Truffle, English name Truffle, French name Truffe, German Truffel. A one-letter difference is not enough to stop it from becoming one of the most elite ingredients in all of Western Europe.
Together with caviar and foie gras, it is called "the world's three treasures", and is praised by the famous French foodie Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin as the "diamond in the kitchen".
In 2010, Macau gambling king Stanley Ho bid for two pieces of Italian Toslana white truffle weighing a total of 1.3 kilograms for more than 2.5 million Hong Kong dollars.
Truffles as ingredients on the market are also very expensive, and ordinary French black truffles or Italian white truffles often sell for more than one or two thousand euros per kilogram.
Stanley Ho bid on the giant truffles
Foodie Cai Lan once "complained" about truffles: "A truffle as big as a kumquat costs thousands of Hong Kong dollars." In general, even if there is a high-end restaurant, it is only a planer and a few slices of italian flour or rice, which is already an expensive dish. ”
Many so-called chefs in high-end Western restaurants seem to be unable to cook without truffles and caviar; or the dishes of so-called high-end Western restaurants must have truffles or caviar to show their nobility and sell at high prices, which has become a very strange common phenomenon.
A caviar burger for $295 to get one?
Another case, which is at the extreme to the point of almost performance art, is the development of the "Black Truffle Burger" by Hubert Keller, chef of Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, USA.
He uses wagyu beef, foie gras and black truffles to make live burgers that cost $5,000 with a glass of red wine.
It's completely unclear whether he really thinks the black truffle burger is worth the price, or whether he just wants to satirize the behavior of everyone in the high food industry who respects these well-known ingredients.
$5,000 dish "FleurBurger 5000"
From a historical and cultural point of view, truffles do have their own unique value.
As early as antiquity, Sumerian inscriptions contain records of the Amorite consumption of truffles in the 20th century BC. Later, the Romans also had the habit of using truffles as spices and seasonings.
Interestingly, in the Middle Ages, the truffles of the European Dark Ages were defined as demons that would tempt humans to sin because of their strong musk smell and ugly appearance, and their status plummeted.
Common black truffles and their slices
Then, with the Renaissance movement and the beginning of the Age of Discovery, truffles were blessed to turn from the demons of religious culture that would tempt human lust into "miracle drugs" with aphrodisiac effects in various literary works and folk tales.
As a big fan of truffles, Dumas once described truffles as making "women more gentle and men more cute", which can be regarded as the top wave of advertising in that era. The French aristocrat Bria Savoyland once said bluntly: "If there is no truffle, there is no real food in the world, they only appear on the table of the nobility to attract women." ”
With the pursuit of these aristocrats, it is not difficult to imagine how high the value and significance of French black truffles will be. This is also the cultural background of truffles as one of the top ingredients in the European world.
An old factory that washes truffles
One thing can be offered to the altar of high society, generally speaking, in addition to "good", more important is "rare".
Truffles, a fungus that grows at the roots of broad-leaved trees, are generally hidden in the ground 5-40 cm deep and are not easy to find. Moreover, its growing conditions were harsh and elusive, and until the mid-19th century, all attempts to artificially grow truffles had failed.
It is no wonder that truffles became a common spice on the table of the nobility and were highly sought after by them.
Finding truffles is like finding gold
Around the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, there were a large number of "truffle hunters" in France and Italy, which were rich in truffles.
Some of them rely on the secret map of truffle production handed down from their ancestors, some train hounds to search for truffles in the field, and more people will directly lead sows to the forest to "treasure hunting"...
*Due to the excitement of sows arching tree roots, this search for mining methods has now been banned in many places
Why can sows be used to help find truffles? This brings us to another very intriguing point of knowledge.
If we look at it from a biological point of view, truffles are actually a global creature. Truffles – or "truffles" – or "truffles" – as long as there is beech, poplar, birch, gooseberry, hazelnut or pine trees, supplemented by good drainage and neutral or alkaline soil.
In China, Yunnan, Sichuan and other places have a large number of truffles, these truffles and French black truffles of genetic similarity of more than 96%, basically can be regarded as the same thing.
Because the smell of this truffle contains androsterols that induce the sow's sexual impulses, the Chinese and French sows like it very much. The biggest difference is that in Yunnan they are called "pig arch fungus", which is generally used to brew medicinal wine or feed pigs; in France, they have become "truffles" and are on the top of the world.com.
The author found a master's thesis of Shenyang Agricultural University in 2016, which studied the role of truffle fungus as a feed additive for sows
Of course, it is very difficult for the French people and even the whole West to accept the Chinese "pig arch fungus" setting.
In 1995, the New York Times published an article called "The Invasion of the Chinese Truffle", calling the black truffles flowing into the US market from China "pseudo-Himalayan truffles", which is very different from real truffles.
In fact, truffles produced in China include Truffles of India (i.e., Yunnan Truffle), Truffles of China, Truffles of Summer and Truffle Pseudo-Himalayans (mostly produced in southwest China), collectively known as Truffles of China.
Since 1989, a large number of Chinese truffles have flowed into the West, a large number of Indian truffles that are close to French black truffles (that is, traditional truffles), and only a very small number are Pseudo-Himalayan truffles that were still unknown at that time.
The New York Times 1995 report
At that time, the reporter of the New York Times coincidentally got a very small number of fake Himalayan truffles, or deliberately recognized the chinese truffle variety, we do not know.
But as early as the 19th century, the French had insisted that Italian white truffles were far inferior to their black truffles, resulting in a downturn in the white truffle market for many years.
Contrast between Chinese truffles (top) and traditional black truffles (bottom).
More interestingly, around 1900, Western growers who cracked the secrets of truffle farming used to increase truffle production to make it a home-cooked ingredient. Later, due to the severe damage to the local planting industry in World War I and World War II, truffle prices soared again.
Now, a large number of truffles in France are derived from artificially cultivated symbiotic trees. The reason why the price of "high-grade truffles" remains high is because humans strictly control their annual production and help the world's truffles to divide three, six, nine and so on.
It can only be said that a good name seems to be really important.
Dan Myers. The most expensive burger on Earth costs $5,000.The Daily Meal. Aug 9, 2019
Giant Truffle Auctioned for $330,000. USA Today. 19 February 2009
Wang Yun; Liu Peigui, Truffle Name Verification and Resource Conservation, Journal of Plant Taxonomy and Resources, 2011,33(06)
Xin Zhang, Study on the Application Effect of Truffle Mushroom Aromatic Flavor and Umami Agent In Sow Feed, Master's Thesis of Shenyang Agricultural University, 2016
FoodWine ate well and drank well and was rejected for a lifetime of Chinese truffles. 2020-12-14
Wei Shuihua, Romantic Truffles Dog Blood Misunderstanding, Taste Art Wenzhi. 2021-3-4