Yellow knight and green brittlegill: edible or dangerous?

Greenish mushrooms always make you hesitate, and that is a healthy instinct. After all, green is exactly the color worn by the most dangerous mushroom in the forest, the death cap. At the same time, there are perfectly edible greenish mushrooms too: the yellow knight and the greencracked brittlegill. Every forager should know which of them you can take and what to look at.

Let's look at both mushrooms, their features and, most importantly, how not to mix them up with their deadly lookalike.

Greencracked brittlegill

Greencracked brittlegill, one of the common and tasty brittlegill species.

It has a greenish, grayish-green cap, white brittle gills and a white crumbly stem with no ring and no sac at the base. The flesh is crumbly and does not taste bitter. It is an edible mushroom with a mild, nutty flavor.

The main caution: a young greencracked brittlegill gets confused with the death cap, which can be greenish too. What saves you is that a brittlegill has neither a skirt nor a sac at the base, and its gills are brittle. We have gathered all the differences in our comparison of the death cap and the greencracked brittlegill.

Yellow knight

Yellow knight, an autumn mushroom that until recently was considered edible without reservation.

It has a yellow-green cap, crowded yellowish gills and a yellowish stem, often half buried in sand. It grows in late autumn in pine forests on sandy soils, often in groups. It keeps its color even after cooking, which is how it got its Ukrainian name (zelenushka, “the green one”).

An important nuance: in recent years scientists have found that eating the yellow knight often and in large amounts can be harmful, so modern sources advise treating it with caution and not eating a lot of it or often. It is not a deadly mushroom, but it is not one to overindulge in either.

How not to confuse them with the death cap

This is the most important part, because the price of a mistake is a life.

1. Check the base of the stem. Dig the mushroom out whole. A sac at the base is a sign of the death cap, not of a brittlegill or a yellow knight.
2. Look for a skirt. The death cap has a skirt-like ring on its stem; the greencracked brittlegill has none.
3. Check the gills. In the brittlegill they are white and brittle, in the yellow knight yellowish. In the death cap they are white, but come together with a skirt and a sac.
4. Don't pick them as young buttons. While the mushroom is still closed, it is hardest to tell it from the death cap.

Remember the key point: a skirt plus a sac at the base mean danger. More in our article on the death cap.

So should you pick them?

A quick summary.

The greencracked brittlegill is fine to pick if you can confidently tell it from the death cap by the absence of a skirt and a sac. The yellow knight is also an edible mushroom, but given the new findings about it, don't overindulge and don't make it the main dish.

And the most important rule never changes: any greenish mushroom you are not one hundred percent sure about stays in the forest. The rest of the guidance is in our rules for safe foraging.

Sources

• “Key to the Fungi of Ukraine” (Kyiv, Naukova Dumka publishing house).
• Tricholoma equestre in GBIF, the global biodiversity database.
• Russula in MycoBank, the international fungal nomenclature database.
• Tricholoma equestre on Wikipedia.