Puffball
No known toxinsLycoperdon and Calvatia species · also called giant puffball
Puffballs are among the easier wild mushrooms to recognise, and there is exactly one test that matters — and it is the same test that prevents the most dangerous confusion in mycology.
Quick facts
- If eaten
- True puffballs have no significant toxins while pure white inside. The danger is not the puffball but what can be mistaken for one: a button-stage death cap looks like a small white ball until you cut it. Cut every single one.
- Under the cap
- none
- Spore print
- Cap
- A ball or pear shape with no cap, gills or stem, white when young and browning as it matures into a bag of spores.
- Stem
- Absent, or a short sterile base.
- Growing on
- grass, soil, hardwood litter
- Season
- Summer and autumn.
How to identify it
- Cut every specimen in half from top to bottom. The inside must be uniformly white, firm and featureless, like a marshmallow.
- If you see the faint outline of a cap, gills or a stem inside, it is a young Amanita — possibly a death cap — and not a puffball.
- If the inside is yellow, olive or brown, it is either a maturing puffball or an earthball, and neither should be eaten.
- No gills, no stem, no ring, no volva on the outside.
What it is confused with
One test settles each of these.
Cut it vertically. An Amanita egg shows a mushroom silhouette inside; a puffball is featureless white.
Earthball
Earthballs have a thick warty rind and are purple-black and firm inside from an early stage. They cause gastric illness.
Read this before anything else
- Never eat a wild mushroom identified by a website or an app.That includes this one. These tools narrow possibilities; they cannot see your mushroom, its base, its smell or its habitat, and the difference between a meal and a liver transplant is sometimes a feature buried in the soil.
- Get it confirmed in person by an experienced local forager or a mycological society. Most regions have one, most run free identification sessions, and they will look at the actual specimen.
- Dig, do not pull. The cup at the base of a death cap is often underground. Pulling the mushroom leaves the most important feature in the soil.
- If someone has eaten a wild mushroom and feels unwell, call poison control now — in the US, 1-800-222-1222. Do not wait for symptoms to worsen. Amatoxin poisoning has a false recovery phase, and delayed treatment is what makes it fatal. Save any uneaten pieces for identification.