Penny bun maggots

[hunter1182]

Just foraged some pen buns, when i got back i noticed some very small maggots inside of them. Does anyone else here also forage for them and had this problem, is it normal. Do some people just pick them out?

Cheers,
Hunter

 

[robin wood]

yep it's common in older fungi of all sorts. Once you get your eye in you will tell if they are clearly past it and leave em to spore. If in doubt snap the top off and you'll see tell tale tunnels where stalk meets the top. If they are big enough to easily spot I would bin em they won't taste nice, if its just an odd one you can cut the good bits away from the bits that have been tunneled through.

 

[Geoff Dann]

If they are big enough to easily spot I would bin em they won't taste nice...

They taste of very little. How long do you think a mushroom maggot lasts for in a frying pan? Or what it turns into? It becomes instant protein mush, which has no effect other than adding to the nutritional content of the mushroom.

When you buy tinned tomatoes or similar products, you can legally be consuming (IIRC) 1% insect matter. You can even label the tins vegetarian. That's what happens to commercially grown crops that are infested with insect larvae but still perfectly edible.

In other words, it's all in your mind - there is absolutely no reason to worry about consuming mushrooms containing maggots - even big ones. What really matters is not the maggot content, but how old the mushroom itself is. Finding maggots in a mushroom does not tell you how old it is.

We associate maggots with decay - with nasty things like rotting flesh and faeces and with causing diseases. But that's just the maggots of certain species of fly. The "maggots" you find in mushrooms are usually beetle larvae or the larvae of non-disease-causing, vegetarian species of fly. There's no more reason to be bothered about eating them than eating prawns or bee larvae in honeycomb.