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Not for your toast – Witches’ Butter

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After a pretty unsuccessful local walk looking for the more favourable spring mushrooms I happened to stumble across these ugly little beauties! Any ‘find’ is a bonus anyway, and I was also glad to get some good shots of them too…

It’s common English name is Witches’ Butter (Exidia glandulosa) and is a widespread, common jelly fungus found throughout the year. It is found on dead wood of deciduous trees, usually on fallen branches but also on dead standing wood too.

At first glance, groups of this black jelly fruiting bodies look like scattered blobs of tar on the dead branches and it’s only on closer inspection you notice the finer details.

Exidia glandulosaGenerally 2-4cm in size, they can grow up to 6cm in diametre and are attached to the wood by a very tiny stem that is only noticeable once you have removed them out of situ.

They are often misshapen but usually disc shaped with randomly scattered tiny warts on their smooth, almost felt-like surface. Fruiting bodies often merge together and overlap giving the deceptive appearance of being one big fused mass of black fungi.

The consistency, as you’d expect, is very ‘squishy’ and gelatinous. Soon after wet weather they are more conspicuous and at their most productive. In prolonged, dryer weather they can shrivel up to hard membranous lumps. But fortunately for them, can rehydrate very quickly and hence last all year round.

Other similar looking fungi include Exidia plana, also known as Black Witches’ Butter (which is a confusingly similar English name!) and is made up of many smaller cup shaped fruiting bodies, merging together to give it a ‘brain like’ appearance, and Black Bulgar (Bulgaria inquinans) which lack the small pimples are shaped like a disc when mature. All very weird indeed, and needless to say, these (like our common Witches’ Butter) are also inedible.

Witches Butter fungus Identification

Top: Typical disc shaped Witches’ Butter on a fallen branch and the brown jelly flesh inside. Below: Several fruiting bodies on the same branch, with several fusing together.

Rare, Medium or Well Done? – Beef Steak Fungus

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It’s a comical sight and nice surprise when you first come across an oak tree sticking it’s pinky red tongue out at you! It’s happened to me a few times and I seem to be getting use to it.

This is the common Beef Steak Fungus (Fistulina hepatica) found during late summer and autumn. It’s a parasitic species usually found at the base of oak trees and sometimes horse chestnut. It definitely looks freaky when younger, it’s fleshy protrusion almost exactly mimicking the tongue of an Ox!

The colour initially is pinkish then getting redder and finally brown with age. You must get touchy-feely with a younger specimen because it has a spooky ‘flesh’ like feel, maybe even a little rubbery. The surface even has the warty tongue taste buds on! The pale yellow pores on the underside which age red-brown sometimes leak a blood-red juice. This also adds to the overall wierdness of this critter. Marvellous stuff.

The common ‘Beef Steak’ definition naturally refers to the flesh which resembles raw steak. And I know what your asking, and the answer is no! It doesn’t taste like beef steak. It is edible though but can be quite bitter (younger ones more so). You can simmer it or soak it in milk for a day to help reduce this bitterness. I intend to try it very soon and will hopefully mention in a later post. There is no worry in identification. There’s nothing out there that even gets close to resembling our ‘beefy’!

Beef Steak Fungus (Fistulina hepatica)

A young example of a Beef Steak Fungus resembling a pink-red tongue!

One last snippet of trivia for you – this fungus can cause ‘brown rot’ in the infected tree, which in turn makes for a very sought after kind of timber. In the furniture industry it is named ‘brown oak’ and is in much demand. It is richer brown in colour to normal uninfected oak. Sometimes only slightly infected trees can create a ‘striped’ pattern in the wood – a mixture of light and dark.

The photos shown above are of a young individual. All the other shots I have of previous encounters have been munched to pieces by the local, and very hungry insect mobs. The older the fungus gets, the tougher the consistency. Colour also changes from an orange-red through to a purple-brown.

Older Beef Steak Fungus

As the Red flesh of the Beef Steak Fungus grows older it will be deeper red in colour and may lose some of it’s surface texture due to weather and insect/animal interference.