I just want to say thanks to the people who look at these kinds of things and think "I should probably check if this is delicious", because I would never acquire that information otherwise
I have a morbid dark humor, semi-serious theory that toddlers put everything in their mouth as an evolutionary poison testing system. You find out what is and isn't deadly poison, and you can always make more toddlers.
i learned about huitlacoche in a plant disease class like a decade ago when learning about fungal disease cycles. still haven't had the opportunity to try it, but i would.
even ignoring the ethics, its far less weird, biologically, than feeding corn to ruminants and eating the products of that. it's using a living corn stalk as a substrate to cultivate fungal fruiting bodies. fungus are very efficient at turning complex structures into simple bioavailable nutrients.
you would know this instinctively if you had ҽαƚҽɳ ƚԋҽ ƚҽōɳαɳāƈαƚʅ αɳԃ ƚαʂƚҽԃ ιƚʂ ɱყʂƚҽɾιҽʂ
Burlwood is so gorgeous. And since you can get a potentially giant round lump of wood you can do things with it you can't do anywhere else. Burls, and their enormous potential economic value in the deeply weird society, are a big plot point in one of Niven's Ringworld books.
My first instinct is that this is disgusting but the part of my brain that cares about facts & logic says that it's just a fungus. We eat plenty of those. Pretty sure there's also plenty of parasitic fungi we eat regularly.
As a food nerd cause it's my job, 2024 is my Year of the Mushroom. Fungi are my favorite variety of food and there's so many kinds and they're all super versatile. Like, imagine a gravy made from these bad boys
I'm vegan and a cook and will be seeing if I can order some on my boss's dime to play with. I'll be posting reports if I can make it happen. This is a very interesting food to me.
So is there any data on its nutrition cause all I can find are websites written by robots talking about it
edit:
there was an increased breaking force as the huitlacoche content increased, and no significant increase in protein, lipids, and moisture content was observed by adding huitlacoche flour to tortilla chips
huitlacoche has almost all essential amino acids, being the most abundant in lysine, glycine, and leucine