Shingled hedgehogSarcodon imbricatus

The shingled hedgehog (Sarcodon imbricatus), also called the scaly hedgehog or hawk's wing, is edible when young and well cooked. Young caps are good once blanched; older ones turn bitter and tough. Don't eat it raw, as it can upset your stomach. Field guides don't name any poisonous look-alikes, but bitter relatives easily end up in the basket, and a single one can spoil the whole pan.

It's an easy mushroom to recognise. The cap is brown, 5–15 cm across and sometimes up to 25 cm, and covered in coarse dark scales arranged in rings like roof tiles. Towards the centre the scales get bigger and stand up. Underneath there are no gills or pores, just crowded, brittle spines up to 1.5 cm long, greyish white at first and greyish brown later. The spore print is brown. The stem is short, thick and pale, and, most importantly, has no green or blue tinge at the base.

Shingled hedgehog vs scaly tooth: one species or two? For a long time the name covered two mushrooms. In 1999 a DNA study showed that the one growing under spruce and the one growing under pine are different species. The spruce one kept the name Sarcodon imbricatus, while the pine one is now Sarcodon squamosus, the scaly tooth. In the field, the tree nearby is about the only way to tell them apart: the pine species is a little smaller, with darker, flatter scales. Both are edible and cooked the same way, so this page covers both.

It grows on the ground among moss and needles, alone, in small groups or in fairy rings, on poor sandy soil in old conifer forests. It's found across Europe, Ukraine included, but it's never common anywhere and has been declining in parts of Central Europe. It fruits from late summer through autumn, most abundantly in early and mid autumn.

How do you cook it? Pick only young mushrooms with firm flesh. Brush off the needles, trim the dirty stem base and scrape away the spines of older caps, as they crumble. Blanch for 8–10 minutes and throw the water away to take out the bitterness, then fry, pickle or add to stews. It's also dried and ground into a powder with a strong, spicy aroma; a pinch is enough to season a sauce or soup. Dyers use it too: it gives different colours from its pine-forest relative, which is how the two were first told apart.

Is it good for you? Extracts have only been studied in cells and mice, and we found no research in people, so treat it as food, not medicine.

What can it be confused with? Mostly with bitter relatives such as the bitter tooth (Hydnellum scabrosum). They are usually smaller, with finer scales, and the stem base is bluish grey, greenish or blackish, with flesh of the same colour inside. So cut the stem right at ground level: in the shingled hedgehog it is whitish or brownish. The wood hedgehog and the terracotta hedgehog have smooth cream or orange caps without scales and pale spines, and both are edible. The devil's tooth is white with red droplets when young, brown and corky with zoned flesh when old, and inedible. The old man of the woods also looks shaggy from above, but it has pores under the cap, not spines.

One more thing worth knowing: the shingled hedgehog absorbs radioactive caesium-137 readily. In a nature reserve in the Chornobyl-affected Polissia region of northern Ukraine it carried up to 464,000 becquerels per kilogram of dry weight, so don't pick it in contaminated areas.