Haines chef Travis Kukull makes the most out of mushroom season

It’s been a dry year. Over a month of drought conditions, a weeks longs burn ban, and lackluster snow pack. But a few days of rain means some delicious signs of hope are popping up in the understory.

Leave and twigs crackle underfoot as Haines chef Travis Kukul slips off the trail and into the ferns on Mt. Riley. His wife Rachel just found forager’s gold.

When you find chanterelles you know in your heart and soul they’re chanterelles,” he said.

“They’re just like patches of gold lying on the ground. ”

They do look like treasure blossoming out of the moss and leaves. Chanterelle mushrooms are also widely considered a delicacy in the culinary world.

Kukull would know. He’s got his culinary start in the kitchen in Washington state, where you can pay up to $25 a pound for these mushrooms at the market. But just a mile from the Kukull’s doorstep, the chanterelles are free.

“I feel like a kid in a candy store. People don’t think of this as a foraging capital but it really is,” he said.

It’s not just the chanterelles that are plentiful. Kukull describes hauls of king boletes⁠—also known as porcini mushrooms⁠—as well. When Kukull worked at the Halsingland, he says they stopped buying mushrooms entirely. He could find more than they needed in the forest.

“You kind of get the feeling in your bones that there’s mushrooms out. You spend enough time in the woods or just start at to acclimate to when they’re growing,” said Kukull.

He and Rachel will put mushrooms or dried mushroom powder in just about anything. Rachel makes sourdough bread with powder from dried chicken of the woods mushrooms, which are among Kukull’s favorites.

He says they actually taste like chicken⁠—he describes it as a “strong bouillon flavor.”

He likes to make noodles made from chicken of the woods and cauliflower mushrooms, too. They’ll do things the traditional way as well. After this year’s state fair, he says he cooked some chanterelles for friends who helped him out at his concession stand:

“I took one of my giant like four foot pie pans and I cooked 15 pounds of them all at once,” he laughed.

“It was really fun. I’d never cooked that many mushrooms all at once.”

Kukull has cooked seasonally in Haines for over a decade. Now he’s putting down roots with his own enterprise: Malo Nista. That’s Croatian for “little nothing.” It’s an in-joke with his grandma about the secret value of places that are in the middle of nowhere.

For now, Malo Nista is pop-up dinners at the First Friday art walk. But he’s hoping it will grow into a restaurant, and he has a few investors that believe in his vision.

“I do feel like Alaska is one of the last places that still can have like a really strong food culture,” he said.

“When I say food culture I mean something you do as an activity, and then eat later. Not just something that you go pick up at the grocery store and make a fancy meal with.”

Then, he darts off into the woods again. He remembers a little patch of chanterelles around this turn in the trail.