July opened the season with the forest already awake. Four consecutive Sundays in the same range and not one morning repeated: what was dry leaf litter one Sunday was, by the next, a carpet of mushrooms risen overnight. That is the lesson no book delivers and that can only be learned on foot.
What the forest gave us
July's harvest was wide and varied. Sunday after Sunday, specimens of the following genera were laid out on the identification cloth:
- Amanita — the genus that teaches you to look carefully: it holds species prized in Mexican cooking and also some of the most dangerous in the kingdom. Volva, ring and white spore print are the first three characters we learned to check.
- Boletus — pores instead of gills, the lineage the porcini of these mountains come from.
- Ramaria — the coral fungi: terrestrial corals that look like sea creatures stranded in the leaf litter.
- Lactarius — the ones that bleed. Cut them and they release latex, whose colour and change on contact with air is a field diagnostic character.
- Russula — vivid caps and brittle flesh that snaps like chalk instead of tearing into fibres.
- Lycoperdon — the puffballs, which ripen inward until they become a bag of spores.
And many more. The full list of the season does not fit here: it lives, species by species and with photo and coordinate, in the citizen science project.
The identification table
Every Sunday, back from the walk, everything gathered was emptied onto the white cloth and sorted by genus. That moment is the heart of the tour: it is when the basket stops being a harvest and becomes a study collection. There the volva is checked, the stipe is cut, the smell taken, the size measured, the specimen compared against the printed plate, and the edible separated from what is only to be looked at.
The chef of the season
Chef David Jahnke — thirty-five years of craft. Professional cook certified by the German government, Chef Educator by the World Association of Chefs, licensed in Gastronomy in Mexico and Maître Cuisinier by the culinary association of France. He headed the Gastronomy department at the Universidad de Celaya and now runs his own cooking school in San Miguel de Allende.
He cooked all four Sundays in the middle of the forest, with that same morning's harvest and no more equipment than fire, comal and grill. Watching a chef of that calibre resolve a menu out of what a group of strangers found two hours earlier is, in itself, a lesson in mycogastronomy.
He shares techniques and recipes on his YouTube channel, open and free, in Spanish, English and German.
If you want to keep cooking mushrooms at home, our Simbiosis Recipe Book is organized by category, and the full recipes live on the Recetarios blog.
The season's poster
This is how July was announced. Four plates that circulated for weeks and that now stand as the record of what was our first full season of mycotourism: the programme, the pair who guided the forest and the kitchen, and the terms of those Sundays.
Historical archive. These plates belong to the July 2026 season and are kept here as a record. The dates, programme and prices shown on them are no longer current. For the experiences running now and their terms, see the tours page.
Upload your photos: what July is still missing
Many of the findings from those four Sundays are still sitting in phones. If you walked with us in July and have not uploaded your photos yet, this is the moment: every observation you record on Naturalista joins the Fungívoros de Simbiosis project and, through it, CONABIO's national biodiversity record.
You do not need to know the species. Upload the photo with its date and location; the community helps determine it. A photo of yours may end up being the only record of that species at that point in the sierra.
Upload my observations to the project
And now, Hongosto
July was the opening. August is the peak: the month we call Hongosto, when the rain has been accumulating for weeks and the ground answers with everything it has. This year there are three experiences across two states, including a day for children and a weekend festival in Amealco.
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