28 Jul Telluride Mushroom Fest 2025: Chad Hyatt, Expert Forager & Chef Returns!
Telluride, Colorado is the epicenter for the largest wild mushroom festival happening in North America. The week of August 11, specifically August 13 – August 17, the Telluride Mushroom Festival enters its 45th year of celebrating “all things fungal.” One of the returning regulars is popular chef and expert forager Chad Hyatt.
Buy your pass to the Telluride Mushroom Festival. Contact the Festival here.
Go here for 2025 schedule.
Go here to purchase your pass.
Scroll down to listen to a podcast with Chad.
Chad Hyatt has been described as a double threat. He is both a classically trained chef and, as an expert forager, a connoisseur of wild mushrooms. Those two skill sets have afforded him a unique niche in the culinary world, and allowed him to expand the boundaries of what is possible when cooking with mushrooms.
Chad made a name for himself in northern California and beyond, sharing his unique (read unexpected) – and delicious spin on wild mushroom cookery, which includes mushroom as preserves like jam and for desert.
Chad has cooked in a variety of restaurants and private clubs around the San Francisco Bay area, where he can often be found foraging for mushrooms, putting on wild mushroom-themed dinners, teaching mushroom-related classes, and attending mushroom festivals.
Like the Telluride Mushroom Festival, where he is always one of the most popular presenters.
Chad’s passion is to cook approachable comfort food based on local, seasonal ingredients, including, of course, wild mushrooms. His book: “The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen” (2018, Chestnut Fed Books) and an updated edition, “The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen” (2025, The Experiment books).
With 120 recipes for everything from dinner to the aforementioned dessert, Chad’s book, (especially the second edition), will make you a better mushroom cook and open your eyes to the extraordinary culinary potential of the fungi kingdom
“From one of the mycological world’s most beloved chefs, this is Just. So. Delicious. ‘The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen’ belongs in the kitchen not only of every mushroom hunter, but also every mushroom lover,” said Eugenia Bone, food and nature writer and editor of Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook.
(Eugenia is also a regular at TMF, returning again the 2025 edition.)
“If you like to read cookbooks, you already know what to expect from chef-authors. Hyatt, though, balances chefly refinements and ambition with an adventurous and practical insistence on expanding the range of mushrooms we collect and cook. His encouraging words about Lactarius, Russula, and Hygrophorus: ‘Not only will learning to enjoy these lesser appreciated edibles help you vastly improve your odds of a successful hunt, but also some of them work better for certain types of cooking than the standard prime edibles.”This approach should have been part of the book’s title because it distinguishes ‘The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen’ from other mushroom-focused cookbooks,” wrote The North American Mycological Association.
Bottom line, Chad opens up a new world of cooking with wild mushrooms you never imagined possible. From pickles to pork belly, granola to gravlax – even cake and ice cream – heoffers food for thought for any occasion and varying degrees of expertise.
Find out more about Chad’s life and work – in his case, personal is professional – by listening to his podcast.
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