Mushroom Culinary Arts
NAMA‘s Mycophagist‘s Kitchen is committed to the delicious, safe, and interesting preparation of wild and cultivated mushrooms. We offer programs in mushroom cookery and preservation which draw from a wide variety of ethnicities and styles.
We promote and share knowledge of all aspects of mycophagy, including cooking demos, recipes, medicinal preparations (teas and tinctures), interviews with mushroom chefs, and tips on handling the variety of flavors, textures, and toxicities of wild mushrooms.
Check back regularly for updated culinary resources:
Check back regularly for updated culinary resources:
Meet the Culinary Arts Committee
Culinary Committee Chair
Julie Schreiber @chezjuliesconsultingwinemaker
Northern California
Julie has been collecting, cooking, and eating mushrooms for 30 years. As a professionally trained chef, she has been teaching others about cooking and eating mushrooms for a significant portion of those three decades. In addition to her personal passion for good food and cooking, her formal training in the food and wine industry includes degrees in Hotel Restaurant and Travel Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Culinary Arts from the Culinary Institute of America, and a Master’s Degree in Enology from the University of California at Davis.
She has worked as a chef and is currently a professional winemaker. Additionally, she was on the Sonoma County Mycological Association board for 14 years and the lead chef for culinary events and demos at mushroom forays for David Arora, the Sonoma County Mycological Association (SOMA), the Mycological Society of San Francisco, the North American Mycological Association (NAMA), Wild About Mushrooms (WAM), and Relish Culinary Adventures.
She is a business partner in Mycoventures (https://www.mycoventures.com/wam), a company that organizes local and international mushroom forays. She organizes the events, helps lead the forays, and teach people how to cook cultivated and wild mushrooms.
Most recently she has become the Culinary Committee Chair for the North American Mycological Association (NAMA).
Visit her webpage at: https://chezjulies.com/
Zachary Williams-Hunter @the_fungivore
Oaxaca, Mexico
Zachary (@chefmazi) has worked in kitchens and food service since 1992, starting washing dishes for his high school kitchen during his lunch break through running the kitchen at his own restaurant (ul.te.ri.or. restaurant and bar) with business partner Tighe Melville in Santa Cruz, CA 2016-2017. His last efforts in the kitchen was cooking for immersive retreats, where he experimented with cooking one cuisine for the entire week: he has taken deep dives through Mexican, Oaxacan, Spanish, Israeli/Palestinian, Thai, and Pacific Northwest, with brief forays into Vietnamese, Greek, Singaporean, Portuguese and more.
Though they intended to move to Oaxaca in April of 2020, instead his partner (now fiancé) Kim Hunter and he ended up staying in Northern Thailand for the pandemic, finally returning to the US in August of 2021. Working with local grandmothers, he learned the depths of Northern Thai Cuisine, and wrote a cookbook on the same.
Since 2001, he has been an avid mushroom hunter, and became known as The Mushroom Chef, and has been presenting a speaking at Mycological events and camps (especially SOMA camp) since 2013, exploring the science of cooking and eating mushrooms, a study known as mycophagy.
Kim and Zachary moved to Oaxaca, Mexico in March of 2022. They lead mushroom retreats there with their Zapotec partners Celestino Mendez and Dr. Samuel Lazo This year they are exploring dyeing with mushrooms with Alissa Allen and Cheshire Mayrsohn.
Jess Starwood @jess.starwood
Southern California; Arizona
Jess is an author, naturalist, herbalist and wild food chef with a Masters of Science degree in Herbal Medicine. She recently published “Mushroom Wanderland: A Forager’s Guide to Finding, Identifying and Using More Than 25 Wild Fungi” with Countryman Press.
Jess has worked as a wild food consultant and forager for Los Angeles chefs Aitor Zabala of Somni and Niki Nakayama of n/naka. Jess has been teaching wild foods and nature education classes for children and adults since 2014.
She founded The Wild Path School—a wild food apprenticeship and education program—in 2020 that strives to connect the community to nature and the foods we eat in a positive, healing and sustainable way. She also leads immersive foraging adventures, multi-course gourmet wild food dinners and other food-focused experiences on the West Coast, Southwest United States and Mexico.
She is also the editor of The Sporeprint and heads up the Mycophagy & Culinary Group (McLAMS) for the Los Angeles Mycological Society.
Visit her websites at thewildpath.org and jstarwood.com
Spike Mikulski @1wd2ef3rg4th5yj6uk7il
Rhode Island
Spike is the Executive Chef at Pot au Feu Bistro in Providence, Rhode Island where he gets to prepare & serve foraged ingredients you can’t find on any other menu in New England.
Spike is Rhode Islands first mushroom forager approved by the state to sell wild mushrooms commercially & teaches the state’s certification program once a year for those also interested in foraging mushrooms for local restaurants and markets.
During rainy season, Spike enjoys studying the Amanitaceae, some of which make up his top ten edibles. Unfortunately for Rhode Island, there are NO Amanita approved for sale, so you will not find them on the menu at Pot au Feu.
He does, however, get to utilize his experience as an Amanita Expert & Northeast Specialist for the ‘Poisons Help; Emergency Identification for Mushrooms & Plants’ Facebook group as an identifier. (https://www.facebook.com/groups/144798092849300/).
In the off-season, he has taken a fascination to learning Food Molds and Plant Pathogens commonly seen in the modern kitchen, observing occurences like “sour-rot” on sweet potato caused by Geotrichum candidum (which is utilized in cheese making) or garlic bulbs being parasitized by Penicillium corymbiferum (known for it’s antibiotic properties).
Spike has a few of his dishes featured on Instagram at @1wd2ef3rg4th5yj6uk7il
He also has some educational Amanita Identification videos on his YouTube Channel at https://youtube.com/user/Seditious100.
Robert Courteau @thinkfungi
Ottawa, Canada
Robert is a former chef, educator, President of the Ottawa Mycological Society and creator of Think Fungi, a non-profit focused on fungi-related events and courses. Robert is our Canadian culinary ombudsman!
Robert began foraging mushrooms for the first time in 2010 as a chef in Europe, and it completely changed his outlook on life.
Having retired from the kitchen in 2013, Robert has been focused on his love of mushrooms and has been active in bringing the world of fungi to the masses through his events and courses on just about anything fungi-related.
Lorenzo Tavani @lorenzo__cooks
Columbus, Ohio
Lorenzo started at Columbus State Community College enrolled in their Culinary Apprenticeship program working in fine dining restaurants. Lorenzo worked as a personal trainer for 2 years, helped open a farm to table restaurant called Ghostwriter Public House and worked on a regenerative family farm collecting eggs, feeding pigs and milking cows. Lorenzo also worked at a butcher shop/slaughterhouse for 8 months refining his butchery skills and exploring our food system!
In 2020 lorenzo got OBSESSED with foraging for mushrooms and plants to use in his dinners and everyday life! Now Lorenzo is a full time private chef involved with an underground supper club, hired chef for international retreats and is using his past experience to put on private family style dinners and classes of his own!
Julie Trotta @fungirls_fungi
Phoenix, Arizona
Julie is the owner and founder of Fungirls Fungi. Her fascination for mushrooms started out as curiosity on how mushrooms grew. This led her to start growing mushrooms at home for friends and family. Learning about mushrooms was fascinating to her because she had no idea that there was more mushrooms beyond what’s found in your typical grocery store. She discovered Arizona Mushroom Society and became obsessed with learning about wild mushrooms.
In April of 2019, she took her daughters on their first mushroom forage, and they were hooked! From there, they learned how to identify several different types of edible and medicinal species of mushrooms and was surprised at how each one tasted different.
In spring of 2020, she started building and growing Fungirl’s Fungi, where she learned how to grow bulk mushrooms. Growing so many mushrooms gave her the opportunity to learn how to cook with them. Learning about the variety of flavors and textures of different mushrooms. She has a passion for cooking with mushrooms and making different dishes. She loves to share recipes and hopes to inspire every day home cooks to eat more amazing mushrooms through cooking classes and demos!
A Word of Caution:
You should not eat any mushroom that you cannot identify with 100% accuracy.
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