas matsutake has a deadly poisonous variety,” she says, adding that even after 30 years as a chef, she is still learning new things about mushrooms.

“You can think about mushrooms in terms of what they like to eat,” Kort explains. “A matsutake has a symbiotic relationship with the Douglas fir – they do a nutrient exchange – and this type of mushroom is called mycorrhizal, whereas other mushrooms are parasitic, which means they feed off living things like other mushrooms and trees. And then there’s saprophytic mushrooms that feed on dead material, and they can be cultivated.”
Halfway around the world in Hong Kong, Vicky Lau is the chef-patron of the two Michelin-starred Tate, where she created a mushroom-focused menu in 2021. “I experimented with a lot of different sorts of mushrooms, and that’s really when I learned about the crazy mycelium world, that they’re really an animal of their own,” she says with a chuckle.

In November 2025, she opened Jija at the Kimpton Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui to present her interpretation of Yunnan cuisine. Lau was inspired by a trip to the southwestern Chinese province two years earlier, where some 800 varieties of mushrooms are grown.
“The most interesting one for me is the ganba mushroom [ganbajun], which is grown between pine trees. In the mushroom world, you would compare this to beef because it’s a bit chewy and has a strong meaty aroma,” she explains.

Lau likes to confit the ganba mushrooms and pair them with rice or pasta, which absorb the flavour. At Jija, ganba are chopped up and made into a paste that is stir-fried with rice. “Sometimes we mix it into the mushroom confit to add different layers to the confit,” she explains.
Other Yunnan mushrooms Lau recommends include morels and jizong, also known as “pencil-shaped termite”. Then there is the hunggu (red) that is fragrant, which she infuses into a broth. “It has so much flavour and a touch of acidity, so it infuses very well in broth,” she says.

Another intriguing item on the Jija menu is mushroom sausage, a traditional Yunnan dish. Lau’s version mixes pork in with the predominantly mushroom filling, which is then stuffed into a casing before being poached and grilled.
“You can really treat mushrooms like meat – the way you season it, the way you stir-fry it to extract some of the water, to concentrate the flavour. When you bite, it really releases so much juice that it’s kind of like meat. The mushroom is really a bit in between. It’s not a vegetable and it’s not meat. For me, it’s a category of its own.”

One of Lau’s more surprising recipes infuses black trumpet mushrooms or morels with coffee in cream to make ice cream. “It boosts a lot of the umami, which can be lacking in desserts sometimes,” she says.
The chef’s tips for cooking mushrooms include using the freshest available, and being sure to clean each variety according to its needs – some just need a wipe, others should be washed carefully in water.

It’s also important to cook mushrooms in a very hot pan with oil that has a high smoking point to sear them. “It seals in some of the moisture and it extracts some of the moisture,” Lau explains. “Then I finish it with a bit of butter. I always season it with salt three times – at the very beginning before you cook it and then two times while you’re cooking it so the salt can slowly absorb into the mushroom. It’s kind of like cooking an onion. It takes time to break down and absorb.”
In Vancouver, meanwhile, Kort hopes that eating delicious wild mushrooms will inspire people to think about where their meal originated from and be curious about what they can discover in nature. Perhaps they’ll be inspired to go out and look, she says: “It’s making that connection to the land that we live on.”


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Taschen’s coffee-table book The Gourmand’s Mushroom looks at how fungi are portrayed in art, literature and music, and explores the health benefits of various species


Taschen’s coffee-table book The Gourmand’s Mushroom looks at how fungi are portrayed in art, literature and music, and explores the health benefits of various species.
