Chaga

Portrait

From a distance it looks like a black wound on the white trunk of a birch, a crust of charcoal that grew there. Chaga is not a capped mushroom: it is a sterile mass called a sclerotium that forms slowly on living birches, sometimes over twenty years. Break off a piece and the inside is orange-brown, golden, veined, with the texture of hard cork.

A long boreal tradition

The peoples of Siberia have brewed it for centuries, and chaga runs through Russian literature, from Solzhenitsyn to travellers' notebooks. In Québec, the Cree and the Anishinaabeg knew it well; the Anishinaabeg also used it as tinder, since it holds an ember for hours. It is a northern ingredient, inseparable from birch and cold.

Harvest

Étienne harvests it in winter, when sap is low and the snow makes the black growths easy to spot. With an axe or a gouge he takes only part of the mass, and only from living, vigorous birches; chaga on a dead tree no longer has the same colour or taste. The piece is then broken into coarse chunks and dried at length.

In the workshop

Chaga is prepared as a decoction: a handful of chunks simmered gently for an hour or more gives a black, clear drink with no bitterness, tasting of vanilla, earth and charred wood. The shop carries it in chunks, as a powder and in some blends with the other mushrooms.