Winter is the time to sum up the results of the past season. Despite the cold long spring and dry, fruitless summer which brought little but wildfires all over the taiga belt, we still found a few noteworthy things. Several hundred kilometers south east of Ugut, in Novosibirsk, summer was wet and almost subtropical, with countless unusual species popping out here and there, but I missed most of it (can’t be in two places at a time…). In my next posts I’ll tell about some of the more interesting finds.
Tricholoma matsutake
An old Boletus pinophilus on last year’s burnsite
In early September we went about 30 kilometers up the Yugan river from Ugut to check a good Boletus pinophilus spot – Leikovskiy bor, a variously-aged Scots pine and Cladina lichen forest both with untouched patches up to 300 years old and younger patches which appeared after extensive logging in the 80’s. Much to our disappointment most of the good forest had been destroyed – at least to some extent – by a wildfire a year earlier. 
Few fungi fruited on damaged soil: only Lactarius rufus and Russula cf. emetica were relatively abundant, with an occasional Suillus or old, maggot-ridden Boletus pinophilus. Sad and fruistrating.
On our way back we found a group of large gilled mushrooms that I at first mistook for pale Tricholoma focale. I picked one of the fruitbodies, and instantly felt its amazing smell – a strong aroma with notes of cinnamon, fruit and wine. It meant it was the matsutake, a much sought-after delicacy currently known from the Far East of Eurasia, parts of North America and Scandinavia.
Just as it often happens, I was tired (= lazy and inconsiderate) to take pictures at that moment, so I photographed my find a day later, when the fruitbodies began to dry and discolor: pileus surface, lamella edges and belts on the stipe (velar remnants) turned darker brown.
A few days later Elena went a bit further in the same direction to Kordon Kamennyi, the northernmost ranger house of the Yuganskiy nature reserve, and – yay! – also found a group of matsutake.
Here is her find:
By the way, a crop of Tricholoma focale appeared about a week later and we were able to appreciate the difference between these two closely related species: Tricholoma focale has a bright orange-red tinge in its coloring, and its smell is plain boring – the usual dull “mealy” Tricholoma odor.
We’re sending a few pieces of our specimens to a matsutake expert in Sweden to incorporate our find into the global picture of this valuable species’ distribution.
A little culinary spinoff: I used the pathetic leftovers of my five years of learning Japanese to google up what the Japanese do with this mushroom. I ended up cooking matsutake gohan from non-herbarized fruitbodies. The taste is indeed pleasant but it failed to strike me as something unique. Good for the matsutake population 😉
Fungi of Western Siberia 