[Pom Pom Mushroom, Bearded Tooth Mushroom, Satyr's Beard, Bearded
Hedgehog Mushroom; Hóu Tóu Gu (China, lit. "monkey head
mushroom"); Yamabushitake (Japan, lit. "mountain priest mushroom");
Nam Dau Khi (Viet, lit. "monkey head mushroom"); Norugongdengi-beoseot
(Korea, lit. "Deertail Mushroom"); Hericium erinaceus]
These mushroom, native to temperate zones of North America, Europe and Asia, are edible and highly medicinal. They are under study for treatment of a number of serious conditions, including some cancers, Alzheimer's and nerve damage. They grow on hardwood trees, especially Beech, as irregular spheres with no stem, covered with long thin soft spines. Fruiting bodies are rather rare in the wild, and are Red Listed in much of Europe, but are amazingly easy to produce in cultivation.
They are grown commercially on sterilized sawdust logs and similar substrates, and harvested young when the spines are still short. The largest of the photo specimens was 2.7 inches wide and weighed 0.32 ounces (9 gms). The soaked one was much like the dried one lower in the photo in size and appearance. It weighed 0.18 ounces (5 gms), and after soaking and wringing out weighed 1 ounce (28 grams).
More on Mushrooms.
To the far left is a mature living specimen growing on a tree. The
spines are for spore production, but commercially they are cloned from
particularly good specimens.
Photo by SKas distributed under license Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
To the near left is the soaked specimen from the photo above cut in half to show internal detail. These mushrooms are of considerable culinary interest in China. In the Buddhist vegetarian cuisine they sometimes replace pork in recipes.
Their mild sweet taste is said to make them suitable to replace
lobster in recipes. Now the flavor is intriguing, but I'm not about to
tell you they taste much like lobster. They are quite spongy and
absorb a lot of water, so absorb a lot of flavor from the recipe if you
wring them out before adding them. They are a little tough, though,
especially near the attachment point, so are best cooked sliced fairly
thin.