What an exciting day! We can now finally reveal that our porcini mushrooms have won 3 stars – the highest accolade – in the prestigious Great Taste Awards. We are so extremely happy and proud that a product that we pick with love and dry with care has been recognised as being of the highest quality it can achieve.

Here are just some of the judges comments: ” Very beautiful slices. Gorgeous clear, clean, bright soaking liquor. Gently and simply cooked they have remarkable, gentle yet distinctive fungal flavour. Truly amazing.”

“Fabulous – the combination of delicacy with such a subtle degree of pungency is truly wonderful. A lovely taste of forest floor with none of the murky mustiness of many dried porcini.”

“Stunning flavour, perfectly intense.”

We are so lucky to be able to spend time in the forests of beautiful West Sweden, Bengt’s homeland, and then come back to lovely north Derbyshire where we pack and distribute to some of the nicest delis and shop owners in the North West and the UK! Many thanks again to Karl Sinfield for his great eye catching label designs.

Now we’re looking forward to going to Sweden next week, for a well earned holiday interspersed with lots of mushroom picking. It is the start of the new season after all! Then there are funghi forays coming up in the autumn, more picking, and a few tastings planned…..

Thanks to everyone who sells or buys our dried wild mushrooms, and all the mushroom lovers that come on our forays, for all your support and enthusiasm. We truly love what we do!

If you don’t happen to live near any of our stockists and are wondering how you can get your hands on our delicious wild mushrooms from Sweden then wonder no more – you can buy them direct from our London stockist Scandinavian Kitchen. They have a fantastic online shop packed with lots of other Scandinavian goodies to try as well, and ship all over the UK mainland. The link above will take you directly to their website.

In stock at the moment are Winter Chanterelle, Porcini and Forest Mix. Many thanks to Tim Hensel Photography for our swish new product photos.

We’ll shortly be travelling ‘home’ to lovely West Sweden for holiday/mushroom picking – can’t wait to see what this year’s season will be like. Here’s a photo from last year, when there were so many top quality porcini and ceps we were tripping over them!

Our popular funghi forays in Derbyshire’s Peak District are slowly but surely getting booked up. Sunday 13 September is full, but there are a couple of spaces left for Sunday 18 October and around 8 each for Saturday 19 Sepember and Saturday 24 October.

Each foray lasts around 4 hours, 2-3 hours of which is walking and talking about the mushrooms we find, and the rest preparing them for cooking, then sharing lunch al fresco together. As well as the pan fried mushrooms we serve a good local sausage & sour dough bread, home made cake and drinks. 

If you happen to be holidaying in West Sweden then do join us on one of our forays on the beautiful island of Orust.

Book using the contact form on the website or give us a ring!

Nice to be announcing that our next wild mushroom tasting is going to be back on home ground in New Mills. We’ll be serving Winter Chanterelle toasties for you to nibble as you mooch in Doc Greens, the lovely, well stocked veg shop/deli on Union Rd, this Saturday 11 July 10 – 1pm.

In common with lots of other small towns, high street shopping here has taken a bashing over the last few years but we’re lucky to have a core of great shops (including the fantastic High Street Books & Records, and The Gallery) that make it a pleasure to spend your money locally, and if you haven’t visited New Mills before our other big attraction is the spectacular Torrs Riverside Park, the deep gorge cutting under and through the town, with the famous Millenium Bridge linking the two ends. The park is also home to the first community owned Archimedes Screw in the country. The Torrs Hydro hydro electric scheme generates clean, green electricity and operates for the benefit of the community.

In other words you’d be bonkers not to make the effort to come and see what the town has to offer, as well as do your weekend shopping, and taste our delicious wild mushrooms at the same time. See you then!

A lot of people ask us at our tastings for recipe suggestions. Not all of us are used to using dried wild mushrooms in the kitchen, so we’re more than happy to help out with ideas. We also like to point out what a great store cupboard standby dried mushrooms are. A little goes a long way, with such a concentration of flavour, and there’s no waste – you use what you need and they don’t go off like the fresh ones you buy with good intentions that then go slimy and horrible at the back of the fridge….

Last weekend we made a new dish, using dried porcini, that we really loved – Potted Mushrooms. Quick and easy to prepare, and perfect as a starter or a sumptuous supper dish. Why not have a go at making it yourself? Full details are now on our recipe page, along with many of our other favourites ways of cooking wild mushrooms.

Bon appetit!

The porcini season in West Sweden last year was extra special. The quantity of mushrooms to be found, growing all over the place, even in our garden, was extreme. These events happen perhaps twice in someone’s lifetime, and EVERYONE talks about them, not just the mushroom enthusiasts. We gathered a bumper harvest to beat all other bumper harvests and sliced and dried around 200kg of hand picked, top quality fresh mushrooms in total. That’s definitely worth celebrating, so we’re going to have a porcini bonanza at Barbakan Deli in Chorlton, South Manchester on Saturday, 18 April from 11am – 2pm. You’ll be able to taste our delicious wild mushroom going to have a porcini bonanza at Barbakan Deli in Chorlton, South Manchester on Saturday, 18 April from 11am – 2pm. You’ll be able to taste our delicious wild mushroom risotto and a rich, creamy porcini soup.

Now we’ve noticed there’s a big difference in the condition of dried mushrooms available in the shops, especially the larger stores. You really have to use all your senses when you’re buying, especially sight and smell. If they look shrivelled and dark brown they might be getting old. They should have a sweet nutty smell, not a sour, unappealing odour. We’ve heard too many stories of people being put off buying dried mushrooms for life after using ones of a quality that would probably be classed as rotten, if they were in the meat cabinet! So come and see, smell and taste our hand picked wild porcini so you know what to aim for in the future. You’ll never look back.

We’ll be serving wild mushroom toasties for you to try at two of our stockists next month. On Tuesday 17 Feb we’ll be back at our old friends 8th Day Coop on Oxford Rd in Manchester, and you can celebrate Valentine’s Day with us at Barbakan in Chorlton, South Manchester, on 14 Feb of course! Both tastings will be from 11 – 2.

If mushrooms be the food of love eat up….

(from the third volume of Shakespeare’s unpublished autobiography: 1584 – 88, The Porcini Years)

Here we are in January 2015. The mushroom season seems a long way off but we all know how time flies these days so we’ve done our forward planning and you can find a full list of foray dates in Derbyshire in the UK and on the island of Orust in West Sweden.

We’d be delighted to see you on a foray or at one of our many wild mushroom tastings throughout the year, or both! We’ll keep you posted with dates for those and any other events as soon as we have them.

We’ll be doing our last wild mushroom tasting of 2014 this Saturday 20 December, from 11ish to 2ish at Back’s deli in Heaton Moor. The forecast is that it’s going to get chilly again so if you’re doing your weekend shopping in the lovely leafy South Manchester spot that is Heaton Moor – or indeed anywhere in the area – make sure you come to the deli for a nice warm Winter Chanterelle toastie straight out of the oven. All the mushrooms we use were hand picked by us in beautiful West Sweden and the delicious sauce was made by Bengt so we can guarantee it’s all good stuff!

We wish all our customers, stockists, Facebook followers, friends, family and anyone else a very happy, healthy, satisfying and cosy Christmas, and all more of the same for 2015!

God Jul! 

We’ve got a Christmas Competition on our Facebook page to win a couple of packets of our dried wild mushrooms and a lovely handmade juniper wood spatula – just follow this link to enter!

And on the subject of Christmas, if you’re hunting for that unusual or unique gift for someone special then why not treat them to one of our funghi forays with lunch al fresco next year?  We guarantee it’ll be worth the wait!