This video is sponsored by Audible. Hey, what even are truffles, and why are people so obsessed
with them? And to be clear, I'm talking about the edible fungus that's referred to as a
truffle, and not the chocolate that's named after the fungus. People are obsessed with
these. I mean, for reference, I paid about $35 for each of these little Burgundy truffles,
and this is not even a very highly prized species. The Burgundy truffles are just what's
in season right now in the fall.
It's what I could get a true black truffle or Périgord is probably the most popular
species. That's a winter truffle, and it's got a lot stronger flavor. For me to get a
nice black Périgord truffle about this size from the same place online, it would cost
about $60 for just a little one like that. To get a white truffle about this size would
cost about $250. And that's when you can even get them. Look, I'm not here to convince you
these little funguses are definitely worth it.
I'm just here to explain what the deal is — why truffles are incredibly hard to cultivate,
and why people go mad for them. Also, why you need adorable little doggies to find them
for you.
"Shmuzzles, find it."
Shmuzzles! The dog's cue word to go find truffles is shmuzzles! Truffles are from a genus of
fungal species known as Tuber that grow around the base of trees — healthy living trees.
This is really different from other mushrooms we eat that grow through dead wood and leaves
and such. Those are scavengers of the forest. Truffles don't eat dead trees. Instead, they
live with trees. That's why you can't grow them in big blocks of sawdust or compost inside,
like you can with other mushrooms.
"Truffles are a unique type of fungus. They're mycorrhizal fungi. They obtain sugar from
the roots of the host tree, but then they also collect nutrients from the soil and provide
those to the host tree. It's a symbiotic relationship."
Ella Reeves and her colleague Katie Learn there are research assistants who help look
after this truffle orchard. It's run by North Carolina State University. It's an experimental
farm where they're trying to figure out how to grow these things in the Appalachian Mountains
of North America, where they are not native — at least not this particular species,
the aforementioned black truffle, Tuber melanosporum.
"They are native to regions in Europe like France, where there is heavy limestone in
the soil, so very high pH already."
Think about the Rock of Gibraltar. That's a giant hunk of limestone right here on this
EU map showing soil pH. Warm colors are high pH. Spain, Southern France, Northern Italy,
a little into the Balkans — this is where your classic black truffles grow wild and
are farmed with relative ease. They like to grow around hardwoods. These are Filbert hazelnut
trees in the North Carolina orchard, and here's how you farm truffles on them.
"Trees are actually inoculated in the nursery with the Tuber melanosporum, which is the
truffle-producing fungus. Once they're inoculated and there's a pretty heavy population inside
the roots, they're planted in an orchard formation, like you can see around. They need a highly
limed soil, so a very high pH to grow, so that they can outcompete the native fungi."
Once down there, the white mycelium of the fungus fans out and effectively extends the
root network of the trees. It sucks up water and mineral nutrients, and it passes those
on to the roots in exchange for carbs — carbs that the trees photosynthesize with their
leaves. Eventually, once tree and fungus are both big and strong enough, the fungus will
be ready to reproduce and it will send up a fruiting body. This is the part of basically
all edible funguses that we actually eat — the fruiting body.
It's this temporary reproductive projection whose job is to grow up and then send out
the spores — cast off the spores so that it will go far and wide and make new funguses
elsewhere. Cut it open and you can see the so-called marbling of this truffle, and you
can see the payload of brown spores ready to pop out. From the time you plant the inoculated
tree to the time you get edible fruiting bodies is an agonizingly long wait. Those hazelnut
trees are popular for this in part because they get you truffles relatively quickly.
And by "quick," I mean you can expect to get your first little crop of edible fruiting
bodies about seven years after you have planted your hazelnut trees. And that's assuming that
everything went right in the meantime. The lab techs here at the North Carolina State
Mountain Research Station can help you make sure that it's going right. You can bring
a soil sample or some roots from your and Ella Reeves and colleagues will try to make
sure you've got the right fungus growing in there.
This might include isolating some DNA and having it sequenced. That's a nucleotide sequence
she's looking at there of genes
"In this case, this wasn't even a Tuber species. This was a contaminant. It was Sphaerosporella."
Well, that's bad news, and truffle farmers get a lot of bad news. Here's a super sad
story. In 1999, a guy named Tom Michaels planted some inoculated hazelnut trees pretty close
to where I live here in East Tennessee. Michaels is a PhD plant pathologist. He did his dissertation
research on truffles. He's already had a long career growing button mushrooms. And when
he finally tried truffle farming, he naturally did just about everything right.
The climate and the geology around here is pretty close to those traditional truffle
growing regions in Europe. Michaels was definitely doing this in the right spot. And after nearly
a decade of waiting, he suddenly started getting bumper crop after bumper crop of real black
Périgord truffles, right here in East Tennessee. Tom Michaels was then, and arguably still,
is the only person to ever produce true black truffles on anything close to a major commercial
scale here in the Americas.
The New York Times wrote a big feature about him. He was a celebrity among American celebrity
chefs. And then his trees got this thing called Eastern Filbert Blight and he had to cut almost
all of them down. Same thing happened here at the experimental orchard in North Carolina,
Eastern Filbert Blight. They had to cut all of these down. But they are growing back.
Could there be black diamonds down there? Well, that's what Lois Martin and her truffle
dog Monza are here to find out.
"We found up to 40-some truffles in this orchard two years ago. Last year we only found two.
We don't know what will happen, how stressed the trees were. The second planting that's
much larger, denser — that we have not found anything in yet and it's due."
"Here, come on, shmuzzles."
Shmuzzles! Monza is a Lagotto Romagnolo, a breed used in Italy to sniff out truffles.
Monza and her human Lois are among the very few professional truffle hunting teams available
for hire in this hemisphere. A well-trained dog like this should be able to sniff out
any truffles down there. The truffles want to be found. The pungent aroma for which we
prize them has literal pheromones in it. The whole point is to attract animals who will
come and dig up the fruiting bodies and thus distribute the spores far and wide.
Even the inferior human nose can detect a really ripe truffle from, I don't know, across
the room. But doggies are way better at it, especially for an early season check like
this is.
"You train them to associate the odor with a treat, with a reward."
For centuries in Europe, they used pigs to the sniff out truffles. Problem was the pigs
would eat the truffles, whereas dogs...
"If they're well-trained, they will not eat a truffle. There are some romantic ideas that
if you feed the dogs some truffle, that they'll find the truffles. But the problem is then
they may start eating the ones that are restaurant quality grade that you would prefer selling
intact."
But Monza would never do anything like that. No, would you? You're a good doggie, Monza.
And hey, has she got something over there?
"We have something!"
It would be a really big deal if she's got something, especially this early in the season.
It would mean this blighted orchard is back. It would mean there's hope for all the wannabe
truffle farmers around here who've sunk untold time and money into a dream that so far only
one guy, Tom Michaels, has been able to realize, only to have it snatched away from him a few
years later. It would be a big deal if there's a truffle on those roots.
"No, ma'am. Forget it."
I feel you, Monza. I mean, these do kind of look like... Surely there are people in this
hemisphere who've managed to farm truffles successfully. In Northern California and the
Pacific Northwest, yeah, there are people doing it, but it's on a pretty small scale.
And the reason American chefs want a local product is these are only super fragrant for
a short while. They are casting off their volatile organic compounds into the wind like
confetti.
By the time you get them from Europe, they might be only really good for a couple more
days. And the smell is what it's all about. These hardly taste like anything. Truffles
are all about those very powerful, but ephemeral aromas.
"I've heard it described as animal musk before. It's really like a woodsy, earthy..."
"Earthy, I think is the word."
"Yeah."
Well, whatever it is, the most common way of getting real truffle into food is to shave
it paper thin onto something hot and steamy. That's too thick, the slices. I'm doing better
over here on the risotto. You shave the raw fungus on top. There's just enough heat and
moisture there to unlock some more of the aromas. If you cook them much more than that,
you drive most of the aromas away.
Probably the most common way of getting truffle flavor into food is not with truffles, but
with infusions — truffle oil. And most of the stuff that's on the market is fake, not
made with actual truffles, though they have put in the bio-identical compounds in here
to make it smell of truffle. I don't know, people get snobby about this stuff, but I
think it's real good. And you generally don't cook it. You just use it as a raw finishing
oil on food.
The traditional way they make truffle oil is to take any leftover crumbles or otherwise
unsuitable fragments of truffle and you just throw them into some oil. Of course, fats
are tremendously good at absorbing and trapping and then carrying aromas. That's actually
what Lois Martin is doing in these little baggies of hers. She's got a block of butter
in there to grab the smells cast off by this little guy that Monza found on a different
hunt.
Notice it's brown and smooth, not rough and black. That is not a Périgord truffle.
"We're smelling the Tuber lyonii, which is also known as the pecan truffle, and it's
a native truffle to the United States. We find it frequently in orchards, even if they're
planted with the European varieties."
At least that's what she thinks it is. They're still waiting on genetic test results, but
this lab full of truffle nerds is pretty jazzed to smell a native truffle — one that actually
wants to grow in the Americas.
"And I would describe it as an early summer evening breeze."
"Wow!"
The obvious question is, why bother growing Périgords here in the Americas? If we have
these native ones here that smell so amazing, why not just grow those and eat those? Well,
the local ones are not as highly prized. Why is that the case? Well, maybe it's because
they simply aren't the European delicacy that everybody already knows and loves. Maybe it's
because they aren't as expensive as the European ones. I'm hardly expert enough to give you
an opinion on that, but I will tell you this.
I have, once in my life, had shavings of a white truffle. That's the ultra-expensive
king of all truffle species. I'm pretty sure the specimen that I'd been served was good
and fresh and well prepared, and I thought it was a huge letdown. To me, it just tasted
like a weaker black truffle. Google it — I'm not the only person to have that opinion,
though lots of people find nicer ways of saying it. They say, "Oh, the truffle is very delicate."
Well, if you want less truffle flavor, then just use less truffle. Don't buy a more expensive
truffle so that you can use more of it. That doesn't make any sense. But anyways, that's
what I personally think the whole white truffle thing is about. I think people like them because
they are rare and expensive. They are rare and expensive because they are rare and expensive.
And now I'm sure you can head down to the comments and read all about why I'm wrong
about that.
But if you really want to read up on truffles and the crazy people who try to grow them,
you gotta check out this new book by the food writer Rowan Jacobsen. It's called Truffle
Hound. Monza and her human, Lois Martin, are featured in this chapter. If you don't have
time to read an awesome general-audience book about truffles, well, might I suggest listening
to it on Audible, the sponsor of this video? How does Jacobsen describe the scent of truffles?
"It was hardly a food scent at all. It was more like catching a glimpse of a satyr prancing
across the dining room floor while playing its flute and flashing its hindquarters at
you."
Well, something that's much easier to understand is that Audible is a phenomenal deal. Your
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The holidays are almost upon us. And I don't know about you, but pretty soon I'm going
to be driving all around Creation visiting family and such, and I really look forward
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Thank you, Audible. And thank you truffle doggies and the humans who train them. You
want to make a dog happy? Give them an important job to do. Go find the money, Monza. Find
the money!
"Good job."