Updated
Wood ear
A brown gelatinous ear on dead hardwood, eaten in enormous quantity in China. Known in the older literature as an anticoagulant food.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blood and clotting | Laboratory work | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | yes |
| Cholesterol and lipids | Laboratory work | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | yes |
| Gut and microbiome | Laboratory work | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | yes |
Commonly taken for cholesterol and lipids, gut and microbiome, blood and clotting. 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.
C10H13N5O4
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
Almost none. It is eaten for its texture, which is crunchy and gelatinous at the same time.
Soaked from dried, shredded, and used in hot and sour soup, cold dressed salads and stir-fries across China.
Soaking dried wood ear for many hours at room temperature has caused serious bongkrekic acid poisoning. Soak it in the fridge and use it the same day.
Where it has been recorded, and when it fruits
102,635 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 | 33,118 | |
| United Kingdom | 32,796 | |
| Germany | 8,569 | |
| Denmark | 7,685 | |
| Belgium | 4,131 | |
| Austria | 2,802 | |
| France | 2,427 | |
| Sweden | 1,934 | |
| Switzerland | 1,793 | |
| Spain | 1,089 | |
| United States | 1,038 | |
| Poland | 575 |
Most records fall in Jan. Northern-hemisphere recorders dominate the dataset, so a southern population would not show here.
iNaturalist separately holds 24,840 research-grade observations of it.
What has been reported going wrong
No voluntary adverse-event report to the US Food and Drug Administration names a product by this name. That is an absence of reports, not a demonstration of safety: these are the products least likely to be reported on, because nobody is required to.