Fungus balls that smell of rotten eggs…

/ Gareth

Renowden’s first law of truffle journalism states that, however good the story, a journalist writing about truffles will inevitably end up spouting bollocks. Today it’s the turn of the Daily Telegraph‘s Hilary Clarke [Link].

I mean, it’s a good story. Soaring truffle prices driving tartufaio to piracy in an attempt to cash in on soaring prices. “…the village bars in the hills around Asti are awash with tales of sabotage and skulduggery. Car tyres have been slashed, paths scattered with nail barbs and poisoned meatballs left in the undergrowth to kill hunter’s dogs.” Happens every year, but let’s not let that get in the way of the story.

Where Clarke goes hilariously off the rails is in her attempt to find a telling description of what white truffles are: “White truffles are fungus balls that smell of rotten eggs but taste of garlic.” Pardon? These things that sell for £1,100 a kilo smell of rotten eggs? And taste of garlic? The byline states that Clarke is actually in Asti (not very far from Alba, in the Piedmont), but if that’s the case, surely she could have managed a slightly more educated sniff. Or perhaps she’s anosmic.

One suspects that the celebrities attending this year’s big charity white truffle auction in Italy will not be paying through their collective noses for something smells of rotten eggs. And I hope that if Roman Abramovich (Chelsea FC owner) and Gwyneth Paltrow buy a truffle this year, they will ensure that their chef doesn’t let it rot before they get a chance to taste it.

Approaching pizza perfection

/ Gareth

Saturday was a challenge. My daughter’s 17th birthday, and 17 bright young women descended on the farm to make merry. I had to make pizzas. 20 in all. The wood-fired oven got its first use since our mid-winter truffle extravaganza. It takes about four hours to get really hot – pizza hot – when starting from cold. This time, I used the dough recipe from Nikko Amandonico’s La Pizza: The True Story from Naples (excellent book, by the way), with a mix of organic stoneground flours provided (with fresh yeast) by Martin at Canterbury Cheesemongers (excellent shop — can’t leave without spending a small fortune on great cheese). Worked a treat. The dough was pliable and elastic, baking quickly to a lovely crispy crust. The girls seemed to like them, but my sternest critic was the most impressed. “Best yet” was Camille’s comment. I shall bask in the warmth of that praise for – ooh, hours.

The Book has landed

/ Gareth

Here’s the big news: I have copies of The Truffle Book. Four pallets each laden with 40 brown boxes stuffed with lovely little books, the fruits of a very long labour. Copies will go out to everyone who helped me in the next day or so, and review copies shortly thereafter. The NZ distributor (Nationwide) starts the sell-in next week. Copies should be in NZ bookstores soon after. The big promotion push won’t happen until late summer (Feb/March) because we’re getting too close to Christmas (and it pains me to say that – it’s still months away), and I’m still waiting to hear from Australia, but I’ll have copies for sale on the Limestone Hills site very soon. In the meantime, don’t forget you can download a pdf sample here. Time for a drink… Muddy Water 2001 Syrah when I get home.

Truffle dog trials: the movie!

/ Gareth

It’s taken me a while to do it, but I’ve finally managed to edit the TV One news item about this year’s NZ truffle dog trials, shrink it for the web, and figure out how to post it to the Limestone Hills website. Click on over there, and see Peg win! I get precisely two short sound bites, but Ian Hall and Christina Weden are much more cogent in any case. (3.1MB, Quicktime required).

The most expensive pizza in the world – with truffles

/ Gareth

Gordon Ramsay is a chef with a fearsome reputation – and tongue, if you have seen him on TV lashing some hapless young proto-cook on his cooking “reality” shows. He is, of course, an extremely fine cook, possessor of Michelin stars and the culinary gravitas that goes with that, and is therefore unafraid to charge like a wounded bull when the situation demands it. Which, at his Ramsay’s Maze in central London, it apparently does, because a pizza with white truffle shaved on top costs £100. The Daily Mail (I used to write a column for them in the early 80s) explains all…

Themostexpensivepizzaint.jpg

Looks very nice, as you’d expect. But I’d rather make my own. And I wouldn’t shave truffle on top either. I’d make a pizza bianca, as I blogged earlier this year. But then I’m not Gordon Ramsay.

Truffle Book intro now available for download

/ Gareth

The new Limestone Hills web site has just been uploaded, and a sample pdf of the Foreword, Introduction and first chapter is now available for download.. Just go here, and click on the download link. I’m currently finalising proofs with the printer and resolving a pre-press issue (the strange case of the disappearing ligatures) (not a medical problem). The whole thing should be on press very soon. I have to put my selling boots on. I wonder if they’ll fit.

Done (and dusted)

/ Gareth / 1 Comment

Preflighted (who’d have guessed that there were some odd little bits of Times lurking in pages of Hoefler Text), packaged, and burned to DVD (twice). Then over to the printer to drop it off, look at a paper dummy, discuss timings. Should be on machine in the last week of the month, and delivered by the end of the second week of October. Now I have to turn into a sales and promotion person. First priority: an A4 promotional sheet I can send to people, and then I begin the sell-in. It looks as though I’ll have about a month to get the thing “launched”, because in the second half of November I’m off to Europe for a month. A week in London, a mushroom conference in Spain, and then a tour of the truffle business in Spain followed by a few days in the Périgord. So I’ll have four weeks to “do” the initial NZ promotion of the book – four weeks to get the book being noticed, and bought. Will I be left with four pallets loaded with unsold books?

I also have to do some sustained work on the Limestone Hills website, particularly the book pages. I’m aiming to have a .pdf sample of the book available for download in the next few weeks, and the full book available for download soon after the print launch.

Sniff it yourself

/ Gareth

Can humans learn to hunt truffles by nose alone? According to some new research by a team at Berkeley, they can.

From the press release: “In a review appearing in the same issue of the journal, Jay A. Gottfried of the Department of Neurology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine noted that the UC Berkeley findings open numerous avenues for further research. “Finally, what are the implications for the Provençal truffle hunt?” he wrote, only partly tongue-in-cheek. “In the traditional world of the truffle forests, the dog (or pig) is king. The evidence presented here suggests that humans are every bit as well equipped to carry out the search.”

“Every bit as well equipped” as dogs? I think not. My experience suggests that if you are in a truffière that has a lot of ripe truffle in the ground, and the air is very still, you might smell truffle. You may also be able to say that the smell is stronger in one area than another. If you were to go on hands and knees and place your nose close to the earth, and then crawl around sniffing, you might be able to home in on a ripe truffle and dig it up. Time taken to find truffle? Being very generous, perhaps five minutes. Number of times each season the necessary conditions occur? Seldom.

Let us count the ways that dogs are better than humans at finding truffles. They have four paw drive, and are close to the ground. The nose/soil interface is achieved without ungainly crawling, and in running mode they can cover a lot of ground in a short time. Their olfactory apparatus is many times more sensitive than ours, and their brain is much better equipped to process the incoming information. A good truffle dog prefers a slight breeze to waft the truffle smell around and give them something to track. A dog will home in on the precise spot where the truffle is hiding and mark the spot with a scrape of the paw, and then politely wait for a small reward.

I’m sticking with the amazingly charming Peg.

The Truffle Book cover takes shape

/ Gareth

The Truffle Book has steadily been taking shape over the last few weeks. I’ve got one more chapter to lay out, but the rest is ready for proofreading and the cover is in the final stages of tweaking. Off to a printer in a couple of weeks. Out in October?TheTruffleBookcovertakes.jpg

With luck, it will attract attention on bookshop shelves, if only because the truffle on the cover could, according to a friend of mine, be mistaken by the uninitiated as a turd. I think it looks rather more like a warty UFO, but if it is in any way turd-like, then I will claim that this was a deliberate design ploy on my part, designed to set up a cognitive dissonance in the viewer, thus drawing them in to check out the book.

The truffle itself weighed 30g, was harvested at John & Iris Burn’s Ashburton truffière in July, and provided by them for photography free of charge. Sadly, from an eating point of view, it had been frozen. Thanks very much indeed, John and Iris. You’ll be getting a credit in the book, of course.