My favourite culinary species outside of chanterelles and morels. They have a much richer meat flavour than an oyster mushroom, very close in taste and texture to beef pot roast. They typically associate with conifers in wet high elevation (2000m~) forests, fruiting from now until Septemberish. These and Boletus edulis make good novice foraging targets because they’re easy to identify and the lookalikes are distinct.
I cut it into strips after soaking it to remove bugs and stripping the outer flesh, then sauteed them in olive oil with pepper/salt/garlic powder. It’s the only specimen I found today and weighed about 1kg.
If you haven’t read it yet, Paul Stamets’ Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms is a fantastic resource for substrates: https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Permaculture/Growing_Gourmet_and_Medicinal_Mushrooms.pdf
It goes into the different nutrient profiles required for species and fungiculture techniques for each. Lion’s mane is probably the most aggressive widely-cultivated saprophyte. Oysters can be particular about the nutrients secondary to cellulose and environmental conditions, but lion’s mane will eat anything with cellulose. Hardwood logs aren’t cheap here but every feed store has cheap 50lb straw bales and higher nitrogen alfalfa ones. Whole horse oats are available for like $20/50lb from the same stores, the cheapest substrate I’ve found for my grain colonies.