A giant puffball in a horse field
September 13, 2025 · 3 min read
I nearly walked past it, because from the footpath it looked like a lost football in the long grass of a horse field. Up close it was a giant puffball, 28 centimetres across by my tape, smooth and white and slightly leathery to the touch, sitting on the ground with no stem to speak of. There were two more smaller ones about ten paces away. I took the big one and left the others, partly because one was plenty and partly because I wanted to see whether the smaller ones would still be there and still be white a week later.
The check with puffballs is done with a knife, and it has to be done every single time. Cut the thing clean in half from top to bottom and look at the cut face. It should be pure white all the way through, with a texture like a firm marshmallow or a fresh loaf, and absolutely uniform. If there is any shadow of a shape in there, a cap, a stem, the ghost of gills, it is not a puffball at all but the egg stage of a mushroom that has not yet opened, and some of those eggs belong to the deadliest things in the woods. Mine was uniform white end to end and smelt faintly of damp earth and fresh mushroom. It weighed just under two kilograms.
Cooking a puffball is mostly about geometry. I cut slices a centimetre thick, which gave me big pale slabs the size of my hand. Half of them I dipped in beaten egg and breadcrumbs with salt and pepper and fried in butter until golden, about three minutes a side, and ate them with lemon. The texture is somewhere between tofu and a soft bread, and the flavour is mild, so the seasoning does the work. The other half I fried plain in olive oil with garlic and put on toast, which was better than I expected and gone in a day. A puffball does not keep; by the second morning the remaining slices had gone slightly yellow and soft and went to the compost.
The two smaller ones were still in the field a week later. I cut one in half and the inside had turned a greenish yellow, which means the spores were ripening and it was past eating. I left it to do its job, which, going by the size of the first one, it does very well.