The Umami Hunter

Can you tell your porcinis from your pine rings? If not, stay out of the woods. Alternatively, enlist the help of passionate forager Justin Williams, who keeps local chefs supplied with wild mushrooms and took the TASTE team on “the silent hunt”

- Kate Wilson

The forager emails me a nameless Google map with a red circle drawn around a big green area.

It feels cryptic and I wonder what I’m getting myself into. Then I realise he’s just replying to my question about where we should meet for our first mushroom expedition. I can’t reveal the location though, that would violate the Forager’s Code.

Justin, the Forager, is a field mycologist. This means when he’s not working as a freelance writer and studying herbalism, you’ll find him poking about at the bases of trees and scraping ancient trunks with his wood-handled Opinel knife, filling his trademark Indonesian basket with precious fungus. His Instagram feed is full of fairytale pictures of his most prized finds – some fat and earthy and bound for risottos or pickling jars, others, like the stinkhorn mushroom, splayed out in improbable colours like an alien invader. I am enchanted.

I picture a Christopher McCandless (an American hiker who set out to live off the land and was found dead four months later) character, wiry and bearded and taciturn, scouring the forest wild-eyed at first light, devoted to what he calls “the silent hunt”. Justin does have a beard, but that’s where the resemblance ends.

In reality he is cheerful and self-deprecating. He is passionate about foraging and happy to talk about it, even if he is selective with certain details. I try every trick in the old journo’s book to get him to share his best place for finding morel mushrooms, the little honeycomb caps so prized in French cuisine. He does lead guided foraging tours after all. He smiles knowingly and sticks to the Code.