Tragedy of the commons

/ Gareth

A long time ago, on the edges of a city far, far away, I used to spend a lot of time in late summer and autumn hunting for wild mushrooms. I got quite good at it – good enough to seldom return home empy handed. This was the early 90s, and most of my competition for the fungi of West London came from expat Europeans, especially Poles with sticks. A few chefs — most notably Antonio Carluccio — were popularising what Russians call the “quiet hunt” and using the harvest in their cooking, but the supermarkets hadn’t caught up with fashion.

One morning at the height of the season, not long before we left for New Zealand, I arrived at one of my favoured sites — Esher Common [map] (a remarkable place, where Brian Spooner from Kew has recorded over 3,000 species of fungi, making it the most fungally diverse spot ever studied) — to find the car park nearly full. There must have a dozen or more people unloading bags full of mushrooms into boxes. It was my first encounter with commercial picking, and they must have systematically hoovered their way through the woodland, because I could find nothing at all.

The legality of commercial picking is however open to question, as this piece by Peter Marren in The Guardian explores…

“Can we have open access and yet ban mushroom picking? In theory, we can. Any landowner can apply to the local authority for an order against blackberry pickers, moss gatherers or butterfly collectors. In this land of the free, any of Mother Nature’s bounties, even the meanest, sourest berry or nut, is deemed to be private property. In the case of the New Forest, which is managed by the Forestry Commission, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) decided that it owned the mushrooms. In the 1990s, it banned commercial picking over the entire forest, and banned foraging for mushrooms altogether in certain woods.”

Marren then goes on to describe how Defra then tried to prosecute a little old lady for picking mushrooms in the New Forest, only to find the judge throwing the case out as waste of his time. Good on His Honour…

Sometimes blogging can pay

/ Gareth

Let it never be said that blogging doesn’t pay. A couple of months ago, I got an email from the team at Food & Wine magazine in New York, asking me if I’d be interested in interviewing NZ food writer Annabel Langbein for their September issue. Interested I most certainly was, and I popped up to Auckland for an enjoyable day with Annabel. I might even have persuaded her to plant some truffles. Writing the piece was a challenge, but now the final version’s appeared on the F&W website I find I recognise most of the words, and some of them are even in the order in which I put them… Thanks for the job, Salma.

All commissions gratefully received: farm and truffle hound to support.

Country Life does truffles

/ Gareth

Country Life, National Radio’s farming and country programme, covered the truffle business on last week’s show. I took producer Tania Oolders down to Ashburton to interview John and Iris Burn, and you can hear Peg having her refresher course in the Burns’ truffiere. Tania also interviewed Carolyn Dixon of Crop & Food Research, and Bill Lee, who is setting up a new truffle tree nursery (working with Tim Terry). It’s a good 30-odd minute summary of the state of the business down here, and well worth a listen. Audio stream and podcast available.

Truffles coming out of the ground in Aussie

/ Gareth

Looks like it’s turning out to be a good truffle season in Australia. Tim Terry has announced his first shipment of truffles to France, and Perigord Truffles Of Tasmania (PTT) are about to ship to Japan. Meanwhile, a New South Wales grower tells me that she’s harvesting a kilo a week from five year old trees.

Tim’s waxing lyrical about his harvest. In an item on the ABC’s The World Today he says:

“It’s the beginning of a coming of age, if you like. We’ve gone from producing a truffle, now to producing enough to put a small trial shipment into Europe, and now what we want to do is get some more feedback from them, saying we want 500 kilos a week. And that’s the sort of feedback that we are getting. They want a lot of truffles and we can’t supply them at the moment.”

He’s clearly a happy man:

“Here we are in the foot of the Great Western Tiers, there’s a bit of snow on top of the mountains today, Spring, the birds are happening, truffles coming out of the ground. It’s just a magnificent place and great to be alive, isn’t it?”

As they say down here, good on ya, mate. Transcript here. Podcast available, but you may have to dig in the archive (originally broadcast August 3rd).

Not perfect, but not bad

/ Gareth

So, the proud possessor of a 26g truffle from Ashburton, found by Peg last week when she was having a mid-career refresher course, and as the good lady wife demanded it, I set about making a midwinter truffle pizza. Off to Canterbury Cheesemongers, where they were fresh out of buffalo mozzarella, but were happy to supply good flour and some fresh yeast, and then a rummage round the supermarket for some of the more ordinary mozarella (from Kapiti Cheese).

Back to the farm to get the oven going. It’s been a fair few months since it was last fired up, and it was getting to late afternoon. In summer, it takes three to four hours to get up to pizza hot, which is fearsome (I had to buy a long sleeved oven glove because putting my arm in to the oven was singing the hairs). So I got the fire going, and made the dough. I used the recipe from Nikko Amandonico’s book again It’s very straightforward: make the dough, divide into pizza balls, and leave to rise. Then roll them flat, stretch them a bit, and cook. Easy — and good.

The oven was being notably slow in heating up. By 8pm, our stomachs were suggesting that dinner should not be further delayed, but the oven was a fair way short of full heat. When it’s ready for pizzas, the interior stops being black with soot, and becomes white. A pizza cooks in a minute or so. All I could see in the light of my new headlamp LED torch was a little white patch. It would have to do.

The pizzas were simple to prepare. I shaved some thin truffle slices on to the bases, and covered them with thinly sliced mozarella. Some good olive oil brushed on top, and out into the oven. They did not cook very fast by wood-fired oven standards – perhaps four minutes before the crust was browning. This is what mine looked like…

Trufflepizza.jpg

Two criticisms. The length of cooking had reduced the truffle impact – probably evaporating more aroma than a short, sharp burst of heat. The good lady wife took issue with the crust, preferring an all white flour base, rather than the mix of white and wholemeal I’d used. But they were still rather good. I also made a simple cherry tomato and mozarella pizza for second helpings.

The counsel of perfection: leave more time for oven to heat up. Use buffalo mozarella and white flour. Experiment with thinly sliced cooked potatoes as additional topping to help seal in truffle flavour. Be generous with the truffle. And do it more often.

Google Book Search, Amazon etc

/ Gareth

Time for a bit of book marketing. A little while ago, I submitted The Truffle Book to Google’s Book Search feature. The full text of the book is searchable (here), and you can read relevant pages (scanned in from the pdf edition). Although the whole book is available, you can only read about 20% at any one time — which seems like a sensible limit to me. After all, the pdf edition isn’t exactly expensive — NZ$15 is about US$9.40 or £5.10 — and I would like to make a profit on the exercise.

Meanwhile, my US and UK distributors have put the book on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, how about contributing a reader review? Or putting it on your wish list? You might suggest a friend buys a copy there, just to push the sales rank up a bit.

UK readers can also purchase the book from Truffle UK (who recently sold quite a few copies at the Chelsea Flower Show, and have a nice congrats message on their homepage). I suspect they also had a substantial hand in getting the book plugged by gardening writer Bunny Guinness in The Sunday Telegraph back in June (not available at the Telegraph website (yet?):

STelcrop.jpg

Not exactly a review, but a firm recommendation… and sorry about the pic alignments going wonky. I’m struggling with the Flint css… Mark?

First cultivated bianchetto in NZ

/ Gareth

Bianchetto1.jpgPhoto courtesy of Crop & Food Research

Found on July 7th by Carolyn Dixon as she was root testing some of the young Tuber borchii infected Pinus pinea at CFR’s Lincoln plantation. Congratulations to all concerned — but especially Carolyn. She’s as good as any dog… (that’s a compliment Carolyn, honest…). I can’t wait to find out what they taste like when fully ripe, so I took Peg round my little bianchetto patch today — but she’s being a recalcitrant truffle finder at the moment. She needs her nose recalibrating — and to remember what her job is. I hope to take her round a couple of productive truffières this week, and have another dog (or two) sniffing round the Hills, to make sure she’s not missed out on anything. Still waiting for #2…

Truffle workshop comes up trumps

/ Gareth

Burn.jpgJohn Burn with a truffle I couldn’t afford.

On the way down to Wanaka for our annual skiing holiday (mostly at Treble Cone), we stopped at Ashburton to visit truffle growers John & Iris Burn. They were holding a “harvesting workshop” (with Crop & Food Research) for South Island growers, and I wasn’t going to miss that…

John & Iris were one of the original NZ truffle pioneers, planting their trees back in 1990, but they had to wait until 2004 for their first crop. As you can see from the smile on his face, John was enjoying himself – and he deserves all the pleasure just for being patient. He was offering truffles at “mates rates”, and I wanted one to take down to Wanaka. Something around 30g to 50g would have been perfect. The one he dug up for me weighed 220g, and I couldn’t afford it.

Press coverage of the day here, a successful sale here, and on TV One’s Close Up here (the video clip was available at time of writing).

Still waiting for number two

/ Gareth

It’s an awkward time. The first truffle is fading into memory, the truffle harvest in the region is getting into full swing, and I’m wondering when I’ll find number two. The amazingly charming Peg is dutifully sniffing round the trees, but remains more interested in the mice than in anything else that may be under the ground. We’ve had visits from two truffle dogs, neither of whom showed a lot of interest — though with one of them we were doing the rounds after dark, so it was hard to be sure what was going on.

It would be rather ironic if we only had one truffle this year, and I found it by sheer luck rather than dogged skill. Ironic, but unlikely. I hope.

It did not die in vain

/ Gareth

What did we do with the first truffle? We ate it, of course. Once you’ve dug up a truffle, they have about a week’s shelf-life, so… I stored it in a plastic container on a bed of risotto rice and some eggs. As noted earlier, a couple of those eggs became breakfast, and very nice and truffly they were too. A couple of days later, four more eggs and about a third of the truffle went into a brouillade which my daughter and I enjoyed for lunch. A great deal.

Early the next week, after passing from had to hand at a Probus meeting where I’d given a talk, it went into my dinner thusly: I cut some flaps in the nice piece of fillet steak I had in the fridge, and inserted truffle shavings. I then trussed the steak with string and left it to truffle for a few hours. The remainder of the truffle (bar a few bits reserved for later) went into a very nice ripe bit of NZ brie. Later, I opened a bottle of good wine (Danny Schuster Omihi Reserve 2004), got some real chicken stock out of the freezer, and began making a red wine risotto with the rice the truffle had been sitting in (which, by now, was pretty smelly). When that was just about done, I added in the reserved bits of truffle, and slapped the steak onto the hot griddle. Served the steak on a bed of risotto. It was very good – but would have been even better if the truffle had been fully ripe — and if I’d left the steak longer to truffle. The risotto was perfectly delicious, but the act of cooking does drive off much of the the flavour it’s absorbed, hence the need to add a few bits at the end.
The cheese was saved until Camille came back from her business trip, so that she at least got a sniff of what all the fuss was about. Still waiting for number two…