Spoon a generous ¼ cup of the tomato sauce in a row down the center of each puffball slice. Pile a heaping¼ cup of the shredded mozzarella cheese into a mound on top of the tomato sauce on each cutlet.

Once you’ve got as many spores as you can into the jar of water, put a lid on the jar, gently shake it, and set it somewhere for two days where it won’t be disturbed.Puffballs are placed within the Basidiomycota group of fungus, meaning the spores are on the inside. Its old name Gastromycete, means ‘stomach fungi’. I think both are potentially true, and it really depends on which species of puffball you’re harvesting. Cleaning Puffball Mushrooms While the pasta water is heating and the pasta is cooking, heat the oil in a large skillet. Add the puffball cubes and ½ teaspoon salt. The pan will be very full, but the puffballs will shrink in size considerably. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the puffballs have released and evaporated their moisture and the cubes have turned golden in spots, about 10 minutes. It goes without saying that you will want to do this step outdoors. Otherwise, it only takes one wrong move to end up covering your kitchen in billions of spores. Puffballs are spherical and don’t have a cap or any gills. Instead, the spores form in what’s called a gleba in the middle of the fruitbody.

They might not necessarily come up in the same field from one year to the next, depending on how the wind carries their spores. They don’t get attached to one particular trees like chanterelles or maitake does. Giant puffballs can reach a foot or more in diameter, which makes them hard to mistake for any other type of fungi once they reach that size. I’ve also heard of people crushing dried puffballs into powder and using it as a substitute for flour to make flatbreads. Although I haven’t tried it myself. Medical Benefits of Puffballs

Puffballs hold the record for producing more potential life than any other living thing on earth. A single average-sized puffball can produce as many as seven trillion spores.

Cut the required amount of slices from the puffball, and peel or cut off the outer skin. Brush each side of the slice with olive oil. Even one raindrop hitting the mushroom can cause the spores to shoot out of the fungi at a velocity of about 100 cm/second. This forms a centimetre tall cloud one-hundredth of a second after impact. A single puff like this can release over a million spores in the Common Puffball, the spores being typically 3.5 to 4 microns in size.If you don’t cook puffballs properly, they can get soggy. Unless you are planning to put them in a soup, they really taste best when they’re browned. Cut them into slices using the biggest, sharpest knife you’ve got.