5.2 ounces? This is newsworthy? That's like a few hundred bucks of truffle they found after ten years. I appreciate the patience, but what is the promise here?
It takes 4 to 10 years to get any crop cultivating truffles. It's only been (publicly) known as a technique since 2012. So this guy was an early adopter. He should get more every year for a while now it's working. Combine that with climate change making existing areas unable to produce and the fact no one else can enter the market in the short term and he's in a good position.
I was wondering too, but I think the point was that it's the first one of (hopefully) many more to come and provides an insight into this style of farming
I believe Truffles are in high demand in the US but it all has to be imported from Europe. Various farmers around the US have been trying to cultivate them to supply them locally. There's a pretty good video on the subject here
It is similar to a "deep tech" company getting their first product.
I know a bloke who spend 14 yrs between getting the special seeds to his first revenue for a specialist cherry. Now he could sell every cherry 10x over but instead charges about $5 per cherry.
I have to say that I was extremely disappointed to see the nicely seared steak tartare and microplaned truffle dish sharing the plate with a sad looking piece of "artisan hand-decrusted Wonder Bread™"
I remember reading about a baker in California who finally found the secret to a making proper French baguette. But it required something silly like shipping water from France. Here in the UK they still having cracked it.
I used to not like bread. I then lived in the us for 3 months and by god, the bread there was atrocious. Now I love bread. We have a lot of good bakeries around and I just love getting a warm crusty bread and chowing on it. I also don't get what the US fascination with decrusting is. The crust is one of the most tastiest parts.
I can not for the life of me imagine how you might need water from France for baguettes. I think the limitation in the US is not the water, but the public preference and the way bread is marketed.
Decrusting… I as a frenchman am digusted by this idea.
The good thing about the baguette is that it is nearly only crust.
I am traumatized by this „decrusting“
And as a bakery enthuisiast that baked in many european countries it is the quality of the flour in my opinion. For every country i visited it were different results but the same recipe. The french have a way „finer“ flour
>Decrusting… I as a frenchman am digusted by this idea
The crust on artificial bread like wonder bread isn't crust so much as darker more bitter bread. As a Frenchman you can relax because you probably wouldn't even consider it bread in the first place.
That sounds like the all american bread…
The thing is I have a thing for american cuisin as it has a deep cultural heritage from all around the world… what a wonderfull place where all the cuisine of the worlds meet and fusion to the most wonderfull…
But this seems only valid for certain parts of the US and food outside of the supermarket or fast food realm. Here in french or most europe the food has a decent quality even the ready to eat stuff in the supermarket.
Btw was never in the US, corona killed that plan. But I had contact with US culture by living in germany near the us military base.
I meant finely ground. But as I wrote those words I was thinking a bit and it is maybe also the quality…. But I have a third idea what it could be. The way it is ground. For example some milling would generate heat and therefore manipulate the structur of the protein(gluten). And this structur is what makes bread…..
Did some search and found this … if someone who reads this want to do a deeep dive, Please let me know the results, thanks
Edit: in europe we have numbers for the flour and they have a relativ to their number a certain amount of minerals. But most european countries are have their own system. But they are mostly comparable
Edit2: did a little search and the waterfree mass of baguette flour should have 0,52-0,62% of minerals. Thats calles t55 to t65 flour. But even then those flour have different proportion of gluten … and worse gluten aint the same everywhere. As I said the milling could affect it but also the kins of wheat and how it is grown…. You see a deep dive into the world of french baguette could be hard… I am happy with beeing often in france and getting the stuff I need there.( I live in germany) … btw same problem with ground almond .. french stuff works perfekt, german stuff not… but for almonds i am sure it is how fine it is ground… because now I ground them myself and it works.
Hope it wasnt tooooo much text and i could help :)
It's the same in UK - all bread is just this horrendous toast bread, really awful stuff. You can find some sourdough in few supermarkets, but it's like made by someone who saw a bread loaf once on a poorly photocopied photo 20 years ago - usually very flat, not risen properly, and tiny! On a chance if you find a local bakery that does actually make proper bread, I can guarantee it will be like £5 a loaf because it's "artisinal hand made with love and attention" nonsense - it's just bread people!!!!
Don't buy your bread from a supermarket (in fact, buy as little as you can from a supermarket). I can't speak for the entire UK, but in London and south east in general (essex, kent), you can find very good sourdough. The UK also has some very good mills and we're spoilt for flour (if you bake at home).
I'm in the north east, and not even in a major city, so the selection is very limited. Like, I could drive 15 minutes to the nearest "local" bakery but then like I said, anything that isn't just your normal toast bread is stupid money per loaf because it's "artisinal".
>>The UK also has some very good mills and we're spoilt for flour
That's interesting, because I find the exact opposite - not in terms of quality of course, but in terms of variety. I find that usually you only have your normal plain, then self-raising, then maybe two types of wholemeal....and that's it. In Poland where I'm from you'd get at least 10 different types of normal white flour in every store, based on how finely they are ground and how pure they are(denoted as "type" from 450 to 2000), and then you have flour from Poznan, from Warsaw, from Wroclaw etc etc - all found in normal stores. In UK it's just "plain". Tesco's own brand or maybe one other "named" brand.
> In Poland where I'm from you'd get at least 10 different types of normal white flour in every store, based on how finely they are ground and how pure they are(denoted as "type" from 450 to 2000)
Okay that's impressive. I buy my flour from Shipton Mill online[1] because, as you noted, supermarkets only carry commercial flour with very little variety, if any. Worse even, you don't get much information on the packaging about how coarse/fine it is, many times.
Side note: I'm also not originally from the UK and had also noticed the lack of bakeries, or specialist shops here. Even smaller towns have your typical Tesco/Sainsbury and few if any local baker, butcher, etc. Where I'm from, a neighbourhood without a butcher, bakery, fishmonger, etc would be considered a bit strange. I don't know why but it seems like the assassination of British culture is almost complete. I don't know if it was consumers that drove it or if the big supermarkets imposed it. They've made the local merchant almost extinct. And don't get me started on food culture (most brits I know don't regularly prepare their own meals, and when they do, they're rarely traditional home cooking outside of the typical sunday roast with the family, or christmas dinner. It's a sad loss in a way.
> I think the limitation in the US is not the water, but the public preference
Exactly correct. Most of us grow up eating cheap, crappy bread and simply continue the habit. There is plenty of really good bread out there but most people are content with the mass produced supermarket fluff.
A lot of the "European mystification" about US eating habits boil down to the fact that we have a lot of really cheap food available. Given a choice, most people choose cheap over good for daily usage.
>A lot of the "European mystification" about US eating habits boil down to the fact that we have a lot of really cheap food available. Given a choice, most people choose cheap over good for daily usage.
I think there is - as always - some truth behind what you call "European mystification", or at least the US people coming here (Italy) wouldn't be going "Wow" (like they almost invariably do) when entering a good (but common enough) bakery shop or at the restaurant (or even when eating a "real" pizza).
Or maybe they are only very kind, in order to compliment us, but anyway they generally give the impression they never ate some "good" food.
Problem is also that there is no specific word for bread in English language. As example the thing you use for sandwich is not bread In my native language.
Having an artisian breadmaker tradition helps. Over here in Germany, you can have all kinds of baguette-analogues (and some actual baguettes) virtually anywhere, no magic French dihydrogenmonoxide needed.
Try it for yourself: Baking bread is easy (and many have taken up the process as a hobby during the pandemic). Youtube is a great teacher of these things.
Most croissants are factory-made these days, frozen and then baked off on location, both for supermarkets and bakeries (also many French bakeries). Keuringsdienst van Waarde had a good episode on it, https://www.npo3.nl/keuringsdienst-van-waarde/05-09-2019/KN_...
I make bread at home, it's not a complicated recipe. I'm pretty sure they could do it in California as well, but it's unlikely they will like it (something about being "too crusty" ?).
I'm fairly sure that they do do it in California, San Francisco Sourdough is a whole bread style, they have world-famous bakeries and the crust definitely isn't an issue https://tartinebakery.com/
Agreed that the bread in the photo looked very sad!
I don't agree with your comment about UK baguettes though. In London at least, you can get very good baguettes from Orée, le Pain Quotidien, (to an extent) Paul, and a bunch of small local bakeries here and there. As a Frenchman, I find these to be just as good as what you'd get in any French bakery.
We do know how truffles reproduce. It's on wikipedia [1]
"Because truffle fungi produce their sexual fruiting bodies under ground, spores cannot be spread by wind and water. Therefore, nearly all truffles depend on mycophagous animal vectors for spore dispersal."
The truffle is full of spores. Because it is underground it can only spread far if something or someone digs it up and tries to eat it.
"When the ascospores are fully developed, the truffle begin to exude volatile compounds that serve to attract animal vectors."
The truffle smells good so something or someone finds it and digs it up.
The trick is that humans only care about a few species of mushrooms as truffles. You spread the spores of one of these good species around the roots of a tree sapling you plant and then you hope that it will establish a good healthy colony. If for any reason some other mushroom species outcompetes your truffle species you won't have any truffles. And it takes multiple years to know if that happened or not. So any experimentation in finding the right method or the right conditions to promote the truffle species and discourage the other species goes at a snail's pace.
If someone would want to invest a crazy amount of money to accelerate this discovery process I can imagine two things we could do: (don’t do it, it is a bad idea)
- we could make a genetically modified truffle fungi which glows in the dark. Now, why would that help? The problem with monitoring the health of your fungi is that most of the body mass of it is in the form of tiny thread like stuff called mycelium. Even if you take a soil sample it is kinda hard to tell the mycelium of the right species apart from the wrong ones. With some species experts can tell them apart under microscope but the only sure way to tell what fungi’s mycelium you are looking at is to DNA sequence it. Which is expensive thus rarelly done. But if you could make your target specie glow under UV light it would make the analysis that much simpler and cheaper. So we could do it more often and thus learn about what factors favour our truffle faster.
- The other option would be to engineer a kind of “immune system” to our truffle species. Basically to make “nanobots” which leave our truffle but kill other fungi. Now how on earth would one do something like that? I would start by trying to modify mycoviruses (the kind of viruses which attack fungi). Many of them are already quite picky about what kind of fungi they infect, so probably that would help us. Bonus points if we can engineer the virus such that it dies out in nature after a few rounds of reproduction so we can minimize the chances of an escape.
Of course both of these ideas are very speculative, scifi level conceptual stuff. :)
> Bonus points if we can engineer the virus such that it dies out in nature after a few rounds of reproduction so we can minimize the chances of an escape.
This should be a top priority or you're describing the beginning of the next disaster/distopian movie.
Actually, in the brain, yeah. And a well thought out plot, too.
I remember looking at old newspapers in the game, and it looks like the fungus was on crops. And I think there were allusions that the fungus was the same on which controls ants, but mutated.
From what I understand, a complex symbiosis is required for truffle mycelia to flourish, so the immune system idea might backfire by killing beneficial organisms similar to how antibiotics can kill beneficial bacteria in the human body.
I was thinking more of a "point an ultrasonic imager at the dirt" kind of solution. There's got to be some way to see what's going on before nine years!
Even then, figuring out what’s needed to make it grow _and_produce_truffles_ may be challenging. There are lots of variables. Temperature/humidity/acidity of the ground/availability of nutrients/… throughout the year all may matter.
Possibly, that’s even throughout the yearS. Mast happens “at irregular periods of 2–12 years” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)) and we don’t really understand that, either.
-add a fungicide resistance gene into your truffle strain. Inoculate your tree with this GMO strain, treat the soil regularly with appropriate fungicide. This will kill off the competing fungi, leaving only your strain.
I have a hunch that wouldn't work well. Trees often use more than one type of mycorrhizal fungi, and there's a lot we don't know about why, how, what causes the mycelium to start the production of fruiting bodies etc.
There are degrees to how, and much is still unknown. As you point out, much of the unknown how relates to propagation and symbiotic bonding to the host trees and soil biology.
You are very right. I choose to pursue other mysteries in my time here on Earth, but it would be so exciting getting to know everything there is to know about the mycorrhiza. Even just reading the literature to learn what others already know would take a long time. Sometimes I feel life is too short.
Ps: Excelent work on the fjords, they turned out really pretty.
Yup. We don't have human-edible truffles around where I live (west coast of Norway), but it is possible to find deer truffles, unrelated fungi with a similar strategy. They release pheromones which make deer go a bit crazy. Apparently they used to be sold in apothecaries as "rutting balls" (løpekule), aphrodisiac for cows basically.
It's probably very hard to measure truffle mycelium growth: its fragile and buried under very heterogenous dirt. And mycelium is the form this organism takes the majority of the time: the fruit is just the end product.
It'd be like trying to understand how plants grow without being able to see or measure light.
According to that article, we know this protein exists, but we have never actually been able to isolate and study it directly - we just see some derived substances. Fascinating how such basic things are still somewhat mysterious; and how it's easier to create antibodies to detect byproducts of a protein than it is to chemically isolate that protein!
While not the same as the full mechanism for reproduction. The cultivation section of the relevant Wikipedia article claims that there was significant large scale cultivation of the truffle in France at the end of the 19th century -- and that many of the techniques were later lost.
Vanilla was not successfully pollinated by humans until 1841, which meant that it did not grow outside of the natural range of its pollinator in Mexico (and only a very small region of Mexico.) And today most vanilla does not come from vanilla beans but is synthesized from petrochemicals, because vanilla's pollination is still ridiculously expensive.
Mushrooms can be super fickle - the conditions under which a spore will grow depend on soil composition, acidity, temperature, and other things. Morels are also famously hard to farm. Most people just hunt for them after forest fires.
it's actually not that much money -- a few hundred million dollars for world wide market? also it seems a fairly inelastic market, i.e. if price drops to 1/5 it's current price, demand won't go up any where near 5x, so current suppliers have little incentive to increase supply or lower cost.
Hairloss is even more of a head scratcher. I've seen people buy pretty much everything to get back or just stop hair loss, and I'd bet the potential profits are way higher than penis growing pills. There are tons of communities of completely desperate men revolving around hairloss. Yet, a part from minoxidil and finasteride, which are far from ideal solutions and can't really regrow lost hair, there's very little good research and no new products in the past decade or so. It's really a testament to how complicated our bodies are, if even hair growth can be so difficult to reliably control.
I started losing my hair at 16. Minoxidil worked, like really well. I grew back robust hair at the bald spots. But I needed to apply it 2x a day and not exercise/shower for at least 4 hours after application. This did not work for my lifestyle. I stopped using it by the time I went off to college. Finasteride wasn't available at the time, and maybe would have been a better option. I did all right in the dating pool after 30, but my 20s were rough. All I would say to my younger self is: you have every reason to consider this a big deal, but at the end of your life (and even by the time you are 40), you will consider losing your hair to be a very very very minor thing.
Minoxidil twice a day is unnecessary, the half life of topical minoxidil is about 22 hours, so once a day is sufficient. I have a compounded spray with 10% minoxidil, dutasteride, tretinoin and a few others that I apply about an hour before I shower for the day which works quite well.
Also, one of the issues with minoxidil is that it is a prodrug, the active form is minoxidil sulfate, and some people don't express sulfotransferase as much in the skin to be able to make that conversion. If minoxidil doesn't work for you, then you want to either use oral minoxidil (the liver will activate it to minoxidil sulfate, the side effect of that is you will have enhanced hair growth through your entire body), or a compounded topical that has tretinoin, since that helps upregulate sulfotransferase in the skin.
> the half life of topical minoxidil is about 22 hours, so once a day is sufficient.
I don't have an opinion on how often minoxidil should be applied, but your reasoning here is wrong. If the treatment works when a particular concentration is maintained, you could absolutely need to apply a drug with a half-life of 22 hours twice a day.
For example, many anti-depressants have half-lives of a few days, but patients still take them once or even twice a day.
The only relationship between half-life and daily dose is initial ramp-up vs sustained treatment. That is, a treatment usually has a targeted amount of a substance being maintained in the body during the sustained treatment, and then the ramp-up and any adjustment needs to be done taking into consideration that the pill you took yesterday may still be 3/4 still in your body today.
There have been several stories from within the trans community of trans women experiencing some amount of regrowth after being on finasteride + HRT. Not growing a full head of hair back from being completely bald, but a lot of trans women with receding hairlines have found their hairlines to have un-receded.
There is some newer data that show minoxidil in combination with tretinoin and/or microneedling is more effective. Preventing hair loss is pretty easy, just block 5AR DHT conversion with finasteride or dutasteride.
The trouble is, once hair loss is visually noticeable you've already lost about 50% density, and most people don't notice their hairline slowly receding.
If every man took dutasteride from puberty, none of them would go bald. We know this from the condition 5-ARD. Obviously that's not a good idea, since DHT is important for fertility and many other male secondary sex characteristics.
The point remains though, if you were able to know that you would go bald, and started taking finasteride or dutasteride before noticeable hair loss starts, that would likely be sufficient for life.
I remember Bill Gates in some video said that pharma companies spend lots of money on research to prevent hair loss, grow hair compared compared to research on diseases like malaria etc.
Don't forget Bill - don't make the Covid vaccine formula open source, just let my org donate vaccines to them - Gates. And then his alliance of health NGOs of donated, what? a few million doses? For a population that literally needs 2-3 billion in India alone.
>Both pieces cite a Sky News interview with Gates that ran this week, wherein Gates is asked if it would be helpful to change intellectual property law in order to enable "the recipe for these vaccines to be shared."
> Gates answers, "No," which by itself could be interpreted as him standing up for intellectual property law and refusing to share vaccine formulas with developing nations. But then Gates goes on to answer the inevitable follow up question: "Why not?"
> The reason, Gates said, is due to the complexity of manufacturing safe vaccines.
> "There are only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines," he said. "The thing that's holding things back in this case isn't intellectual property. It's not like there's some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines. You've gotta do the trials on these things. And every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way."
> Moreover, Gates said getting COVID vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson to share vaccine formulas has already happened — such as the case with India.
> "We got all the rights from the vaccine companies," he said. "They didn't hold it back, they were participating."
Those are Gates' claims, yes, while many vaccine manufacturers were explicitly saying this is BS and they are perfectly ready to produce these vaccines if they are given the go-ahead.
"I've ordered products like this before, wasted a pretty penny I don't mind telling you. But if this works, I'll order a dozen.
We're not selling penis mightiers
Well you're sitting on a goldmine Trebek"
It's not clear to me this is true. I think there may be some niche market, but I think most men wouldn't even consider something like this.
A few people mentioned viagra, which has made a lot of money, but that's not about size.
I remember reading a long time ago that there is some kind of "enlargement" surgery available, but that the motivation is almost exclusively the "locker room" rather than a sexual issue.
Anyway, I'm sure that an invention as you describe may be interesting to some niche, but I don't believe it's one of the worlds burning problems, which is why it hasn't had any serious study.
Hard to tell where the sarcasm starts and ends, so my apologies if I am taking you too literally, but my assumption would be that we haven't seen 'serious study' of penis enlargement because it's highly unlikely there's some simple way of making it happen, especially one that doesn't also have side effects...
There's an old joke that penis enlargement is very easy through mechanical means, it just doesn't last all that long and leaves a small mess at the end.
Truffles do reproduce. So it is not a question of if it is possible, but merely how an observable phenomenon occurs. There are no penis enlargement pills yet beyond viagra and one of the problems is that there is no proof that anything drug can extend tissue in that way.
I think alot of dudes would want it in case she is lying about birth control. Every do often you hear about a paternity case where the alleged father had had a vasectomy years before.
Before you bring out a snappy "Will not work", try to think about exactly it won't work for, and if you're making unwarranted assumptions about the goal. Just a few seconds would have helped.
this is like some kind of reverse occam's razor argument but i feel like your point is blunted by the fact that there are lots of companies making tons of money off of viagra derivatives.
Unless it’s patentable, there’s no economic incentive for any one farmer or farm conglomerate to invest in this research. It would require government or non-profit research. And in a world of scarce resources, funding research on a luxury food item would strike many as a waste of taxes or philanthropic funds.
(I’m not saying it’s wasteful, learning the secrets of truffle reproduction could unlock a new branch of scientific study. Just explaining why this is.)
Just make it a trade secret? A patent is basically making it public in exchange for a guaranteed, albeit short term, exclusive right. Why not just let only a few know and keep it secret from everyone else?
If there was a reliable trade secret, then there would probably be farmers producing outsized yields. Hiding the total production per acre would be difficult in such a top end product where consumers frequently tour the farm.
Edible foraged mushroom markets are surprisingly opaque. The foragers are unlikely to give anything more than a vague notion of where they find their stuff in my experience.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that there are people that have figured out how to increase yields in the wild or simulate correct growing conditions
Lots of businesses have successfully kept trade secrets for decades, many very famous and gigantic company's recipes are trade secrets. Companies know that if they patent it, it will be in the public domain eventually, whereas trade secrets can stay secret indefinitely, theoretically.
The vast number of off brand cola and waterproof fabric products would seem to imply that marketing is the operative force rather than the secret recipe.
That would be antieconomic. Culturing a truffe means buying a tree that cames "pre-configured" in a lab and letting it grow. This young sapling would cost, lets say, 80$. Thus they would be burying 1000$ for a lottery ticket with a small chance of turning it into a new 80$ tree. Very bad idea. Anybody can buy a pre-seeded tree online.
Eating the truffe instead is advertisement and creating a net of future exigent customers.
For chefs is also an opportunity to verify that you have exactly the right stuff. There are other types of truffe that grow in Corylus and have a much lower market value.
They break it down per ounce. I was fed "truffle butter" but it turned out to be the opposite of my expectations.There was a whole bunch of cannabis in there, and I was pissed. Not good
I'm from an area in Italy where truffle is quite common. This year prices are higher due to lower production (climate has been too dry). The quoted price seems high, expecially due to the fact that that's a black truffle.
Forget truffles -- I want someone to grow some matsutake mushrooms which are just about as legendary/rare as truffles, so I can finally taste some and see what all the hype is about.
Matsutake are delicious. You can get them online in october-november usually if you look around. I've gotten them from www.oregonmushrooms.com. Not cheap online; the dried version are also pretty good, but not as much.
I personally wouldn't pay ridiculous prices for them, but as I live in the SF bay area I keep an eye out when they're in season and you can usually buy them for $20 a pound or so (and a pound is a lot of mushrooms). trim off the dirt, slice them, sautee them in a little fat with onion and garlic, add in some soy sauce, white wine, maybe chicken stock, maybe strips of chicken.
The main thing with matsutake is, like truffles, they have not really been domesticated. You have to forage for them.
There's all sorts of interesting things about mushrooms- the mycelium ends up connecting multiple trees together, and they act in symbiotic relationship to each other, in terms of exchanging minerals and nutrients (which is apparently why they haven't been domesticated yet).
(the Japanlology series is pretty entertaining / informative too -- it has lots of episodes and there's always a touching / memorable story at the end of each)
If you’re in the Bay Area, Nijiya carries them. I think either Rainbow Grocery or Far West Fungi has them occasionally too. They definitely take like a combination of red hots and wet socks, but I like the flavor.
You can’t mess with them too much. The trick is to trap the aroma. Leeks sautéed in butter with lemon thyme(optional)..deglaze with a nice white wine..high heat..toss thinly sliced matsutake. The recipe I know calls for clams..throw in the clams and close w/lid. They will open and release juices. Squeeze of lemon and use crusty baguette to sop the juices.
Japanese preparations are with rice or like a consommé. You can also fusion it with Lemongrass etc…but because they are seasonal and expensive, why ruin the pure flavour. They are also known as pine mushrooms..so the aroma is kinda piney/forest floor and cinnamon chai’ish. Mushroom cravings now!
Absolutely incorrect. There are lots of rare things. Rarity by itself is nothing. Something good being rare is something. It might not be the best thing in the world, and something perfectly commonplace might be "better" than it. But rarity + good is the combo that generates hype.
I disagree that you can't value variety and novelty while being thrifty. There are a lifetime of recipes using very common ingredients in completely different ways. I would accept that one major part is differing spices which are relatively rare and expensive (at least, if you're trying to emulate a variety of non-Western cuisines and you're in the US).
I think we are both getting a little away from the original topic of what generates "hype" or in other words "excitement"
Take steak (common) and lobster (rarer)
Both are good, and I would rather live in a world without lobster than one without steak. That said, if you asked me what which I wanted for my next meal, I would pick lobster.
This doesn't mean you can't eat good food with variety on a thrifty budget. But even someone doing so might be especially excited to have something expensive that they don't normally have access to.
Yes, and it is nice; worth a taste if you run into it. Overrated imho for the price but nice a few times per lifetime. Make sure though you don't get it in hip, millionaire folk restaurants (which usually have reviews which are not about the food but more about the ambiance and such); in my experience, they put way too much of expensive DOP products (including white & black truffle) on things so people can post pics on twitter 'this is $4k/kilo white truffle'. A plate of pasta where you only see a mountain of white truffle is expensive but not very nice imho (unless you take of most off the truffle). In normal Italian restaurants where they serve this they would put a few slivers so you have a nice subtle dish.
In October/November in the pacific northwest you can buy them at asian markets (though they're pricy) or find them in dishes at many japanese restaurants.
"Thousands of truffle-producing trees were planted, and production reached peaks of hundreds of tonnes at the end of the 19th century. In 1890, 75,000 hectares (190,000 acres) of truffle-producing trees had been planted."
Lots of mushrooms smell worse than they taste (cooked). I found some Lactifluus Volemus last year. It tastes great, but it gives your fingers a smell that's somewhere between musk and old fish.
Only black truffles. White truffles..the alba variety (more expensive) is shaved and can be had raw. You can cook black truffles.
Some 10+ years ago, I scrimped and saved and bought white truffles for something like 400 quid in London. I had only omelettes and pasta and risottos for days and I stretched it and stretched it. I didn’t want to try anything else fancy..just a blank slate to imbibe the aroma of white truffles. A Hungarian Tokay and a very pungent raw Camembert. I could only afford McDonalds soft serve and fries for a week after that but it was totally worth it.
As I am typing this..and I am obviously imagining it..I can almost smell it ..it’s like the aroma of those meals are still clinging to the inside of my nasal passages.
I used to work Michelin kitchens…and classical recipes were always revered..but there was always someone who’d want roast chicken with black truffle slices under the skin. A tame version of the original..roast chicken inside a pig’s bladder. I have had many humiliating experiences including shaving a piglet with a razor in a bathtub(not to mention Glorious 12th shenanigans which were probably not legal..who knows) , but never have done the bladder balloon bag for truffle chicken.
Others can be simple and not fancy at all. Or a consommé with black truffles in it and a puff pastry dome so a plume of truffle steam hits them when they break the dome. These are text book recipes..old fashioned escoffier stuff, but there will always be someone who will wax lyrical about them.. I wonder which generation will lose the nostalgia of it all.
When I came back to the states, I had a few usual suspects under my sleeve that I repeat again and again. The most popular one was seven hour gigot d’Agneau with robuchon pomme purée and a cream of garlic soup. The Americans refused the lamb because it was falling off the bone(that was the point) and suspicious because it was ‘still pink’. And insisted on truffles in the pomme purée even though none was available and I only had fake truffle oil at hand. That was the last meal I cooked and I stopped cooking meat all together. There is something about America that can’t get past beyond a well made burger. It’s very insulting to my craft. It makes me very sad because I love to feed people..but I also realized that I love feeding people only because they loved me.
Sorry..went off on a tangent and then down the mushroom path.
Fwiw re the OP, I think I know that Sonoma farm…I remember when they planted and many were skeptical. they planted in a hazelnut orchard. It’s the most suitable one for California. It’s not worth planting new growth oaks as they are protected under state law and can’t be felled if need arises. Further..oak disease is ravaging California..sudden oak death is clearing off old growth oaks. It’s all very depressing. But I am very happy that there are truffles in our own CA backyard. They use dogs now to dig them up instead of pigs, I heard…because pigs will gobble up everything. Thousands of dollars worth of truffles in one snort.
Seems like it’s around 10,000 euros/lb now. When I bought it..it was probably 2200-2500 euros per pound. That was almost a decade ago!
To me, after the Italian white truffle experience, black truffles are not worth it anymore. I just want to preserve that one special memory(of many meals) untainted!
You can forage for those on the Oregon coast! I was just given some by a friend and they're tasty; had never had them before. But they do smell a bit like gym socks.
As others have noted they are widespread in the PNW and BC. Bought some at a mushroom festival a couple of months back, and got the advice to eat then raw with a bit of olive oil and salt. Pretty good, but you probably need an umami-soaked Japanese palate to truly appreciate them.
You can collect them in the wild, at least in the mountains around Seattle. We found a bunch at some point... frankly I think they are overrated. What they really need to grow are king boletes ;)
> Weighing 5.2 ounces, ... [the type of truffle] frequently sells at prices that range from $800 to more than $1,000 a pound.
So he planted an orchard of trees containing truffle spores, waited 9 years, and then found a single $300 truffle. Hopefully he finds more because otherwise that's a very bad ROI (unless he's doing it purely for the flavor/hobby in which case it's a good ROI).
You may have a point. Here in the Périgord, hazelnut trees are reckoned to decline in truffle production when they are around 10 years old. Oaks go on producing for decades. If he's planted solely hazelnut and he's waited nine years, he may have a problem.
You all forgot that he owns two dogs that are the only breed to sniff out these truffles. That probably cost thousands.
I would say this guy might be a failure. He has earned $350ish dollars over 9 years. That buys like 2 bags of dogfood a year.
I can just imagine the conversation with his wife before he got the dogs. "Honey, I'm spending $2500 on a pair of dogs." And then inevitably later, "but they will pay for themselves with the truffles they find"
I mean… it’s a great company and awesome idea so I don’t mean to detract. But that website design made me very uncomfortable… I mean right aligned? Really?
Look at the page on a wide monitor or with a mobile sideways and i think you'll see the issue: the page is designed to have a left column, which is right aligned so that it goes flush with the picture to the right. But when you view the page on a narrow monitor or with a mobile vertically, below the cut off width it reflows so the right aligned text section goes to the top (which results in the odd layout complained about)
The popular psilocybin mushroom types are all saprophytic, they grow on decomposing plant matter or dung. Truffle fungi are mycorrhizal, they form complex symbioses with trees, exchanging water and nutrients with them.
Not only does that make them harder to grow, it also makes them a lot more chill about producing fruiting bodies (a.k.a the actual mushroom caps that we eat). Saprophytic fungi need to move on once the matter they grow on runs out of nutrients. Mycorrhizal fungi can live comfortably for decades with their host tree and only produce fruiting bodies when the conditions are optimal.
Some fungi have very complex relationships with other species before they will produce fruiting bodies and it isn't easy to figure out exactly what they need to thrive.
Always sad to see this kind of thing happen, and I feel for the truffle farmers of Périgord, France. Americans are also trying to do the same with kava.
Inevitable the native peoples of the world end up in poverty while some Johnny-come-lately capitalist in the US eats their breakfast.
I just happen to have looked at the truffle prices in Austin, Texas, USA yesterday. It was $1200/pound. We have, essentially, no truffles in the US. It is clear that the truffle farmers of France do not have enough to be exporting to the US (or else there is some other obstacle). If a US farmer finally manages to produce significant quantities (and we have heard news of this kind of breakthrough before that never really delivered), it will be filling currently unmet demand.
We do have them throughout the US in elite restaurants. Shipped in, I assume. If you go to The French Laundry, there is a special guy who comes to your table with a gorgeous long hardwood box. He opens it with a flourish, and set into several indentations in the box are baseball-sized truffles. You get to select one, and then he gets out a microplane and starts shaving huge truffle slices onto your plate. He does this until you can no longer see the dish in question (usually it's The French Laundry's legendary truffle mac and cheese). Then he keeps doing it until you think your eyes might pop out of your head and there is a thick fragrant layer of truffle slices all over your dish.
This costs a lot of extra money on top of an already expensive bill. It's worth it.
Granted not at French Laundry but I’ve done this at a fancy NYC restaurant. I’ve also had less desirable truffles (summer truffles) at a far less fancy restaurant in Italy. The Italian ones were much better.
The decay function on truffles is insane. Maybe the very top restaurants can get them from ground to plate in 48 hours but it’s pretty clear that the meal I had used truffles older than that.
I’m excited about the possibility of US truffles because I think a very tight supply chain is more likely.
It sounds like you've studied this market, so I'm curious if you have thoughts on Oregon, as it has been my understanding that there are meaningful quantities harvested there. Is it a matter of variety, lack of commercial production, or am I just misinformed?
From what I’ve read, the Oregon truffles harvested are different varieties noticeably different from the top ones, and even more perishable and time-limited. I don’t think many people eat Oregon truffles outside of Oregon.
Well what I meant is, far less than we would be eating if we could get them. A price like I saw in the grocery store is not at all reflective of cost, even with a profit, it's the kind of price you get when there is a finite supply that cannot (yet at least) grow any, so the price goes up until enough people say "never mind".
For all I know, that truffle I saw was from Oregon. But regardless, there aren't very many. It was priced at about 4x the price of silver, per unit weight.
fun fact: all french grapes are grown from american root stock [1,2] due to an infestation in the 1960s. one could argue it is a benefit so that if either country is struck with something like this for truffles, they can share.
Great articles, it seems that most (not just French) wines are produced by grafting wines onto a phylloxera (insects that feed on the vines) resistant rootstock. From the gizmodo article:
It's hard to compare modern wine, which is all grown on grafted vines, to pre-phylloxera wines (the notable exceptions being Chilean wine, and wine from the occasional European vineyard that was spared from the blight).
And:
Though modern chemistry and genetics have given agriculture plenty of new tools to fight pests, the ancient practice of grafting, honed during the Great French Wine Blight, remains the method of choice for protecting grape vines. "Rootstocks are the 'cure-all' for many soil-borne pests and diseases, but not all," Walker says. "In the past fumigation and pesticides controlled some of these issues, but if phylloxera are present, rootstocks are essential."
Rather than flying truffles transatlantic they can just be trucked across the country, or take much shorter and much less carbon-intensive flights. This is a massive win for the climate.
Is it a massive win for the climate? Truffles are light and small, and I think the quantities small enough that they are only modest packages in airfreight right? Even if on a weight-normalized basis flying them is extravagant, given the scale it would seem like the aggregate impact is pretty small.
I'd rather have it grown locally than like coffee or cocoa beans where entire country-sized economies are devastated by US megacorps (see the reasons why we need fair trade), not to mention what they do to the environment.
the natural supply are forests. The overwhelming majority of truffles are found, not farmed.
Anyway, I don't like the idea of wasting so much soil, water, chemicals for few pounds per acre. It really seems like between preserving nature and money we always choose money.
