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).
Truffles & Farm
The most expensive pizza in the world – with truffles
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…
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.
Shortages, gluts and truffle untruths
The northern hemisphere truffle season is getting under way, and while there are signs that it could be a good year for Italian whites, French trufficulteurs are worried that summer drought and excessive heat will lead to a poor harvest of Périgord blacks.
Sniff it yourself
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
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?
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.
The biggest truffle in Australia
This picture arrived recently from Australia: I am both jealous and salivating…
Nick Malajczuk looks (unsurprisingly) rather pleased with his 1kg+ monster truffle.
I’ve been doing some checking up on NZ’s largest truffle. Alan Hall believes the biggest he has ever found was about 760g (and there’s a picture of what might be it on his web site), but his brother Ian believes that a bigger one turned up at about the same time (’97 or ’98). Still, it looks as though Nick’s claim to the largest black truffle found outside Europe is justified. Congratulations! Thanks for the picture Nick, it’s going in the book…
Australian truffle claims record
It’s turning out to be a bumper season in Australia. Hot on the heels of New South Wales’ first truffle, and Tim Terry’s reports of a good harvest under way in Tasmania, comes news of a 1kg truffle found at Nick Malajczuk’s Western Australia truffière. The linked article in The Australian claims that it is the “biggest harvested outside France”, and at 1,018.5gm that may be true. Or it may not. In the mid-90’s, when New Zealand’s pioneer grower Alan Hall was hauling big truffles out of the ground, he also found one that weighed over a kilo. Was it more than 18.5gm over the kilo? I can’t remember, but I’ll ask Alan next time I see him. In 1997, I saw several that weighed over 500gm being harvested, and that was impressive enough.
Victoria is also getting in on the act, with young trees at Greg Kerr’s Yellingbo property, 60km east of Melbourne producing their first truffles. The Age has the story [registration required], as does the Herald Sun.
Meanwhile, The NZ season is progressing nicely. Peg’s been round to a neighbour’s place and found a truffle or two, but she’s not showing any interest round my own trees. I haven’t given up, though. She’ll be sniffing for her supper for a month or so – and there’s the borchi trees to keep a nose on too.
Truffle pizza for lunch
It wasn’t the ripest truffle in the world – still only whitish brown inside – but it had a good perfume, and its effect on pizza was remarkable – so impressive that my wife, who normally professes to dislike truffle, was moved to comment on how delicious it was. And it was exquisite.
We were hosting lunch for a gobble of local chefs who had just been to see the truffle being unearthed. They brought the pizza dough and toppings, Gavin and Chris, the truffiere owners, donated the truffle, Wilma brought two cases of wine (Cracroft Chase Pinot Gris), and I fired up the oven. Add to the equation a chef with considerable pizza skills (thanks, Nick!), and we had some stunning food.
There are two possible approaches to truffle pizza. You could make the pizza, and then shave truffle on top – perhaps the only way to do it with Tuber magnatum (Italian white truffle), or you could put the truffle onto the pizza base and then cover it with cheese, so that the flavour isn’t boiled away in the heat of the oven. We used both methods, but the better – by far – was the “cooked” truffle. A wood-fired oven cooks pizzas really quickly – in two or three minutes when its at its hottest. Nick did a version of pizza bianca, shaving the truffle onto the pizza base (lightly brushed with olive oil), and then covering it with a generous helping of fior de latte mozzarella and thin slices of cooked potato.
When it came out of the oven, the truffle flavour had worked its way into the cheese and into the base – not overwhelmingly strong (because the truffle wasn’t), but a wonderful accent to the crisp base, molten cheese and crispy potato.
And it didn’t rain.
Truffle in the ground
One last blog from that busy Queen’s Birthday weekend: a picture of a truffle in the ground at the North Canterbury truffiere visited by the NZTA tour.
It wasn’t fully ripe at the time, but has recently been harvested. If only they were so obvious at my place… (Still no sign of truffles at the Hills. Peg had a good sniff round yesterday, but didn’t show any interest. Fingers still firmly crossed.)
Olive harvest 2005 disappointing
We harvested all our olives on June 18th. Lovely warm day. Total of 18kg of fruit, well up on the handful of the year before, but well down on the 50kg I was expecting. The birds – despite some noisy bird-scaring gear – had obviously been busy. I took the fruit to Athena Olives in Waipara, to be thrown into the pot. No Limestone Hills oil this year, but unless we have some sort of climatic disaster in the coming year, I’m confident we’ll have some next winter. Next on the olive grove task list: pruning and fertilising. I’ll do some light pruning at the end of July, and give each tree a feed in August.