In season at the windmill: April - 'Tortulhos' (Amanita ponderosa)

For a certain time each year, the land around the windmill and along the various routes we walk the dog come alive with wild mushrooms, especially after the kind of wet autumn and winter (not to mention spring!) that we’ve had recently.

Despite attempting to identify a few more each year, there’s only two we are currently confident foraging for eating - both with distinctive characteristics, and coming up at the same time and place each year. Thankfully, both are absolutely delicious! First, we are treated with the sometimes-dinner-plate-sized Parasol Mushrooms (Macrolepiota procera) in October/November, which we love to bake in the oven with butter and herbs and enjoy for breakfast with some homemade bread and some of our hen’s eggs. Then, come the end of March, we start to notice reddish-brown bumps bursting out of the ground: these are Amanita ponderosa, made easier to identify because they aren’t many other mushrooms around this time of the year, as well as the distinctive way they appear. This year, we’ve been stirring them into wild mushroom risottos and using them to top bowls of dal.

Amanita Ponderosa at the windmill

Parasol Mushroom at the windmill

Known also as 'Silarca' in the Alentejo, 'Tortulho' in Beira Interior (we sit more or less in between the two) and 'Gurumelo' in Spain, it's a mushroom native to the Iberian Peninsula and highly-prized for its flavour. It is usually found in fairly poor, dry, clay soils (definitely what we have here!) and forms a mycorrhizal relationship with the Esteva (Rock Rose, in English) which abounds here. We're clearly not the only ones looking for it - we’ve seen quite a few people in recent weeks, parked in odd places and literally beating around the bush, peering into the gaps between the rock rose for the tell-tale disturbances on the ground.

They can be easy to miss, as they’re cleverly camouflaged in the exact same reddish-brown hue as the soil they push their way out of, but once you've seen one in an area, it's worth keeping an eye out as they keep popping up in the same place for a few weeks.

When it comes to identifying them, we always do a lot of research and double-double checking before picking and eating any wild mushrooms. We are totally confident eating these now, because we’ve been here a few years and have started to recognise what comes up on our land. It’s particularly important to get this one right though, as the Amanita genus has some particularly nasty family members - Death Cap or Destroying Angel, anyone?

Here’s some things we’ve learnt to look out for:

- It grows almost entirely underground, covered in a ‘veil’. So we look for both the way it breaks through the ground, as well as a ‘thick, sack-like structure at the base of the stem’

- The gills are not attached to the stem

- The colour is reddish-brown

- It has a pleasant, earthy smell

Obviously, please don’t use just these notes to make a decision on eating a mushroom, but they could prove a useful basis for further research if you think you've spotted Amanita ponderosa - it certainly repays the effort of searching for it, and we look forward to its arrival each year.