One of my favorite mushrooms to find is the Indigo milky cap mushroom. Indigo milkies—collectively called the Lactarius indigo species group—bleed blue juice when you damage any part of the fruiting body. They have lovely powdery blue caps with concentric bands around the margin and dark blue gills. Indigo milky cap mushrooms are common in the Eastern U.S. and South during summer and into the fall. The signature feature of these edible mushrooms is their prodigious blue latex, which makes them spectacularly fun to mess around with, even though I don’t eat them often.

In North Carolina, Lactarius indigo group grows under pine in small clusters of powdery blue mushrooms with concentric growth zones. All Indigo milky cap species are edible, and I’m told the varieties that grow in Mexico and the Southwest are much tastier than their Southeastern U.S. counterparts. They’re popular in Mexico, where they're sold in markets and appear in traditional dishes. I’m not too partial to the Lactarius indigo species in my woods, largely because they're mealy and don’t have much happening in the flavor department.

Basically, they’re amazing to find and photograph, but in my estimation, they fail the Hot Pocket Test. For those unfamiliar, the Hot Pocket Test is how I decide whether to pick a mushroom for eating. If the species is tastier than a Hot Pocket, specifically a pepperoni pizza Hot Pocket, then I’m inclined to pick and cook it later. If not, well… I keep the mushroom on my list of things I could eat, but choose not to most of the time. Personally, Lactarius indigo typically gets a slightly sub-Hot Pocket rating.

I also give a fast overview of red Russula mushrooms using a spicy-hot red and white specimen. Russula is a genus with hundreds of species, and many of them taste hot, like cayenne pepper. The acrid flavor is not derived from capsaicin, which is the compound in hot peppers. So take a minute to enjoy the colors and flavors of October’s mushroom harvest.