Terms discussed: acrid, bitter, latent
The taste of a mushroom, as used in identification, obviously has some similarities with smell, including subjectivity and genetic variation. I'm including only the tastes here that are not covered in the entry for smell, and the special tastes that some mushrooms have when cooked.
Topics:
acrid
bitter
tastes of cooked mushrooms
acrid
Peppery, hot. This is not really a taste per se, but a burning sensation that fills your mouth (and sometimes your throat!) when you put a bit of the mushroom in your mouth.
bitter
This should be pretty self-explanatory, but I should mention (warn you?) that some mushrooms are intensely bitter, so much so that the sensation is almost as unpleasant as acrid.
Some mushroom-hunters carry hard candies with them to suck on after tasting a bitter or acrid mushroom, to help get the taste out of their mouth.
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tastes of cooked mushrooms
A lot of people think that all mushrooms taste the same. This is a little like thinking that all fruits and vegetables taste the same because you've only had one kind.
The taste that most people think of as "mushroomy" is the taste of Agaricus bisporus, the common cultivated mushroom, whether in its dwarf, albino, bald form as the "button" mushroom or its brown-haired robust form as the "portobello" or "crimini" mushroom. This taste is common in the genus Agaricus, and many other fungi have at least a whiff of it, but that's hardly all there is to the entire kingdom.
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Boletes and morels are often described as having an earthy flavor, like the smell of a forest after rain. This is hardly a coincidence: after a rain is when the fungal metabolism kicks into high gear. The smell that we all recognize as that of a wet forest, or indeed of wet earth, is actually the smell of fungal respiration.
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Russula species often have a nutty flavor, and many boletes also have a nutty component to their taste. The chicken mushroom, of course, tastes like chicken (but - - in its prime - - juicy, softer, and without any bones). Meripilus tastes like liver - - but in a good way! Hen of the woods has a flavor which is hard to describe, but is sort of like chicken broth, rather than chicken. I have eaten Amanita rubescens, A. vaginata, and A. fulva, and they all tasted rather strange and vaguely unpleasant to me, in a way I can't describe. Mushrooms that smell almondy also have that flavor, at least as a component.
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Anyway, I hope this gives you an idea of the range of flavors to be found in mushrooms. There are also many mushrooms that are pretty much tasteless. Just like vegetables!
