Description

Mushrooms with teeth? As a matter of fact, yes. Nothing intimidating, mind you, but these mushrooms do have small toothlike projections rather than gills on their lower cap surfaces. The tooth fungi, also known as "hedgehog" and "sweet tooth," appears in a variety of forms. Some grow as shelves on trees. Most are found on the ground. Colorful ones decorate the forest floor with their white, buff, red, orange-brown, blue, and purple caps. Several of the brightly colored wood varieties are used for dyeing woolen yarns. Only two kinds, Hydnum repandum and H. umbilicatum, are commonly eaten. Both are late bloomers, tending to appear in January along the Pacific Coast after other edible mushrooms have stopped fruiting. In the east they appear from July to November.


Hydnum repandum is large, fleshy, buff colored, and found occasionally in groups under conifers or hardwood trees. White teethlike structures bear the spores. In a young specimen the teeth are firm. This is a good way to determine its age. When young, it has a mild, fresh odor, and it tastes best.

Hydnum umbilicatum, sometimes called the belly-button mushroom, is found in the dense undergrowth under rhododendron bushes and other forest shrubbery. It is smaller and darker than H. repandum. The cap is an inch or less in diameter and is depressed in the middle like a belly button. It romps around through the leaves in tr