Into the Wild: Allegheny County Foragers Gather PA's Finest Homegrown Foods for Hungry Market

Tom Patterson stoops at the edge of a logging trail in the Laurel Highlands of Cook Township, Westmoreland County, and readies his pulling knife.

"Cavan, we've got some good boletes here," he calls to his brother, deeper in the woods. Tom cuts a small, brown, edible bolete mushroom from the ground and slices it in two. "These are nice young ones," and free of insect marks, he marvels. He cuts more, and puts them in his sack. "They get ridden with bugs so easily!"

To the untrained eye there are more boletes a few feet away, but Tom cuts and discards them--they are russula, another variety entirely, and poisonous.

Further up the trail, Cavan has found a king bolete--the American version of the Italian porcini--but it's past its prime, the top the size and color of a hamburger bun gone wrinkly in the moist air. He cuts it open; a small bug crawls out. A week ago it would have been wonderful to eat. There are other, similarly aged king boletes scattered around.

"You come across a big patch of something that (far) past (its prime)--oh!" Cavan says.

The brothers will enjoy the smaller boletes themselves, but large fields of wild mushrooms are the real object of their hunt. Cavan and Tom Patterson are using mankind's oldest food-gathering technique--foraging--to build a modern-day business called Wild Purveyors. Founded in April 2009, the company sells food gathered from Pennsylvania's woodlands, as well as from Commonwealth farms and dairies that practice sustainable farming. The Pattersons also grow their own heirloom vegetables, and have begun raising ducks, near their headquarters in Indiana Township, at Allegheny County's northwestern edge.

The idea for Wild Purveyors formed in 2002, when Tom, now 30, was in the middle of his horticulture studies at Penn State while Cavan, two years older, was writing mortgages for a living.

"That's when Tom called and said, 'Do you want to come out and pick mushrooms?'" Cavan recalls. "I was sitting at my desk in a tie. I said: 'What kind of mushrooms, Tom?'"

They spent a week in the forest and found 100 pounds of chanterelles, a dark yellow variety with a jagged cap and the distinct smell of woody apricots. Tom, who had minored in mycology, knew that this was one of the mushrooms that cooks and knowledgeable consumers prized. They called all the restaurant chefs they knew, sold most of their stock and began to accumulate contacts.

For five years, they honed their gathering skills on weekends and days off, concentrating on chanterelles and morels, another fungus on fancy menus but rarely gracing a grocer's shelves. Today they seek a dozen varieties, mainly for restaurants in the Pittsburgh area or near Philadelphia.

"The mushrooms we forage, for the most part no one has been able to figure out how to cultivate them," Cavan notes. Most grow symbiotically with live plants, including trees, whereas white button mushrooms thrive on dead wood before reaching their cellophaned destiny. And each wild mushroom variety has a short growing season--three to six weeks. If it's too dry or too hot, even that time may be shortened.

But discerning palates will find wild mushrooms irresistible. Sautéed in butter, just a few chanterelles have more aroma than a pot full of white buttons, and their flavor runs deep.

Today is a scouting mission on private land. The owner is happy to allow the brothers access in exchange for learning what can be found.

"You don't want to eat anything while you're out here," Cavan cautions. "Until you know what you're doing, go out with a professional."

For all Tom's expertise, and the Audubon guide Cavan totes for insurance, "sometimes it's kind of like the forest is guiding us," Cavan says. "People ask me, how do I look for mushrooms? I look for everything but the mushroom"--the right soil conditions, for instance, or the right trees.
Morels like poplars. Maples "tell me to keep moving," says Tom. Beeches and oaks attract chanterelles. "I like to get up close with these mosses," he adds. Mushrooms "tend to grow in these knolls and spill down."

"Yeah, steep embankments that we have to crawl down," Cavan says.

Foraging for the modern marketplace is hard work. Tom finds a brown-capped stropharious. "That one's edible, but it's not desirable," he says--not enough meat. Cavan finds a milky lactarius, which has both edible and poisonous varieties, so it's not worth the risk of harvesting. They bypass both the eggshell-white parasol of the aptly named death angel and the burnt-marshmallow puff of an "old man of the woods."

"If you were lost, you could live off them," Tom says. But you wouldn't want to."

Tom glances around them. "It really is a hunch," he says about foraging. "It's an adventure."

But it's not an idyll. While the pair engages in Stone Age pursuits, Cavan's cell phone rings non-stop. He's sorting out the week's pick ups and deliveries, talking to a dairy about a cheese they're producing, and chatting with a quail farmer about their new ducklings.

While wild products give Wild Purveyors its unique flavor--besides mushrooms, they've hunted for dandelion greens, wild watercress and young stinging nettles--the company couldn't survive on foraging alone. They also carry 200 varieties of cheeses from seven Pennsylvania creameries; pastured meats (beef, pork, elk, venison, rabbit, duck, chicken, quail and pheasant); trout raised in the state's mountain-spring waters (including rainbows, browns, brook and golden varieties); flours from local grain growers; and herbs, micro-greens (vegetable sprouts) and salad greens from state farms.

They even work with a few mushroom farmers to offer some of the less-common cultivated types, such as pom pom (lion's mane) and royal trumpet (king oyster). Their only out-of-state product is tofu from a West Virginia processor. Their own gardens concentrate on heirloom varieties of tomatoes, peppers and eggplant.

The company has no warehouse, transporting their products straight from the forest floor or farm to chefs who desire local foods with extra nutritional value and taste. Kevin Hunninen, executive chef at Point Brugge Café in Pittsburgh, orders local produce, cheeses, mushrooms and meats from Wild Purveyors.

"It always comes in looking really nice--fresh, fresh harvested herbs and tomatoes, and you really notice the difference over commercially harvested produce," he says. "People [at the restaurant] notice the difference, even if they don't know why.

"I always like putting money back into the region," he adds. "For me it feels like the right thing to do."
"They're open to trying a lot of our products and introducing them to chefs in Pittsburgh," says Donna Levitsky, operations manager for Shellbark Hollow Farm in West Chester, specializing in goat cheeses and yogurt. "It's great to have that ability to have our cheese travel like that."

"They get into areas where I don't really have any sales," reports farmer Daniel Shirk of Newburg, in Clearfield County, who provides the brothers with duck eggs, ducks, lamb, beef and rabbit from grass-fed herds. "Things are going well and will continue to."

The Pattersons have even teamed with Clover Creek Cheese Cellar in Williamsburg to create Wild Mushroom Cheese, which is selling very well, Cavan says. With bits of chanterelles inside, the cheese has a pleasantly pungent aroma but mild, buttery flavor around the earthy, chewy mushroom bits.

"There's no more archaic way to purvey food than to go out and forage," notes Tom Patterson. "It helps us to feel confident in our mission of purveying local food to local consumers."

---

Marty Levine is a Pittsburgh freelance writer trying to cover the waterfront from the water. Send feedback here.

To receive Keystone Edge free every week, click here.

---

Photos:

Brothers Cavan and Tom Patterson, partners in Wild Purveyors.

Some of the Patterson's chanterelles await preparation at Point Brugge Cafe in Pittsburgh.

Cavan Patterson searches for chanterelles near a decaying tree.

Edible oyster mushrooms grow on a stump on land atop Laurel Mountain.

Rainbow and golden trout, sustainably farmed in the Laurel Mountains near Somerset, are just a few hours out of the water and awaiting delivery to the Fairmount Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh.

Point Brugge chef Kevin Hanninen plates a portion of Butler County pork with sauteed chanterelles acquired through Wild Purveyors.

Hanninen's finished presentation of Wild Purveyors' locally raised pork and chanterelle mushrooms, with a Belgian beer at Point Brugge Cafe in Pittsburgh.

All Photographs By Heather Mull