Folk methods for checking for poisonous mushrooms: will onions and silverware help?

0

Among avid mushroom pickers, there are those who are sure that you can check your forest harvest for poisons using folk “life hacks”.

Most often, this is a raw onion, which is added to the water when boiling mushrooms. It is believed that if an inedible mushroom gets into the pan, the onion will turn blue.

Folk methods for checking mushrooms

But mushroom pickers sometimes take a real risk when they rely entirely on such advice. Every autumn, sad statistics report what this can end up being.

Onion method

There is no scientific basis. Anyone can try to cook an assortment of fly agarics and pale toadstools with onions and garlic. Not a single head or clove will turn blue, and all because the chemical composition of the poisons in each mushroom is different and there is no reaction with onions. After all, there are false mushrooms that are often confused with honey agarics, chanterelles, boletus, boletus and boletus.

Method with silver

This is also a method for gamblers. It is believed that silver will darken if a poisonous mushroom is cooked. In fact, the metal reacts with amino acids that are part of any mushrooms, so you can throw away the harvest of edible mushrooms.

Method with insects

It is believed that worms and other parasites do not eat inedible mushrooms. This is also not a fact, because some insects are immune to poison.

Method with milk

If you drip milk on a poisonous mushroom, it should curdle. But the milk curdles due to the pepsin present in any mushrooms.

Method with vinegar

It is used to neutralize toxins, but it only works against weakly toxic species that are present in conditionally edible mushrooms. Vinegar will not work on the poison of the pale toadstool and other similar mushrooms.

The method with colored caps

The presence of pink plates under the cap does not at all indicate that the mushroom is edible. A vivid anti-example can be a poisonous yellow champignon, which has pink plates.

You should also not count on the fact that the cut site of a poisonous mushroom will turn blue. The edible boletus turns blue, while its false counterpart does not change color.