09/05/2025
Topanga! Just about a week ago! Another buried treasure found in the Santa Monica mountains! Sooo uhhh, WHERE exactly did you find Boletus barrowsii??” 🤓
This oughta be interesting… Funny too 😂😁😆
I usually have the same response to everybody who asks… “In the mountains where I live, where else?” 🤓😉😂🫂
‘Like answers’ with ‘like questions’ I always say 😉
So feast your eyes on this beauty, Topanga.

A mushroom hunting friend and I recently joked about naming these chunky white porcini “Ghostly Whites” on the account of them proving sort of elusive, and nearly impossible to track with consistency, particularly in my area.
At least speaking from my own experience of feeling relatively familiar with what’s available locally and what is not.
Living in a place for 40 years & never having seen it before has got to count for something.
Yet, seeing is believing, as it were.
A seemingly scarce species, and improbable to come across. But does that make it an apparition?
Boletus borrowsii, documented within Los Angeles County?? Well, yeah, but confirmed cases are slim to none.
Travel north a few hours, and highly unlikely becomes more like sporadic, unless you have a tried hand in specialty hunting.
Italians traditionally shave porcini buttons paper-thin and eat them like a crunchy aromatic salad, with a little sprinkling of salt and locally grown olive oil. The flavor of fresh button porcini has always sort of reminded me of fragrant, sweet raw carrot or pine nuts. Extremely dense and firm, especially when found as fresh young buttons.
With wonderfully aromatic flesh, sweet, earthy & nutty. Cook them over wood coals, or roast them in the oven! Enjoy them with any pairing. They make a wonderful meat alternative as well. No, I’m not vegetarian or vegan, but I can still appreciate meat alternatives like mushrooms, that don’t have a bunch of processed additives and junk mixed in!
The last few pics in this lineup was where the detective work came in… I noticed that somebody (probably kids) had picked a few of these fruiting bodies. Not aware of what they were, they cut them up or stomped them and left the pieces strewn about to dry in the sun. So when I walked by, I noticed them and took a closer look. Noticing the reticulation on the stems, the next few days were spent nose to the ground doing detective work, which revealed several other mushrooms, hidden under barely recognizable shrumps (mushroom bumps under the leaves) in the area.
After sussing out and exposing several barely perceptible shrumps, revealing chunky white porcini buried within, I circled the surrounding area, methodically, investigating every tucked away corner or stand of oak trees. Before long, I chuckle to myself, realizing it wasn’t necessary.
Another three mushrooms had already exploded out of the leaves and were now above ground, standing like pale statues of stone. One of which was the grandpa fatty of the bunch. The cap was fatter and wider than both my hands, fingers spread.
The largest one was rather blown out and soft, but not with one single mushroom worm to its name. Obviously they didn’t get up early enough. Probably indicative of weather that had been in the low 50s for most of the week prior.’
