Chaga [Harvesting, Preparing, And Consuming Guide]

What Is Chaga?

Chaga seems to be one of the most popular mushrooms in the last decade. Its medicinal properties have been confirmed ¹²³ and its particular taste makes it one of the most sought-after fungi in the northern hemisphere.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
Hippocrates

It may not be pretty like the chanterelle, or taste as good as the morel (it depends on taste, I personally prefer Chaga to Morel), but the chaga mushroom has a powerful card in its deck. The health card.

Harvesting Chaga

The mushroom must be harvested in the wild. It is possible to make it grow in your backyard, but it is easier and more fun to go into the wilderness to hunt for it.

Now that you know you need to go into the woods to harvest the chaga, you will need to know what to look for and where to look for it.

Distinctions and look alike

Chaga can’t really be confused with other mushrooms, but it can easily be mistaken for a scar on a birch tree, especially on a white birch tree.

The mushroom is growing inside and outside of the tree. Logically, we spot the outside protuberance first. Its darkness and odd form are distinguishable from most of the scars a tree can have, but when you go for a chaga hunt, you will have a lot of false positives when trying to identify a black spot on a white tree.

If you want to see what the black mushroom looks like in its habitat and not in a well-lit professional photo, here are some of my photos:

When to Forage Chaga?

It is widely accepted that chaga should be harvested in the winter, but depending on the properties you want your mushroom to have, summer may be the best time to harvest.

What do I mean by what properties you want your mushroom to have?

If you harvest your chaga during summer, it will have more melatonin, a powerful antioxidant. On the other hand, if you harvest it in the winter, you will get more betulin, the cancer-preventing molecule.

Melatonin and betulin will be in the mushroom whenever you harvest it, the only difference will be their concentration.

Where to Forage Chaga?

Where in the world?

We can find the mushroom in the northern hemisphere in places where winter is (usually) really cold. Here’s a non-exclusive list of where you are most likely to find chaga.

Northern United States (mostly Alaska) and Canada
Russia and the Baltic
China, Mongolia, both Koreas, and Japan
Scandinavia (including Iceland)

Where in the forest?

According to the experienced forager I have met, you are most likely to find the mushroom in a birch patch on a slope near a river. In my experience, the slope and river don’t really make any difference. What makes a difference is the age of the trees in the patch.

Young birch trees are less likely to have chaga. It makes sense when you understand that the mushroom infects the tree in wounded areas. Older trees are most likely to be wounded than younger trees.

Bugs and insects

You shouldn’t find any insect inside the chaga, unlike many other kinds of mushrooms. If you do, you should consider not bringing it home, it probably means that it was harvested on a dead tree and the mushroom is also dead.

Preparing The Chaga Mushroom

Once the chaga is harvested, it should be dehydrated as soon as possible. It can wait a couple of hours, but you should do it on the same day that it was harvested. We are dehydrating the mushroom to prevent it from rotting and creating molds.

How to dehydrate?

Since you probably harvested your chaga in the winter, the “sundry” method isn’t really an option. The good news is that you can dehydrate it in your home, here are the steps:

Cut the mushroom into chunks about the size of a golf ball.
Lay them on a screen or any porous surface that can let the air circulate under the chunk.
Wait for a couple of weeks (even months according to some)

*The way I know if the chaga is dried is that it weighs around 45% of its “wet” weight. There is no ABSOLUTE way to know, but as long as it has dried for a couple of weeks, you shouldn’t be too worried.

Once it is completely dried, you can put it in bags or containers and store it in a dry and cold place. Some people recommend the freezer, but as someone who has dozens of pounds of chaga in my house, I would need a separate freezer to store my mushrooms.

I personally store them in my cupboard and don’t plan on changing my storage method soon, but if you have a lot of room in your freezer, go for it.

How To Consume Chaga?

There are three main methods to prepare and drink the mushroom:

1. Tea

Drinking tea is the most commonly known method to consume this healing mushroom. The process to make tea is fairly simple and quick. All you need is hot water and ground chaga. Once you have those two elements, you just have to make a tea like you would do with any other tea and drink it.

2. Decoction

The decoction requires more time and effort than the tea, but it is more powerful and has more health benefits than regular tea. Here are the steps to prepare a decoction:

Fill a pot with water. You should heat the water, but not boil it.
Place chunks of chaga in the water. It is recommended to use 30-40g of chaga for a litter of water, but I would recommend going with trial and error because it’s not everybody that likes a strong decoction. You can try it and if it’s too strong, just add water until it is to your taste, the next time try to remember the approximate ratio that you liked and recreate it. You can use the same chunks up to 5 times.
Let everything sit in the pot for 2 or 3 days
Use a strainer to separate the liquid from the chunks
You can drink the concoction directly or incorporate it into your coffee. Personally, I prefer to drink it in my coffee because it tastes delicious and the combination makes me light up like a Christmas tree. I would recommend once again testing different ratios of chaga to coffee to suit your taste.

A better way to create a decoction would be to make it in a Crock-Pot if you have one. You can read the step-by-step recipe here.

When drinking a tea or a decoction, all the water-soluble components, such as the polyphenols and beta-glucans, will be extracted in the drink. Unfortunately, water-insoluble components, such as phytosterols, and betulinic acid won’t be in the tea. You will need a tincture to fully extract those components.

3. Tincture

The tincture is made by using alcohol to extract the hard-to-get components that can’t be extracted otherwise. It is a healthy drink since betulinic acid, the cancer-preventing molecule can only be extracted using this method. This means that this form of alcohol can prevent and even cure* cancer.

*Anecdotal evidence and studies tend to confirm that betulinic acid can stop and reverse cancer.

How Do I Make A Tincture?

Here are the steps to correctly make a tincture that will extract the important components of the chaga:

Grind small chunks into a powder with a grinder or a blender
Fill a 1-gallon mason jar with the powder, but leave 2 inches of room at the top of the jar
Fill up the rest of the jar with vodka, whiskey, or any other hard liquor. The tradition wants to use vodka since the tincture originated in Russia, but any liquor will do.
Let it sit for 8 weeks to 4 months and shake the jar regularly.

How Do I Drink A Tincture?

The physical act of drinking shouldn’t cause you any problems, but the quantity and frequency should be mentioned.

The tincture is not a party drink. You shouldn’t drink it like you drink alcohol. I mean you shouldn’t if you want to get the health benefits.

Drinking the tincture is like making the tincture, patience is key. It’s better to drink small amount regularly than to drink the whole thing in one sitting.

The Russian tradition calls for a drop of the tincture for every year of age. This means that if you are 50 years old, you should drink 50 drops of the liquid.

To recap

If you live in the northern hemisphere and can harvest chaga near your house, I strongly recommend you go out and harvest it. It is not only extremely fun to hunt for chaga you will also have fresh mushrooms to drink for weeks and probably months depending on the success of your hunt.

If you don’t live near wild chaga, I suggest you buy some on Amazon or in a local shop and give it a shot. Your body will be transformed. This is not an overstatement.

Thanks for reading and happy chaga hunting.