Dishes with aspen boletes — 8 delicious homemade recipes

They are all very much alike: the red aspen bolete, the white aspen bolete, the oak aspen bolete, the yellow-brown aspen bolete, the spruce aspen bolete, and so on. Even the most experienced mushroom pickers often cannot tell one aspen bolete from another. The aspen bolete somewhat resembles the birch bolete, only its stem is thicker and its cap is denser. The cap of the aspen bolete looks like a fallen autumn leaf — it is bright orange. In the autumn forest it does not catch the eye right away; it is very easy to walk right past an aspen bolete. But once the color of the fallen leaves turns dark brown, aspen boletes stand out on the ground like Chinese lanterns.

In nature there are no poisonous mushrooms resembling the aspen bolete, so heading into the forest for aspen boletes is perfectly safe. If we lean on the quote given at the start of the article, then salted milk mushrooms are much tastier than salted aspen boletes, which makes milk mushrooms a more desirable "catch" for mushroom pickers. On the other hand, aspen boletes can not only be salted, but also pickled, fried, dried, and boiled.

By the way, in mushrooms (according to many plant-eating animals) the tastiest part is the caps. As a rule, they do not eat the stems at all.

Aspen boletes grow across nearly all of Russia, including even the tundra. These mushrooms owe their name to their tender love of aspens — it is right beside these trees that aspen boletes prefer to come into the world.

A quirk of the aspen bolete: during cooking or drying, this mushroom usually turns black, just like the birch bolete. Because of this not-so-pleasant property, the aspen bolete is called the "black mushroom".