Content
- Tasty mushrooms - are they part of the fruit or vegetables?
- Mushrooms as their own order
- Tips & Tricks
Tasty mushrooms - are they part of the fruit or vegetables?
In summer and autumn is the right time to harvest many different varieties of mushrooms. In the process, many people repeatedly ask themselves whether the tasty fruiting bodies of the mushrooms are actually fruits or vegetables.
Mushrooms as their own order
Many chefs and retailers like to count mushrooms on the basis of their culinary uses like the vegetables, but that's not quite true. Botanically speaking, mushrooms can not be any kind of vegetable, because they are not attributed to the plants, but form a separate order between plants and animals called Funga. The distinction to the plants is based, for example, on the fact that fungi do not photosynthesize and consist more of chitin than of cellulose.
Tips & Tricks
Actually, the mushrooms grown for consumption are only the fruiting bodies of the respective fungus species. The mycelium of mushrooms, which branch out into subterranean branches, occupies far greater space.