In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners
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In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners
Truffles
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Not to be confused with the chocolate treat, today on In The Garden with UC Master Gardeners, we are talking about Truffles - the mysterious yet delectable underground fungus. Truffles are mycorrhizal fungi which play an important role in the health of soil. The truffle/tree relationship is beneficial for both the environment and for the tree. Because they grow underground, their aroma and flavor are tantalizing to both humans and animals. Today we’ll learn about how truffles are being cultivated and then how to cook and enjoy them. UC Master Gardener Host Bill Brooks recently spent this episode with his expert guests located across the country - Dr. Tom Michaels, trained as a Plant Pathologist and expert on EVERYTHING Mushroom and Truffle-related. Dr. Michaels will entice the science buff listeners in what is known and NOT known about truffles. Also, joining the program is Susi Gott Séguret, author, chef, fiddler, forager, and Certified Culinary Professional to name a few aspects of her expertise. This episode is one of a kind!
You're listening to In the Garden on 88.9 K U C I Irvine. I'm your host, Bill Brooks, University of California Master Gardener. Not to be confused with the chocolate treat. Today we're talking about truffles, the delectable underground fungus. The first recorded mention of truffles dates back to the Neo-Sumerians of the 20th century BCE. We're fortunate to have Tom Michaels and Susie Gott Segre with us today so we can learn more about this unique organism. Tom is the owner-operator of Tennessee Truffle, located in the foothills of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains in Tennessee. He has a PhD in plant pathology, and that's been an area where he's done a lot of research. He's been a scientist for both Monterey Mushroom and Dole Foods in the Mushroom Division. Susie Got Segray is a chef, fiddler, forager from Madison County, North Carolina, also in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She's a certified culinary professional and certified specialist of wine who holds a diploma in gastronomy and taste from Cordon Blue. She has authored four books on Appalachian cooking, culture, growing up there, truffles, and foraging. So let's begin our discussion about truffles with identifying what exactly is a truffle.
SPEAKER_03This is uh it's it's actually a little hard to do it because it has a lot of different conceptions. People have a lot of conceptions about a truffle. The simplest way might be able to say it's a it's a fungus like a mushroom that grows on at fruits underground. And so we make a slight difference between a regular mushroom and a truffle. And um, like I say, it's a funny thing in terms of how we define it.
unknownThe the USDA, in all their agricultural uh work and statistics, uh doesn't even have a definition for it. In other words, uh in a legal sense, we don't know whether a truffle is a mushroom or not. That's a very important thing.
SPEAKER_01That's interesting.
SPEAKER_03So it's kind of in the it hasn't made the radar in terms of uh, you know, the cultural scene and or the whatever the legal um scene. So so anyway, to be able to get down to what might interest you your listeners, they're more interested in the in the cooking and growing aspects of the truffle. Uh the truffle is um sometimes we speak of it as an underground mushroom, and that's a general term to be a little more scientifically accurate. For scientists, the truffle is thought to be a member of the the Ascomycete uh family of fungi. Uh and and within the Ascomycetes, we even some people are even more specific to say it is uh only species of the genus tuber. Other Ascomycete species, uh some people classify them as truffles, some uh not so much. Um and in the case of the genus tuber, uh before the gene jockeys got involved about maybe 10 years ago, we thought there were about 60 species of truffles. My major professor at Oregon State University, where I did my work on graduate work on truffles, uh Dr. Jim Trappy wrote the monograph on truffles, and he had more or less about 60 species. And then now the gene jockeys got into it and they said, Well, this DNA is a little different than that one, and so now we're over 400 species.
SPEAKER_01So we're way, way down to it almost a genetic level of studying these organisms.
SPEAKER_03Yes, and but and the thing is they're so difficult to grow. The classic way of defining a species uh is uh you know, if it can interbreed and mate, uh then they're the same species. But uh since we don't have a very good ability to grow and and and form the sexual stages of these truffles, uh we don't have the the ultimate uh you know proof that that of how many species we actually have.
SPEAKER_01So what we do know though is it's something that is very tasty, and we certainly like to eat it. And I know Susie's going to address that later in the show, but I've heard about black and white truffles. But it is my understanding that there's many different species. Can you tell us a little more about the different types, especially the culinary types that we like to eat?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, there's that's that's a good point. The the truffles, in terms of the culinary aspects of it, we're talking big uh mostly the aromas that the truffles give off. Uh, a lot of other mushrooms have uh their culinary uh desirability has to do more with their protein flavors and and fatty flavors. But in the case of the truffles, we're talking about the volatile aromatics. And so among all the different species, um, kind of have to step back and ask why is the truffle producing, you know, in an etiological sense, of all it is aromatics? And that's uh since it grows underground, it's a little hard to spread your spores around, so it wants to attract uh animals to eat them.
unknownSo it it it puts out this blue of aromas.
SPEAKER_03And uh some animals like to eat uh you know stuff that smells like sewer gas, and uh, some truffles do have a terrible odor, and other and a handful of truffles have these aromas that uh that we humans love. And so in the case of the uh, we can kind of in in a very general terms uh divide the type of truffles of culinary interest into black truffles and uh white truffles, and there's a little bit of extension into kind of uh brownish-reddish truffles, which are kind of orphans in the whole culinary landscape. In the case of the of the black truffles, generally speaking, and um I'm gonna have to use uh forgive me, Susie, I'm gonna use kind of like the wine lingo here in terms of how to describe to the listener what the black truffles are like. Uh you might say that at depending on their stage of ripeness, they might be floral or fruity or um earthy or musky, have those kinds of uh tones or notes. And in the case of the generally speaking, those truffle species that are in the white truffle group, uh they tend to be more uh sharp in the sense of um, oh, um sulfury, garlicky, onion-y, um, and please please help me out here, Susie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, you've got uh you've got it right there. I would add um sensuous, pungent, sexy, sweet, and kind of dark chocolate, sorghum, molasses, and um various other things to the black truffle profile, nutty, oaky, and then the white truffles, I would say, are more garlicky and peppery and petrel y and spicy, really, really heady and intense.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah, like petrol. I had an Australian uh truffle friend uh and and he's actually he was uh he was my first uh truffle hunting uh mate.
unknownHe he said they smell like uh bitumen. I said bitumen. That was how the Australians, you know, pronounced uh called their asphalt, so so it's so it is like that.
SPEAKER_03But uh yeah, Bill, yeah, did you notice uh Susie's quite wordsmith there? So you can't do it.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and and that's really good. And that's what we appreciate about having both of you here is Tom can bring in the growing aspects and Susie can talk about the wonderful things that we can do with these to really change the way that we eat, which is an awesome field. And planting and eating, I think, go hand in hand together here. So tell me about the optimal growing conditions. What kind of climate? I've heard Mediterranean climates like we have here in Southern California really work well for growing truffles.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Now that's uh that's uh such an interesting question. It sounds like it could be a simple answer, but but it really isn't, uh, because you have to look at how the truffle survives in its ecological niche, survives and thrives and produces. And in the case, I would I guess um speaking in more general terms, uh, the black truffle group, in particular uh tuberbolantesporum, which is the which is the major black paragraph black truffle of trade, uh, is the black winter truffle. Uh tubermelanosporum is rather forgiving in its growing condition. It can take quite a quite a uh differential in yearly moisture, and but it does need a a seasonal climate, something of a Mediterranean uh climate where we do have seasons, uh it would be impossible to grow the truffle in the tropics. It's a terrible truffle. But here we have uh enough climate, the temperate climate variability, uh, as long as our soils don't freeze, uh, you know, when we freeze our truffles below you know the frost line.
unknownRight. If we can survive uh uh frost into the soil in the winter, that's that's an ideal kind of condition, growing condition for the truffles.
SPEAKER_03The soil is in the case of the of the black truffle, it a lot of the species uh tend to uh thrive and outcompete their competitors in somewhat slightly alkaline to actually fairly alkaline soils where we're allowed the pH of the the general uh specifications that you know the French have done work over many decades about what they find where their truffles grow. And they they've identified a p a pH range of about seven, six to eight, one is where the this is the case I should be more exact here. This is the case of the paragord black winter uh truffle where those fruit bodies appear. And some of the other uh growing conditions for the other truffles have not been uh quite as well uh specified or determined. Uh in the case of the of the white truffle group, there some of them are actually uh we're having some good luck uh developing a white truffle species uh that grows with a pretty with a vi even a more forgiving set of growing conditions than the black white truffle.
unknownIt's we can talk about that later in the program, maybe uh it's tubergorchi. But your your listeners are probably familiar with with the uh with the white alba truffle, which is uh which is you know, in terms of if you the price point, uh, you know, it's it's it's off the charts.
SPEAKER_03So there's no explaining how you how you figure the price of a white truffle. Uh that's because it its ecological niche is so tight that we have barely begun to understand it. Uh in other words, it's it's just not just soil. It it you have to have certain uh types of vegetation, certain weeds have to appear, uh, or whatever under the yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because that that that's what I understand that truffles, unlike mushrooms and other fungi, have lost their ability to decompose plant matter, so they have to live symbiotically on a tree. So tell us a little bit about the species of trees these truffles live on.
SPEAKER_03Well, generally speaking, they are uh they are deciduous uh, well, actually, I shouldn't say that, the conifers. We tend to have, in the case of the of the black truffle group, they tend to be in the in the Betulaceae and Figaceae, the oaks and uh and the hippories and and what have you.
unknownUh and also uh in in the pine family, too. Um then there's uh there's a few other ones that we find them on.
SPEAKER_03We find them Atlantic cedar and uh linden trees and uh some other ones. So so but but generally speaking, uh that's where they that's that seems to be their required hosts.
unknownThere's a very large group of of how do I want to describe this, uh, of trees.
SPEAKER_03Like, for example, if you look at the the ashes and the maples and what have you, what they they do not have the uh the biochemist chemical machinery to be able to work in symbiosis with the truffle. They work with a totally uh other different group of mycorrhizal fungi. Oh, something of note, I think you're which is very important. We talk about mycorrhizal, you know, of a fungus that and a root that grow in symbiosis. That's of course kind of the definition of the term. But in our in our biological world, about 95% of all plants are mycorrhizal. It's the norm and not the exception.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we we study that a lot through Master Gardeners and promote that. You know, we're talking about things that that increase the mycorrhizal fungi that grow all over plant roots. So I think our listeners are familiar with that, and that's just basically what a truffle is.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, it's very beneficial. I mean, it's a pretty smart way if we want to get technical. They the truffle has a much greater surface to volume ratio as it's growing through the soil than a root does. Uh, so that that means that the truffle is much more efficient at picking up water and nutrients and uh delivering it to the to the host tree. So the host says, Well, I'll sacrifice a little bit of my uh sugar up here in the leaves, send it down to the roots and and feed it to my friend the truffle.
unknownAnd and but in a more cynical term, as a as a scientist, uh we sometimes call it mutual parasitism instead of symbiote. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03They both benefit from each other, but uh weren't necessarily in their best interests.
SPEAKER_01So here in Orange County, we have a lot of oaks, uh native oaks in particular, and we have sycamore trees as well. Those are our native trees within the area. Would those do well for hosting truffles?
SPEAKER_03Oh, perfect. Well, that was a perfect setup question. The sycamore is is endomycorrhizal. You couldn't you could never grow a truffle on a sycamore tree.
unknownAnd the oak tree, however, is is ecto that's kind of a family of uh mycorrhizal that the truffle uh is a member of. So so the oaks are are uh pretty darn good hosts. But now you have to ask yourself where you are.
SPEAKER_03And uh I remember my folks retired on the central coast of California. We had these beautiful high pH caliche soils uh where the live oaks were growing, and uh those would be great. That was a great candidate uh environment for growing the truffles. But some of these oaks, like pin oak and what have you, they like the acid soils, and so we have a little conflicting situation. The truffle, in the case of the black paragord uh truffle, likes these alkaline uh environments. I I I tried growing my under white oaks here in Tennessee, uh, tried mycorrhizing the truffle onto them, and that was a total dud because they hated acid soils. They they turned chlorotic and nutrient deficient.
unknownYou couldn't you couldn't make the two work together.
SPEAKER_03So it depends if that's adapted to an alkaline soil. That's a good that's a good candidate to Yeah, and that would depend.
SPEAKER_01You know, definitely one of the things a home grower or someone that wants to experiment this would probably need to do is send a soil sample off to a lab to find out all of the uh acid and bases components.
SPEAKER_03And also that soil is something we should uh realize that in the case of doing something simple as uh changing the pH, we do that, of course, with liming, and uh that's the that's the bonus operande for most of the truffle growers here in the United States. So we don't have too many naturally occurring uh high pH soils, so we uh we we lime them up and and get that uh soil pH propitious for the truffle to take off.
SPEAKER_01And that's something you're you're doing where you're growing them in Tennessee. You're you're changing the pH of the soil by doing that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and and also what that does is there's remember the roots are juicy. There's thousands of fungi that want to want to get those juices and live off, you know, micro symbiose in some cases with the roots. And by adding lime to the soil, we have eliminated well over, I'm picking a picking a ball, real ballpark number, well over 90% of the possible competitors of the truffles, we've eliminated them because they just can't do well in these high pH soils.
unknownSo by liming, we're also trying to make selective conditions uh for the truffle to give it a little competitive advantage over all the other fungi that uh want to symbiose with the truffles.
SPEAKER_01So if the home gardener, somebody that say had oak trees, wanted to start experimenting with this, how would they begin? What would they what would they start doing with the growing?
SPEAKER_03Well, this is the case of the in the case of a fungus on a root, the fungus that gets there first has kind of primacy of place. So if you say, well, I got this beautiful oak in my backyard, I'm just gonna uh spoon in a few, shovel in a few truffle spores, uh-uh, it's uh the odds of that are pretty low. Yeah, I mean, you could be one heck of a clever gardener and they make it work, but uh but if you want to wait, have to wait for years to find out if you were clever enough, uh it's it's uh the better strategy is to actually get the truffle on the roots before the other fungi show up. And so we start uh germinating oak seeds and hazelnut seeds and you know other potential host species, uh seeds in a nursery environment.
SPEAKER_01And you you inoculate them.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Inoculate, excuse me, Bill, is a very generous term.
unknownUh we just uh simply uh infest the soil.
SPEAKER_03So it's not like we're taking a syringe, you know.
SPEAKER_01Right. So you're actually starting then with a tree that's that's potted, so you haven't put it in the ground yet.
SPEAKER_03Right, yeah. So we give it a head start, get a good colonization of the truffle on those roots, and then uh and and actually that's tricky too. Um gosh, I wish we had two set two programs we could talk about uh, because it gets so deep, but there's some fascinating things going on with the sexuality of the truffle, even in the nursery where you may end up with a tree that's only uh both female or uh or male, and then you've got yourself a you might have the truffle. Yes, it's there on the roots, but it's never gonna produce uh truffles until it finds the opposite mating types.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah so it really this is this is all new news.
SPEAKER_03We had no idea until about ten years ago that uh that the truffle is behave so uh cantankerously even in the nursery environment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was gonna ask you about because they live underground, how do they spread their spores? How do they get into that reproduction?
unknownThat's that's one of my little pet uh ideas. I learned it from my father.
SPEAKER_03I was raised on a on a button mushroom farm. And uh you actually can make a make a living at growing mushrooms, as you're to your garden or listeners. Um anyways, and my father used to say when he was growing his mushroom crop, and I didn't get it as a kid, but after you know working a little while in this world, uh he said, I was part of the ecology. When I go into a mushroom growing room, the the organisms in that compost would speak to me and get an idea, and I would encourage the ones I uh the good ones to grow, and I would uh um say decapitate the the bad ones when I saw those. I was part of the ecology. And so that's where we are with the truffle. When I'm in the uh the truffle is is saying to me, I I need to spread my spores.
unknownI taste good. Come and get me, make more of me. And so that's so it's got us. We are part of that ecology when we're in the when we're managing the truffles.
SPEAKER_01It's it's it's got us uh us as well as in any other organism, especially a vertebrae organism. In any other critter.
SPEAKER_03Well, they also uh snails and pods.
unknownSome of those uh pick them up too.
SPEAKER_03Uh earthworms are are uh there's this is a few decades old work, but there was some some looking at earthworm castings that might stimulate when the truffle spores were inside the earthworm that uh it stimulated the germination of the truffle spores for for moving it around the environment and and getting the truffle to to reach its goal.
SPEAKER_01So they really are dependent on a lot of organisms to spread their spores from one place to the other.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and then and then you take it to the next uh next degree of separation. Okay, you got this little little poor little uh vol or some rodent there that's eaten it, and now comes the owl and it eats it eats the owner.
SPEAKER_01I see.
unknownOwl eats the rodent.
SPEAKER_01Now you've got you've just spread those spores around by miles.
unknownSo it's it's a fun thing. Uh but you are Part of the ecology it's stricken us.
SPEAKER_01We're another organism that wants to eat the spread those information. So I guess you you know when you're talking about that, then using a good organic compost, this is another reason why a good organic compost is so good for anything you're growing. Uh because it does influence those those good funguses that we want growing in our roots.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's where it that's that's a little more complicated than that. Many of those organisms, why we love compost as gardeners, uh one of the things, like you say, it it uh it's a good uh substrate for growing a lot of uh you know beneficial organisms in the soil for the for your garden plants. Uh at the same time, a lot of those organisms, a lot of those are back an old-fashioned term, uh, since I'm an old-fashioned scientist. Uh, we used to call uh some fungi in the soil hyperparasites, where they would be they're beneficial to the host plant because they parasitize the p the pat the fungal pathogens that might attack the host plant. And so we you actually making a very verdant soil full of organic matter uh isn't necessarily the recipe for good truffle production. In fact, uh it can be extremely detrimental. Uh the uh the organic matter uh levels uh that have been pretty much established. I'm speaking now for Paragord Black Winter Truffle, of which we know the most about conditions, uh, tends to be uh anywhere from about uh maybe two percent organic matter. In some cases you might get up to six, seven percent uh organic matter, but uh but you really don't want uh you don't want to overdo it with trouble growing.
unknownDefinitely not.
SPEAKER_03And then the state of decomposition of that organic matter you're adding is absolutely uh it is extremely important too. If you put in a fresh green manure organic matter, you know, put in your lawn clippings and what have you, uh you're asking for trouble. Uh you want a well decomposed uh organic matter that's basically just uh just lick very lignified uh stuff without a lot of free nutrients there for the soil soil organisms. You want the organic matter more for structure and for uh being a pH buffer, you know, since organic matter has a lot of uh acid groups on it and makes a beautiful uh soil buffer for managing your your nutrient availabilities for the for the tree on the truffle.
SPEAKER_01You've certainly, I think, got a lot of us thinking about a possibility in gardening, a direction we could go that many of us may not have thought about. So this is this is fantastic. So when you get to the point of finding the truffles, I and Susie, I believe that that France is kind of the modern culinary use of truffles. Is that correct? Would I be correct in assuming that?
SPEAKER_00That France is one of the countries that uses truffles the most in cuisine, is that what you're asking? Yes. I would say the French and the Italians, and of course the French have had the good fortune of uh uh finding perigord truffles in Perigord, hence the name. Um, so um um they've had a perhaps a little bit more easy access to that particular truffle than other countries have had. And uh given that the French love to cook with butter, butter, and butter as the main three ingredients, and butter is one of the best um hosts to truffle flavor because it captures the aromatic essence of the truffle and holds it in place and uh can then diffuse that uh on pasta or potatoes or uh rice or whatever you happen to be cooking, that is a very good base. So, yes, the French who love butter and cream are particularly well suited to making the truffle shine. And the Italians, of course, the Italians uh who are known for their albatruffle, which is the white truffle profile rather than the black truffle flavor profile that we discussed just briefly, um they uh tend to cook with uh sharper, more acidic ingredients like tomatoes and garlic. Garlic is quite a strong flavor, and so you don't necessarily want to use tons of garlic with your with your milder flavored truffles because it's going to eclipse that truffle flavor. But for the albatruffle, which is already quite garlicky in itself, in fact, you know, in a way it almost renders the garlic obsolete. But uh, Italians love that garlic flavor, and so their type of cuisine, I think, um, is is best suited to the white truffle flavor profile, which is sharper and more garlicky, more um almost lemony as well. The the French, the the Perigard truffle being a little bit just slightly more subtle, but more musky and uh uh more of that deep earth, dark chocolatey kind of a flavor. It goes particularly well, as I said, with the with the cream and the butter.
SPEAKER_01So that is so it's an oil, and you hear about truffle oil, so it is that essence of oil that carries that flavor. It's like when you call Appalachia appalachia, you're in the somebody's gonna throw an appalacha. When you mention truffle oil, you're gonna bring up a whole lot of hackles here.
SPEAKER_03How do you want to expound on the scientific uh I'll say just one word dysmethyl thiomethane.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'm not gonna pronounce that one.
SPEAKER_03That's the when you get the artificial truffle oil. It's it's one of the uh what's it's one of the major aroma constituents of truffles. Uh in fact, it's it's something that maybe we think the animals key in on when they're when they're hunting the truffles. In other words, when you see truffle oil, it's almost like the problem we have with olive oils, where you can sell something that has mostly soybean oil in it presented as olive oil.
SPEAKER_01Right.
unknownUm, the trading, the the rules and the regulations. Well, in the case of truffle oil, it's the same sort of thing.
SPEAKER_01It would be a gimmick.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, put a few pieces of truffles, the shavings in there to look like, oh yeah, it's got truffles in it. And then the the the major uh additive is a uh is a feedstock from the chemical industry called this methyl thiomethane. In the case of that, it it's just it's it's one of those classic cases of you get what you pay for. It's uh if it's if it's too uh you know inexpensive, uh it's too good to be true.
SPEAKER_00So and in the case of truffle oil like truffle salts, it is that perhaps one flavor that's been extracted. And so you are uh experiencing a very, very tiny profile of what a truffle really tastes like. And the danger is that people who have tasted only truffle oil because that's all they they can afford, or it's what they've found in restaurants on French fries or popcorn, they think that that's what a truffle tastes like. And then they're looking for that when they taste a real truffle, and sometimes they're disappointed because they are expecting something less than what a truffle actually is. But a truffle, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, uh Tom, it might have over a hundred different magic profiles. For instance, if you like gumbo, gumbo for people from the South and New Orleans know it, you know that gumbo is a pot where you put everything in one dish and you've got lots and lots of different flavors. And when you make gumbo, you build on those flavors and it's uh it's a very intense uh stratified dish. But if you extract just one of the elements that you put in gumbo, for instance, celery. Okay, celery, uh if you've eaten gumbo, you wouldn't necessarily think that gumbo tastes like celery.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00But if you extract that just that one flavor and say, here, this is what gumbo tastes like, and uh some of them they're gonna be disappointed that's like that with trouble oil. May I interject uh very quickly here, uh some maybe a news you can use category for your listeners.
unknownSure. And that's uh that bismethyl thiomethane, you know when you've got it if you have a metallic aftertaste.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's very good to know.
SPEAKER_03It's a slam dunk. Uh if you've got that, you don't have the real thing.
SPEAKER_01So talking about, I think this is a good spot to get to the harvest. And we've seen train dogs and train pigs that sniff for truffles. Since they grow underground, that's kind of how you have to find them. Can you add a little bit about how truffles are harvested or found? And are dogs and pigs the things we use?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I wanted my cat to learn how to do it, but I'm a more of a cat person than a dog person. So in the case, okay, historically, let's let's back up maybe a hundred years, uh, back when uh truffles were uh just a uh a seasonal uh treat uh for the peasants in southern Europe, uh where they could could help hunt them on their farms. And uh what they noticed pigs love to root around, and that's you know, root tubers and what have you are one of their major natural natural environments, major food sources. So truffle uh pigs are natural hunters for uh for truffles. And so back in those days, uh you were a you were a peasant farmer and you had your you had your your sow and your bear growing your pigs and train them to you didn't have to train them. You could just nose up a truffle and then you'd haul it off to your kitchen and and uh you just had your nice holiday meal or what have you. Uh so that's but then now with uh you know modern uh refrigeration and transportation and what have you, uh that's when the truffle left the farm, so to speak, and and became more more popular in the wider culture and more highly distributed. So pigs were not necessarily the the best option in that case. Uh they're very big, like for oh, by the way, sows are much better if you than uh the boarers are barrels or uh than they are because uh the at the truffle in the case of the black paragon truffle, it's there's uh oh one of those, how do you say those steroidal compounds, epiandrosphyromes, whatever a male sex hormone is uh is produced by the truffle. Don't ask me the the why the truffle decided to make some of that, but uh maybe it's again to attract the sout uh to uh spread the spores around.
SPEAKER_01Interesting evolutionary uh question there.
SPEAKER_03But so so today now uh dogs are are easier to handle.
SPEAKER_01Easier to train as well.
SPEAKER_03Easier to train, yeah. And they you know, they're I mean, I know people have kids with friends and buddies, but dogs tend to be the the rigor when it comes to uh having a nice buddy as a pet.
SPEAKER_00So uh they're a little easier to keep in the house the ten months of the year when you're not producing truffles as well.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Oh this is actually a note, a lot of the uh truffle uh professional truffle hunters in in Europe, they are not buddies. They're they're not their man's best friend with them. They treat them like uh like a like a stock animal, you know, they're out there they're pens and and that's all they're they're there for is just to work. They have for them. We're we have a little softer hearts, uh, some of us anyway. So we like our dogs. Uh yeah, yeah, training them. Uh why don't you go on about that?
SPEAKER_00Well, that's another science in itself, dog training. And uh we have a couple of really wonderful folks here in our country whose specialty that is. One is Lois Martin, who is located in the Knoxville, Tennessee area. Another is Alana. Remind me Alana's last name.
SPEAKER_03Oh, I've I just know her as Alana too.
SPEAKER_00Anyway, she's out on the Pacific West uh coast in Oregon. And then, you know, there are there are a few people who are breeding the Legato Romagnolo, which is uh the Italian uh water dog essentially that is very well suited for um looking for truffles because it has a very intense uh uh and particularly adapted to this. Uh and it's a cues heck dog to have around to. Tom has had experience with that. You don't really need the most expensive dog on the market to hunt truffles either. You can uh so long as your dog is not an easily distracted dog like a beagle that's gonna run off after every rabbit, you can train a lot of other dogs as well.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, one my one one of the things I noticed, yeah, I had my legato and she was she was a real honey. But one of the biggest characteristics for truffles is they have work ethic. They can go all day, they only want to find those truffles.
unknownThey they'll go all day.
SPEAKER_03And it it's amazing. And what uh what I understand about it is is when a truffle when a dog is sampling the the aromas in the soil, uh its brain is working as hard as our brains are when we're in deep deep concentration and thought. Up to 25% of their metabolic energy is committed to identifying those aromas. I mean, it's uh it it's a very serious uh sort of of an endeavor for a dog.
SPEAKER_01So, Susie, we've touched a little bit on the flavor, and we know that maybe a lot of our listeners haven't actually had the truffle. If any exposure, maybe it's the oil. So, can you talk a little bit about the kinds of foods that are especially enhanced by truffles and what we do so the people that are on the cooking end of listening to the show know where to start?
SPEAKER_00Sure, you want to take the uh plainest, most basic foods actually. Truffle is a rich man's uh food that goes well with a poor man's purse because just a tiny, tiny bit can go a really long way and it can make very ordinary foods extraordinary in a second. So you want, I think um pasta, rice, potatoes, eggs, uh, and anything, of course, with cream, uh, butter, um bacon fat, uh, without too much of that intense bacon flavor, you don't want to overpower with bacon. Um, but essentially anything that is a mild food is very well enhanced by truffles, and then you want to have that fattiness or that creaminess to uh transmit the aroma uh to the food itself. Um, because if you just shave a truffle on top of uh a dish, um you are the truffle itself doesn't have so much flavor uh as is. It has this incredible aroma, but you've got to capture that and and disseminate it. If you ate the truffle sliver all by itself, it might it has a little bit of a cardboardy texture almost. Um, and so you really need that, you need the food to enhance it, like you need the tree to grow the truffle. Um, another thing to think about is seasonality, because of course there are various different uh truffle species and they are ripe at different times of year. So, say the tubermelanosporum uh is in its fruiting stage from mid-November through mid-March, and generally its peak is after Christmas. And so you want to think about foods that are ripe and ready at that time of year. Obviously, root vegetables are good, squashes are good, hog killings in the south take place from between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so often you might have a little bit of fat back that you can use in enhancing your truffle flavors. Uh, the tuberborchii, the white species that we are able to grow well in the North Carolina East country under uh under pines, that is available from mid-January through the end of April, and it pairs well also with root vegetables. And then if you get into a little bit of the early tomato season, um uh well now it's a little bit early for that, but asparagus, you could pair that with asparagus because that being more than only will stand, garlicky will stand up to something that has a little more flavor. The tuber estuvum and the tuber and canatum, they are uh available more from the summer into the early uh parts of winter. And um so they go well with uh with summer dishes and also with the with the early uh root vegetables, the squashes and uh pasta, of course.
unknownAlways pasta.
SPEAKER_00Pasta goes with everything. Um the magnatum, the Italian white or alba truffle, is available from September to October, largely through December, uh, and is ideal to go into autumn soups and holiday poultry. It goes well with Christmas uh ingredients and Christmas dishes. Yeah, uh feel free to elaborate on that, uh, Tom, if you've got some more truffles you want to throw in there seasonally. But it's always good to use what is fresh and in season. And again, go simple. Uh, if you do anything that is too complicated, you're going to compete with the truffle flavor. And what you really want to do is highlight that truffle. So stay away from things that are too acidic generally or too spicy, or um, you know, really strong fish or the things that are in the cabbage family, unless you cook them down and serve them with a cream sauce, which is going to bring that truffle early.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, I might uh amplify a little bit of that there, Susie. Uh uh we've all heard uh the latest concept of farm to table, where we want to be uh growers, whether we're gardeners or or or commercial, uh, to get straight from the farm to the chef. And uh what I learned in the case of truffles is this is it puts it puts another dimension to farm to table in the sense that that every truffle that I pull out of the orchard is different. We Susie, when we talk about these general terms of aroma, I could have two truffles under the same tree, and one might be that floral fruity, and the other one might be perhaps a little riper and be more earthy. And so what uh what what you do over the years is you develop relationships. I love to I I didn't do any wholesaling, I went straight to the straight to the chefs in the restaurants. So you get to know the chefs, and my gosh, I had I have a case one time, one year, uh well, I learned that that Linton Hopkins, who's the restaurant eugene in Atlanta, uh one of the helicopter chefs in the country, I learned that he likes uh earthy muskie truffles. So now when I'm hunting my truffles, I can set aside those for him. And so now he's got just the kind of truffles he wants, and then somebody else that likes the floral ones uh will get that little bit of truffles. So it's it it's a fun relational thing, uh, the marketing of the truffles. And if if I might take 30 seconds on one story I have with Linton, it was Valentine's Valentine's and New Year's are the largest uh days for the restaurant trade with regard to truffles, uh, you know, they're big events. Valentine's is near the end of the black winter truffle season, so I had uh I had some truffles that were oh, I was I was getting knocks in my stomach. They were starting to turn, you know, a little bit overripe, and and I thought, oh my gosh, I I and it's Valentine's Day. He needs his truffles, so I've got to send him some. So what I did was I I I doubled his order and I wrote I put it and I didn't uh I I said, you know, just I called, I didn't sleep well that night after I got extra truffles down to him, and and I called him first thing in the morning. Uh I had I thought, oh boy, you know, the last thing you want to do is uh is is lose a relationship because you sent a bad truffle.
unknownAnd I I asked him, Well, how would you think of the truffles with a lot of anxiety in my voice? He says, Tom, those are the best truffles you ever sent me. Oh wow.
SPEAKER_03You know, so it's uh it's aromas are you know, it's it's it's a jean as they quoi about the truffles. Uh they're all different and uh and so when you're a customer going to uh you you gotta find your deli or your uh you know specialty food vendor and develop a relationship with them. In the case of a lot of the French uh overseas, you know, truffles that come to the big truffle houses, they'll store their truffles for two or three weeks because they want to keep an inventory, and of course the aroma being volatile goes down over time, and at the same time uh they can be adulterated with uh some other black truffles uh with that have very different off flavors, but uh a naive consumer uh is unaware of that.
unknownThey see a black truffle and they think, oh I got the black truffle. Yeah. So develop a good uh it it is a relationship thing when you're working with truffles. There's three there's three to the party.
SPEAKER_01There's you and and your vendor and the truffle, and all three have to work together to so that you get and then that vendor should know whether you want the musky notes or the fruity notes within you.
SPEAKER_03That's why you gotta be a regular.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Okay, that that makes perfect sense. And Susie, to clarify, it sounds like the best way to use truffles is actually in the dish rather than shaving them on top.
SPEAKER_00Well, it depends a little bit on which kind of truffle you have, uh, to be uh more precise. Uh the black truffle lends itself well to being heated a little bit. The heat, warmth brings out the flavor of the black truffle species. Again, I'm lumping them together. Sometimes there's a little more subtlety between various species, but the warmth does bring out that flavor. If you had a black truffle sliver on top of a slice of raw tomato, for instance, you would definitely not be giving it its best chance to shine. The white truffles don't stand up so well to a lot of heat. Their flavor is more delicate and it will disappear if you heat it too much. By and large, if you serve it on warm food, be it a black or white truffle, if you serve it on food that has warmth, it's going to just the flavor is going to disseminate a little bit more, but you don't want to overcook either, particularly in the case of the white truffle. So, yeah, delicate heating uh for the for the paragord, little to no heating for the white or truffle, but served on a hot food is going to bring it out the best.
SPEAKER_01So it's going to be something you're going to add at the end. So if I'm making a let's say a simple pasta with the buttercream sauce on it, I'm going to put that truffle in right at the end before I put the sauce on top of my pasta. Right.
SPEAKER_00So I would um uh if I'm doing that myself, I would cook my pasta. At the same time, I would melt some butter in a skillet and maybe put in just a tiny bit of shallot because shallot is going to give it a little more flavor without overriding it like garlic does, uh, and then pour in some heavy cream, and then I'm gonna grate the truffle into that just right at the last moment before I put it on the hot pasta and serve it. And that would work for white as well as uh black truffle.
SPEAKER_01And are you using a specialized grater?
SPEAKER_00Uh you don't add it.
SPEAKER_01Or is it like a microplane grater? If you have it, you can use your box grater if you have it.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00You can uh shave it on uh uh a mandolin if you have it, or you can use a knife if you cut nice uh thin slivers, whatever, whatever you got.
SPEAKER_01Okay, whatever you think is that you need it. You gotta make sure you sharpen that knife though, because that's a problem with a lot of home chefs is we forget to sharpen our knives.
SPEAKER_03If I can add Yes, please, Tom. Yeah, if I can add a geeky note to that, uh don't go light on the fat. Uh truffles are from the scientific perspective, the aromas, uh practically all of them are fat soluble. So you put the fat in there, the butter and what have you, or the under the skin of a of a poultry or what have you, uh, that that traps the aroma into the food get it absorbed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, which is exactly what we want to do. So if I once I bought my I've found my vendor, I've bought my truffles, what's the best way to store them at home?
SPEAKER_03Well, it's very interesting when you're first of all, when you're hunting, let me go back to getting the imagine you got that truffle straight out of the orchard and you don't forget the vendor for now. That truffle, uh, if I I would not sell that truffle. You know, you think, oh, the fresher the better. Well, the first day out of the soil, that truffle, you you haven't uh killed it by pulling it out of the soil. It has lots and lots of storage nutrients inside it that are still metabolizing and converting those nutrients to the beautiful aroma compounds. So if you keep that truffle in a sealed container, uh that truffle, the the aromas and the taste of that truffle will potentiate over the next uh two or three days. And so you have a much you have a much stronger bloom on the truffle. It's it's concentrated. So so when you want to store a truffle, make sure you uh store it with you know, make your make sure your container is not in a paper bag, you know, put it in in some Tupperware type container or what have you. And then also I I found uh it's ex it doesn't sound like much of a difference. The refrigerator is at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The truffle instead don't put the truffle at 40 degrees, store it, put that little container like you would if you were uh storing fish. You would put it on ice. So put that container in a little bowl of ice water so that now the ambient temperature in that container is about 32 degrees.
SPEAKER_01And that that that will ext very that will extend the shelf life or the useful life of that truffle for a long by So I want it just I'm storing it above just above freezing, is what you're saying.
unknownYeah, just above freezing.
SPEAKER_03So so that's uh that's another news you can use sort of sort of tip, I hope.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, and I'll add to that in saying that immediately when you get a truffle, put it to work for you. That means store it with eggs in a closed container. For instance, a ball jar is perfect. Uh a ball jar is even better than a plastic container because often plastic containers will lend a little bit of their flavor to whatever your food uh um ingredient is. So store your truffles with eggs uh in a closed container, store it with sticks of butter. You can put sticks of butter in a container with your truffles, and you know uh the wrapping of the butter. You can just put the whole stick in. The wrapping of the butter is porous, the flavor will seep through into the butter just like it will seep through the um eggshells. Um, and you can even put cream in with uh with truffles as well. Um, but anyway, in a matter of a couple of hours, that ingredient will already be infused with the truffle flavor, so that then when you cook with that, uh you will uh only need to use a very, very tiny bit to accentuate that that flavor uh because you'll yeah, you've already captured a lot of the essence. And the truffle keeps giving and giving and giving as it's uh as it's sitting in the refrigerator, continuing to ripen. Uh, and so you're really not depleting that truffle of its goodie by uh storing it with eggs and butter.
SPEAKER_01Wow, that that's great. So that's that's a way that you're kind of making your own truffle butter versus purchasing truffle butter that as Tom has told us, we don't know if it's using something from the food industry chemically augmenting the flavor. So that that would be that would be fantastic.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and the butter freezes well too.
SPEAKER_01It sure does after you've made it.
SPEAKER_03You at months after truffle season, you can still get a nice uh you know truffle treat from your freezer.
SPEAKER_01Truffle season, tell us a little bit. I think it's it's the late fall, is that correct?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and it depends on it, depends on the species. So in case of the black winter paragord truffle, it starts to ripen uh a little bit, maybe a week or two after Thanksgiving. It depends on the type of fall weather that you have. If you have it it's kind it's counterintuitive, uh totally counterintuitive, but if you have a warm fall, it slows down the ripening of the truffle.
unknownWhat on earth is going on with the biochemistry there?
SPEAKER_02I know.
SPEAKER_03Uh but if they have a nice cool fall, then those truffles will start to ripen early, the paragord in the case. So in December, when you when they're starting to ripen and they have a noticeable aroma and are culinary, you culinarily usable, uh, they will be kind of a light milk chocolate and if you cut you know into a cross-section through them uh with more of a lighter uh floral aroma. And then as the season goes on through by the end of maybe by about the first or second week in March, uh would be uh typically the end of the paragord truffle season.
unknownAnd as Susie mentioned, uh the white alba truffle is a fall is a fall truffle.
SPEAKER_03Also, and and she mentioned a few others like the tuberuncindum, that's a a black truffle, very similar to the paragon truffle, not quite as intense. That's uh that's a also a fall truffle. So uh, and then there's a tuber estivum, which is uh I'm not gonna go into the species differences, but it it's a it's a summer truffle, and it is it has only a trace of what but it has the same aroma profile as the black winter truffle, but nowhere near as intense. So you can tell by the price point, a summer truffle will be about one-tenth the price of uh a black winter truffle, a burgundy truffle will be about oh, maybe 40-50 percent of the price of a of a paragon truffle.
unknownSo the aroma is what you're getting there.
SPEAKER_03And then uh we we mentioned maybe we should mention this tubercorphiae, it's a white truffle. Uh and also we have a in here in the southeast we're getting a commercialization of the pecan truffle that occurs naturally in all the pecan orchards, and it's uh properly handled. It used to be uh it's so funny they uh till a few years ago, it was just something they had to throw. They they pick them off off the conveyor belts because they're about the same size as a pecan, and they couldn't uh they had to manually pick them out and they'd throw them away.
SPEAKER_01But oh man.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, now we find out holy macro.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's a good source.
SPEAKER_03I think uh pecan growers are getting a byproduct second second crop off their truffle, pecan orchards, and it has it's a whitish truffle, uh, it's so it has those sharper notes like the like the olive truffle. So just something to be aware of as we see we see other truffles coming on the scene that are in the white truffle class that uh are are making the the marketplace for finally getting to that point now.
SPEAKER_01Perfect.
SPEAKER_00Also mention flea uh a few native truffles besides the pecan truffles that we're uh finding, the Appalachian truffle and what is uh now being called the Blue Ridge truffle by many, as well as the Oregon truffles, which you want to pronounce the names. I'm gonna I'm gonna get Tom to give you the scientific names because he's a special.
SPEAKER_01That's okay. I think we can we can we we've got the idea here.
SPEAKER_00We're finding out more about them daily.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you can say canilla c canilla colado.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well the opinions expressed on this show are not necessarily those of the station, the university, the UC Board of Regents. For more information on the show, visit KUCI.org. You're listening to 88.9 FMKUCI in Irvine. This is in the garden, and we've been talking about truffles with Tom Michaels and Susie Gott Segaray. Thank you, Tom and Susie, for joining us today and sharing your knowledge, and a special shout out and thank you to Victoria Michaels for arranging this.