Updated
Morel
The honeycombed spring ascomycete, among the most valuable wild foods in the world. It has to be cooked; raw morels make people ill.
Laboratory work
Nobody has run a trial of it in people that reached a public register, and no randomised trial of it has been indexed. Everything below is laboratory work, where it grows, and what people report.
What it is taken for
One tile per use. The line under each is how far the evidence for that use actually got, counted rather than argued.
What it has been tried for, and how far that has got
One row per use. The label is counted rather than argued — it is set by how many randomised trials and posted results exist for that use, and nothing else. How that is worked out.
| Use | How far it has got | Trials | With a result | Randomised, published | Reviews | Commonly taken for it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Immune function | Laboratory work | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | yes |
| Nutrition | Laboratory work | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | yes |
Commonly taken for immune function, nutrition. The work there is still laboratory and animal work — often a great deal of it — and the step into a trial in people has not been taken yet.
The compounds the research names
Formula and mass from PubChem. Naming a compound is not a claim that it does anything in a person.
C9H15N3O2S
C18H32O16
What it looks like in the field
Research-grade observations, each by a different photographer. Every one links to the record it came from.
In the kitchen
Deep, dark and smoky — among the most prized flavours in European cooking.
Washed carefully, then cooked through in butter and cream; the hollow caps are often stuffed. Dried morels reconstitute better than almost anything else.
Must be cooked. Raw or undercooked morels make people ill, and they should not be eaten with alcohol by anyone who has reacted before. Do not confuse them with false morels, which are dangerous.
Where it has been recorded, and when it fruits
12,080 verified occurrence records with coordinates, from GBIF. This is where people have recorded it, which follows where recorders live as much as where the fungus grows — read the shape, not the ranking.
| Netherlands | 2,052 | |
| Sweden | 1,421 | |
| Austria | 1,185 | |
| United Kingdom | 841 | |
| Switzerland | 781 | |
| Germany | 779 | |
| Denmark | 764 | |
| Spain | 629 | |
| France | 498 | |
| Belgium | 496 | |
| Norway | 420 | |
| United States | 393 |
Most records fall in Apr. Northern-hemisphere recorders dominate the dataset, so a southern population would not show here.
iNaturalist separately holds 1,903 research-grade observations of it.
What has been reported going wrong
5 voluntary reports to the US Food and Drug Administration name a product by this mushroom's name. A report is someone saying something happened after taking something. It is not a finding that the product caused it, the FDA says so itself, and nobody knows how many people took the product without reporting anything.
| Death | 3 |
| Diarrhoea | 3 |
| Nausea | 3 |
| Vomiting | 3 |
| Malaise | 2 |
| Abdominal Pain | 1 |
| Anosmia | 1 |
| Fatigue | 1 |
| Headache | 1 |
| Pain | 1 |
| Pyrexia | 1 |
| Death | 3 |
| Other Serious or Important Medical Event | 2 |
| Other Outcome | 1 |