Food|Buried Treasure That Is Filled With Mystery
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By Eugenia Bone
IF you have never bought truffles because, frankly, you do not know how to begin and you are afraid you will get skunked, well, you are not alone. Serious home cooks and even food pros are bamboozled all the time. It’s actually pretty difficult and always expensive to attain good-quality truffles, especially for retail customers. In fact, acquiring truffles is so fraught with potential fraud that you might wonder whether the dining experience is worth the financial risk.
Of course, it’s that marvelous odor that makes truffles so desirable. What a shame, then, that many people complain of having paid a fortune for truffles only to feel like ninnies because the taste just didn’t live up to the hype. But that’s not necessarily the fault of the consumer. When it comes to truffles, it pays to know a few facts about the weird biology and the sometimes (O.K., often) duplicitous nature of the truffle business.
Truffles are mushrooms that have evolved to grow underground. When the spores of the truffle mature, the fungus produces aromatic compounds that attract animals. The animals dig up the truffle, and the truffle spores become dispersed. The truffles we prefer to eat have evolved to attract swine (hence the tradition of putting pigs to work hunting them). The truth is, the truffle itself doesn’t taste like much. It is the gas that gives truffles their flavor.
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My cousin Mario, a retired barber and white truffle hunter, spends every morning during the fall months trespassing all over the chilly little valley in Tuscany where he lives, directing his feisty dog to sniff under this scrubby willow or that. When she smells a truffle, she starts digging furiously, and Mario has to yank her aside to retrieve what looks, rather disappointingly, like something the dog deposited, rather than unearthed.
But the smell! It’s as if a sulfuric love bomb went off. If you could roll in the smell, you would. For lunch, his wife, Maria, serves the little truffles Mario won’t be able to sell, ground with butter and black pepper and spread on a cracker, and then again, shaved over soft, eggy tagliatelle. On the train ride back to Florence, I reek of truffles, which elicits knowledgeable smiles and nods from my fellow commuters.
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