Midland man finds giant fungi not to be truffled with

This is definitely a puff piece.

A Midland man believes he has found the world’s largest-ever puffball.

Andrew Scott was visiting a friend in the Ottawa Valley last weekend when he came across the giant fungi.

“I looked into the field and thought it looked like my buddy’s sheepdog,” Scott said. “And then the dog came out of the house so I knew damn well it wasn’t the dog.”

Scott, who was visiting his friend’s farm to help harvest alfalfa and straw, walked over to the area and quickly realized he had discovered the mother of all mushrooms.

“I picked it on Sunday and we brought it home,” he said. “We can’t find any legit one that’s bigger online after looking up the ‘world’s largest puffball'."

But Scott realized he had to gather evidence to support his record claim before the mushroom rotted and dried up.

So, he headed over to Meatland in Midland to have it weighed, where it came in at a whopping 35.58 pounds with a 78-inch circumference.

Scott searched Google to try to find out where these kinds of records might be recorded, but came up empty with the Guinness Book of World Records.

“I wasn’t thinking of records when I picked it up, right? Because I had no clue,” he said. “But everybody's telling me you better take that and get it measured and stuff like that.”

The giant fungi has also been quite popular on the Wild Edible Ontario Facebook page where it has garnered close to 2,100 reactions so far.

“Everybody’s freaking out about it,” Scott said, adding that while Guinness doesn’t include fungi records, he expects to find a different library featuring "ginormous" stuff.

“I’m going to get into that. I’ve got all the evidence I need.”

A mushroom aficionado, Scott shared the harvest of his puffball bounty with 17 families.

“They only last so long once they’re harvested,” he said, noting the wild delicacy can be made into a range of dishes, including mushroom steaks or fried in butter with garlic and parmesan.

“Once you open it, it has a really strong mushroom smell. It makes for good eats.”

And while Scott doubts he’ll ever find another puffball as grand as this one, he’ll keep looking as he continues collecting various varieties of wild mushrooms.

“They're all over the place; you’ve just got to find them,” he said. “They’re on field edges and the sides of roads and stuff like that.

“But when you find something on the side of the road you don't really want to harvest it from there because of pollution.”