Giant polypore or Chicken of the woods

The fruit body is made of many fan- or tongue-shaped caps overlapping on a shared base. Each cap is 10 to 30 cm wide and 1 to 3 cm thick, and the whole rosette is usually 50 to 80 cm across, sometimes over a metre, and can weigh tens of kilograms.

Young caps are yellow-brown to cinnamon, later chestnut brown with darker concentric zones and a paler cream margin. The surface is felty, finely fibrous or finely scaly. The margin is wavy, blunt and rounded when young, thinner with age.

The fruiting body is bushy, with 5-30 overlapping fan-shaped caps on a shared base. Individual caps are 10-30 cm across and 6-30 cm tall, flat, spreading, fan-shaped and fleshy. The surface is smooth or finely felted; young caps glow yellow-orange, like fresh sulphur, and look glossy in wet weather. The colour is a striking sulphur-yellow to orange-yellow, typically shading from a rich orange centre to a yellow or cream margin. Older caps fade to pale yellow and cream.

The pore surface is white to cream, later dirty greyish. The pores are small and round, 3 to 5 per millimetre, and the short tubes, 4 to 6 mm deep, run slightly down the base.

The key feature: the pores quickly bruise brown and then black when touched or damaged. The spore print is white.

The underside is a tube layer with fine sulphur-yellow pores (2-4 pores/mm), coloured sulphur-yellow to orange. Spore print: white.

There's no true stem. The caps narrow into short stalk-like bases that merge into a shared, lumpy base, often rising from buried roots.

No distinct stem — the caps attach to the substrate by a broad base or a short lateral stem.

The flesh is white, sometimes pinkish. It's soft and juicy only when very young, then fibrous and almost leathery. When cut it turns reddish, then black.

In young brackets the flesh is tender, meaty, juicy and cream-yellow, much like chicken breast. In old ones it's tough, leathery, fibrous and inedible. It doesn't change colour when cut. The smell is distinctive, sourish-fruity and mushroomy, with a hint of fresh cucumber, and the taste is mild and delicately mushroomy, with a hint of chicken.

The smell isn't distinctive. The taste is slightly sour, especially in older fruit bodies.

A distinctive sourish-fruity smell with a hint of fresh cucumber, and an easy one to recognise.