I just finished listening to the Truffle Underground by Ryan Jacobs, and boy, do I want to try a fresh truffle from France or Italy. I thoroughly enjoyed Jacobs’ style, part history lesson and part narrative.
The book offers a fairly deep-dive into the all things truffle, the rare and delicate culinary treasure. The rareness is largely due to the fact that truffles remain a scientific mystery for the most part. Scientists still don’t have a complete understanding of the mechanisms which control fruiting. Truffles are fungi and have a complex and fickle reproductive cycle. Some things are known to promote truffle growth, such as certain climate, soil composition, and tree varieties. Jacobs’ chapter on the man that discovered young oak trees in rocky soil would yield consistent truffles was very interesting. Even with the right soil, and the right trees, truffles remain a challenge to produce consistently, and truffle agriculture remains elusive.
Truffles are rare, and sourcing truffles from nature is a side gig for many working class people in France and Italy. Truffle hunting, as it’s known, sounds like a cool hobby. As a mycophile myself, I love the allure of hunting through the woods in search of treasure. But when truffles can fetch $300+ per kilogram, people can get vicious. Bringing trained dogs is a common practice if you want to get a good yield, but some vile hunters will leave poison-wrapped treats for dogs to come across, or poison water puddles surrounding the truffle hot spots. Killing your competition’s dog will leave more for you, after all. As a result, hunters’ using dogs typically use a muzzle, and have to hyper-vigilant in the forest. Poisoning isn’t the worst. In fact, the book opens with the story of a trained truffle-hunting dog was stolen in the night. The dogs are arguably the most valuable asset when it comes to sourcing truffles. The mass spec they have for a nose can be finally trained to sniff out the aromatics specific to truffles, but training requires a lot of time and effort. There’s a black market for trained dogs. Reading this story, one wonders what the dog make of the experience? How many modern day Bucks are out there somewhere in the italian countryside, getting passed between owners?
Throughout the book, you get the impression that everything is cloak-and-dagger. Middle men source truffles from collectors and connect them to buyers, pocketing a finder’s fee, of course. It’s very much black market and unregulated, so people are very dependent upon reputation. Personal connections and trust are the backbone of the system.
But given the rise in popularity of the truffle in the US (and globally) since the 1970s, the difficulty in which all but connoisseurs can differentiate high quality truffles from low, and the limited quantity of truffles, there are a lot of opportunities to cash in by deceit. Jacobs’ covers a scandal in the 1990s where one of the largest suppliers of truffles in the world started cutting their locally sourced truffles with cheap, low quality Chinese truffles. The Chinese varieties look the part, but are far more common and less desirable in terms of taste and texture. However, given the similar appearance, the aspiring supplier started cutting the legit truffles with 60% Chinese, saying the aroma of the legit would permeate the cheaper ones. But they didn’t disclose this practice, and sold the product at the original price, pocketing the profit. Eventually 60% turned into 80%, which eventually turned into 100%. But at some point, chef’s caught on and started calling out the practice. The owners were busted and had to pay fines and live under house arrest, but from the sounds of it the company is still in business today.
All-in-all I really enjoyed this book. 10/10.