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A variety of wild mushrooms offer a feast for the taste buds. (Photo: China Daily)
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BEIJING, July 24 (Xinhuanet) -- July is one of the best months to tickle your palate with fresh wild mushrooms. For Beijing gourmands the good news is that restaurants here are transporting fresh mushrooms by air to the capital daily. Colorful Yunnan, for example, has been flying in 80 kg of wild mushrooms to its Anzhen branch, and 100 kg to its Temple of the Moon branch since last week. In & Out, a popular Yunnan cuisine restaurant located at Sanlitun has also been flying in fungi.
The fresh fungi taste much stronger, slippery, and far more savory, than refrigerated, dried, or canned mushrooms.
Yunnan province in Southwest China produces probably the world's biggest variety of fungi - more than 800 kinds and the province alone consumed 50,000 tons of wild fungi last year.
A recent media tasting at Colorful Yunnan allowed us to take a look, and have a taste of some newly arrived mushrooms from the region.
Matsutake, dubbed "king of fungi", is probably the most famous fungus in Yunnan. Interestingly, the locals didn't eat it much until the Japanese started to import it in large quantities in the mid-1980s, according to Wang Min, general manager at Colorful Yunnan.
The story goes that, matsutake were the only "plants" that survived the atomic bombing on Hiroshima in 1945, and since then the Japanese have developed a strong belief in its health benefits.
Last year, Yunnan exported 957 tons of the fungus, which can only be gathered in wild fields. Yunnan is now trying to develop the domestic market for the fungus.
Boletus and yellow morel are two other native fungi that Yunnan exports in large quantities.
"There are 158 varieties of boletus, but only a few varieties, the yellow, white and black ones, are edible," Wang says. "A trick is to fry garlic slices with boletus. If the garlic slices turn black, then the boletus is not edible."
