Panellus serotinus

Description
Mushroom Identification
Synonyms

Description

Panellus serotinus aka Sarcomyxa serotina is a thick-gilled mushroom with an oyster shell shape and olive color. It grows on hardwood logs, especially sugar maple, beech, and oak. Logs can be inoculated just as you would for Shiitake.

This mushroom tends to fruit in groups, either in clusters or single.

Its velvety olive or toffee-colored caps are excellent culinary mushrooms, fresh or dried. Fresh mushrooms, when sliced and sauteed, are buttery in texture, much like Chicken of the Woods. In Japanese culture, late fall oysters are considered a very popular edible mushroom although it is not as common in North America.

Common names: Olive Oysterling, Late Oyster, Mukitake.

Mushroom Identification

Ecology

Saprobic on the recently downed (with the bark still adnate) deadwood of hardwoods and occasionally on the deadwood of hemlocks; usually growing in shelving clusters but sometimes growing alone or scattered; late fall and winter; widely distributed in North America but more common in northern and montane areas and all but absent where temperatures are warm year-round.
Cap

3–11 cm wide; semicircular to shell-shaped in outline; planoconvex to flat or shallowly depressed; sticky when fresh; bald; dull, dark green to olive when fresh, fading to yellowish or greenish, or sometimes darkening to medium brown.
Gills

Radiating from the point of attachment or running down the pseudostem; close; short-gills frequent; orangish to yellowish buff, developing brownish edges.
Stem

Absent, or occasionally present as a stubby lateral pseudostem.
Flesh

Whitish; tough and rubbery; unchanging when sliced.
Spore Print

Whitish.