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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
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 Bumper year for British truffles 
#8740244 - 08/07/08 05:37 PM (3 years, 9 months ago) |
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Bumper year for British truffles
August 7, 2008 - telegraph.co.uk
 When you start wondering whether you can pay your fuel bill this autumn or whether Britain's Olympic athletes can contend with Beijing's polluted air, just remember that reassuring fact.
Truffles like warm, damp weather of the kind we have been seeing this summer. A Dorset company, Truffle UK, has been digging up truffles the size of shot puts worth £100 apiece while a gardener has uncovered a hoard worth an estimated £400 among beeches in Plymouth city centre.
Like many of my fellow Brits, I used to think of truffle-mania as something imported and faintly absurd, but now I'm not so sure.
We have been visiting friends in Piedmont, Italy. Truffle Central. Our hosts produced black truffles to grate over a risotto of Po valley rice flavoured with beef stock. Next morning, they invited us to grate the rest of the truffles over fried eggs, an even simpler way of savouring the delicate hazelnutty taste.
In the autumn, their farm has white truffles, too. And it seems that however high the price of white truffle - and they can be worth thousands of pounds a kilo - people with truffles on their land keep a little back.
Truffles are hunted these days with dogs, not pigs. Pigs tend to consume the truffle - which is what the truffle intended. Being eaten is the only way the truffle spreads its spore round the woods. The higher the incentives facing the truffle hunters, the fewer are left to be spread around by wildlife and the more the truffle declines.
Britain's main commercial species is the Burgundy truffle, Tuber aestivum, a black truffle. It lacks the more expensive Perigord truffle, Tuber melanosporum, also black, and the fabulous white truffle, Tuber magnatum, which fetches five times the price of gold.
Ingeniously, ways have been found of farming the truffle, by inoculating oak saplings with mycelium fungus in a process developed in New Zealand.
Dr Brian Spooner, head of mycology at Kew Gardens, tells me the native black truffle can be found widely in England and is therefore not of conservation concern. That is not true for truffles everywhere.
The interdependence of animals and truffles is not always understood. In British Columbia, truffle production collapsed when voles were controlled because there were no creatures to spread the spores.
All of which goes to show that it is not only bears but gourmets who should do their stuff in the woods.
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 clover606
Stranger
Registered: 08/13/07
Posts: 656
Last seen: 6 months, 17 days
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Re: Bumper year for British truffles [Re: veggie]
#8740622 - 08/07/08 07:10 PM (3 years, 9 months ago) |
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i read that tobacco farms make ideal truffle farm land, and that it takes like 25000 to convert an acre to truffle production. seems like a good buisness to me.
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grassman said:
I remember being in DARE when i was much younger and some of the stories they would tell you are not only ridiculous, but completely untrue. One story was that a woman was on LSD and thought her infant was a turkey so she baked it in the oven. Now I look back and think thats hilarious, but at the time I guess it scared me.
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