Foraging Indigo Milk Cap Mushrooms

These bright blue mushrooms look like something from the smurfs! They're known as indigo milk cap (Lactarius indigo) and they have some of those vibrant blue color you can find in the forest. This bright blue pigment is rare in the forest, so this deep indigo blue mushroom really stands out! The mushrooms aren’t super common, but they have a wide range. These mushrooms are also edible and have a similar texture to portobello mushroom.

Where Can you find Lactarius indigo?

These mushrooms can be found in the late summer and early fall. These wild mushrooms are found in both hardwood or conifer forests in Eastern North America. The trees that are associated with these mushrooms are oak, beech and pine trees. While indigo milk cap has a dazzling color on the underside, it can be tricky to spot in the forest. Sometimes the top of the mushroom is a much lighter pale blue color, they're often covered in leaf litter and pine needles. When they emerge from the ground, this can give them a surprisingly good camouflage for such colorful mushrooms.

Indigo Milk Caps from Young to Old

Indigo Milk Cap Lifecycle

Indigo milk caps start out their life cycle as a flat round cap with thick edges. The smaller indigo milk cap will be grayish blue to deep blue in color. As the fungi matures, it'll form a vase shape with thin edges on the underside. It has distinctive blue gills that exudes dark blue milk whenever they're cut or bruised. This milky sap is said to make a great blue dye. The old indigo milk cap mushroom's blue color disappears and slowly turns green over time

Perfect Indigo Milk Cap Specimen

Are blue milk caps edible?

Indigo milk caps are edible and have a similar taste to other milk caps like leather backs. Strangely enough, these mushrooms also have a very interesting fruity pebble smell to them. They are very interesting because they change the color of all the food you cook with it. They are beautiful, but not considered a choice edible. They're not as tasty as other late summer mushrooms like chanterelles, but they are enjoyable to eat.

Indigo Milk Cap Look-a-likes

Indigo milk cap is a pretty distinctive and unique mushroom, but there are a few other mushrooms that you could misidentify for this one. There's another blue milk cap called the celadine milk cap and this one has a slight blue color on the top, but if you flip it over it has orange gills on the bottom. There are also some Cortinarius species that have a blue color and looks similar to milk cap, but they don't exude the milky sap. These are multiple poisonous mushrooms in the Cortinarius genus., be careful! Blewit mushrooms also have a similar structure to indigo milk cap, but they have a purplish color rather than a blue color.

Indigo Milk Cap Recipes

Indigo Blues aren't my favorite mushrooms to eat, but their color does make the experience more exciting. Their dark blue dye stains everything that's cooked with it a greenish blue color. So you could recreate "Green Eggs and Ham" by cooking Indigo Milk Caps with Eggs and Canadian Bacon. People also like to bread and deep fry these mushrooms.

Foraging Indigo Milk Cap