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Why are morel mushrooms so loved by Hong Kong chefs? They’re bursting with savoury flavour and full of amino acids and antioxidants

  • Popular in most cuisines for their flavour and healthy properties, morels are incredibly difficult to cultivate
  • Hong Kong-based chefs Shane Osborn and Teruhiko Nagamoto (who uses burn-site morels) share how they’re using them in their restaurants Arcane and Nagamoto

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Morel mushrooms are bursting with savoury flavour, and full of amino acids and antioxidants, and are loved by chefs and cooks. Photo: Shutterstock
Charmaine Mok

The knobbly, cone-capped morel mushroom, prized for its exceptional ability to imbue and absorb flavours and its health benefits – an average morel contains over 20 kinds of amino acids and is high in antioxidants – is an enduring kitchen classic.

Its arrival on store shelves, in tandem with similarly covetable ingredients such as asparagus and wild garlic, signals the start of the spring or summer season, depending on which region it grows in.

Part of its desirability stems from the fact that it is incredibly difficult to cultivate indoors (though farms in the United States and China have tried, with varying degrees of success); the specimens you’re eating in restaurants have been painstakingly foraged from the wild. Morels are notorious for their capriciousness.

The optimal growing conditions for morels are difficult to pinpoint, too. Some seasoned morel hunters will sniff out the fungi from sites ravaged by wildfires – while anecdotal, enthusiasts report the intriguing phenomenon of morels cropping up from scorched earth in the spring following such a blaze.

“Burn-site morels” (Morchella exuberans), a black variety, growing under a charred tree branch at the site of a fire. Photo: Shutterstock
“Burn-site morels” (Morchella exuberans), a black variety, growing under a charred tree branch at the site of a fire. Photo: Shutterstock

In 2014, researchers from the University of Montana and University of Washington descended upon Yosemite National Park in California to study a 60-acre (24-hectare) plot that had burned during the 2013 Rim Fire. They discovered that morels were mostly found fruiting in patches where the forest floor had been completely blackened.

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