Dried Turkey Tail Mushroom | How to Dry Turkey Tail Mushrooms

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How to Dehydrate Turkey Tail Mushrooms

Once you get your freshly foraged turkey tail mushrooms at home, and you check for correct identification in the mushroom guides and lookups for similar species, it is really simple to process and dry the turkey tail.

First, we need to give each foraged turkey tail mushroom a quick rub down with an old toothbrush, making sure to get rid of any dirt and grime. Taking off any bits of wood with a pair of kitchen scissors is easy to do at this stage.

Do a quick inspection for holes, there should really not be any on the fresh specimens, you just want fresh mushrooms, then pat them dry, then lay them out to dehydrate in your dehydrator. Make sure they are spaced out nicely, without overlap.

Set to around 95-100° F, and leave for around 24-36 hours, depending on how many pans you fill. If you have 3+ trays, you will want to definitely rotate every 6-8 hours.

If you do not have a dehydrator, you can do it in an oven. Set your oven on its lowest setting, typically around 200° F, and lay the mushrooms flat on baking sheets.

Again, be sure that no mushrooms are overlapped. Put the pans in the oven as low in the roasting pan as you can get them to go (heat will escape, you want to keep them cooler than 200° since we ideally want 95-100° that we’d have in a dehydrator), and let them roast for about 24 hours, leaving the oven door open by about 3-4 inches.

If you have several trays of mushrooms, you will want to turn them often. I cannot stress enough how important it is that a forager has a dehydrator. It is an extremely low-cost investment that you can use on herbs, fruits, vegetables, and even meat.

During harvest season, my one runs about daily. It is a reliable investment, and hey, it is coming up on holidays and it could be a great gift, even to yourself ;).

In Asia, this mushrooms-brewed tea is consumed every day, but I rarely find this level of fecundity, weekly or twice-weekly is more my speed. I use a medium-sized Capsule of Worth (about 2-inches by 1-inch). If I am feeling ambitious, I grind it up in the spice mill, but I generally just chop it many, many times with scissors.

You want to maximize the surface area when you’re making tea.

The tea that comes from this mushroom is definitely bitter. It smells a little bit like mushrooms too, but it does not actually taste like mushrooms, at least not to me. The taste is difficult to describe, it’s not unappealing, but its hardly my favorite.

I enjoy mixing this in with some of the other teas and blends, which I found perfectly melded with both the turkey tail and the mushroom flavors of the ganoderma, but I have not found anything else quite like it. I mainly steep this in a green tea.