Medicinal and tea
Turkey tail
Trametes versicolor
Never eat a wild-foraged mushroom you identified from a website, this one included. Wild mushroom misidentification can be fatal, and no page can rule a specimen IN. This reference is about cultivated and shop-bought mushrooms only: species you buy, or grow from bought spawn, where there is nothing to identify. To identify anything wild, consult a qualified local expert holding the actual specimen, never a description on a screen.
Also sold as
- Cloud mushroom
- Yun zhi
- Kawaratake
In the kitchen
Flavour
None to speak of; it is too thin and tough to eat.
Texture
Thin, leathery, banded brackets. Simmered for tea or ground for extract, not eaten whole.
In the kitchen
Not a culinary mushroom. Dried and simmered into a tea, or sold as a powder or extract. Health claims for it sit outside what this reference documents.
How it is cultivated
Substrate
Hardwood logs or sterilised supplemented hardwood sawdust; it is a common, aggressive wood-decayer.
Fruiting temperature
18-24°C (64-75°F)
Humidity
85-95% relative humidity
How it is grown
Hardwood logs, or a supplemented sawdust block
Time to first harvest
A few months on a block; a season on logs
How much, how long
Tiered rosettes of thin brackets
Difficulty at home
Intermediate. Colonises hardwood readily, which is both why it grows easily and why it can contaminate other grows.
What is worth knowing about it
One of the most studied medicinal mushrooms, grown for tea and extract rather than the plate. It is thin and tough, so it is never a food mushroom, and its ease of cultivation reflects how vigorously it rots wood in the wild.
Elsewhere on the site
Sources
- Wikipedia, Trametes versicolor
- Stamets, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms
Others in this group