Asked what he plans to pay per pound, Bernhardt hesitates. "Three dollars a pound," he says. "But if there's a big boom, we could go $4 or $5 a pound." Asked whether the price will go down if the market becomes glutted, Bernhardt pauses. "And we'll pay more if they bring in really big mushrooms."
He says he's set up to move fresh--there's a refrigerated truck out back--and to dry up to 6,000 pounds a day, though he has no drying ovens. "Most buyers want their mushrooms dried naturally," he explains, so he plans to air-dry them, which he thinks will take 24 hours, and which is a little like hoping that if one leaves a pan of cake batter on the windowsill for a day, it will bake.
"It's my intention to keep this as an annual thing," he says, as a mosquito the size of a silver dollar crawls on a lens of his aviator-style glasses. "We have everything in place."
Though whether he does or doesn't remains to be seen, as every evening this week, when the pickers drive back in with their loads, the Great Alaska Mushroom Co. is closed.
Casey Jonquil and his wife arrive just as the Mexican pickers are selling the day's haul, 500 pounds. Linda Garcia asks Southard who that man is. He tells her, the owner.
"Ohhh," she says. "The man with the money."
"Can we have some cold beer and soda tomorrow?" asks Jose, one foot already in the van.
"Sure, I'll have it for you," Rankin says.
Jonquil runs his hands over the morels. He's concerned about the bits of white fluff from birch seed pods, less concerned about several slender white maggots.
"If you heat the morels slow enough," he says, "they'll crawl out."
Jonquil is hoping to do a good business in fresh morels, which should get to market within 48 hours of being picked, which means they must be driven to Anchorage, where there are direct flights to Portland. But before any of this happens, there has to be enough product to make the rush profitable. So far, there isn't, so Alpine is drying almost all the morels instead.
Jonquil says the stories about dried mushrooms being worth $200 a pound are fantasy. "If you go to Whole Foods and you get their little half-ounce bags and you do the math, yeah ... but that's not what goes to the source."
He hopes to get $65 to $75 a pound for dried. The ratio of wet to dry is about 8 to 1, though if the mushrooms are very wet when they come in it can shrink to 13 to 1, which means he'll take a bath. The final price also depends on global markets.
