truffles

Marlborough’s first truffle

/ Gareth

Hysonsfirst1.jpg

This is the first truffle of the 2010 New Zealand season, the first ever found in the Marlborough region, and a first for Marlborough grower Michael Hyson and his Waihopai Valley truffière. It’s nowhere near ripe yet, but as Michael exclaimed when he rang me with his news yesterday morning, “Gareth, it’s huge!”. And it is at least big — that scale is in centimetres, so the top of the truffle is about 7 cm across. The very slight reddish tinge to the surface is typical of immature melanosporum, and Michael reports that the flesh (seen through a nick in the skin) is still white. That skin damage and the fact that it has grown out of the soil surface means the chances of it surviving through to full ripeness (probably late June/early July — around three months) are poor, but where there’s a big one, there’s almost certainly more. The Hyson family’s trees are eight years old. I hope their success is echoed in other young truffieres around the country in the coming season.

I also have my fingers firmly crossed for this year’s harvest at Limestone Hills. At the beginning of the week I was pretty certain that I’d found a couple of “push ups” — where the soil surface cracks open as a truffle grows rapidly underneath — but I resisted the temptation to check on progress because one slip with the trowel, and the truffles might never ripen.

Truffle dogs and Chinese truffles (but not Chinese truffle dogs)

/ Gareth / 3 Comments

Since we’re in catching up mode, here a couple of articles I’ve been meaning to make available for some time. The first is a paper [PDF] on Chinese truffles commissioned by Gastronomica (the prestigious US food and culture journal) in 2008, which draws heavily on my experiences in China in 2007. It discusses the impact of Chinese truffles on the world truffle market, and the prospects for the future.

Admirers of Peg the beagle (and dog lovers in general) will enjoy this six page feature [PDF] from New Zealand’s Pet magazine (issue 47, June-August 2009). The truffle hound’s on fine form, but please ignore the pictures of her boss. Jean-Paul Pochin did a great job on the words and pictures.

Time of the season

/ Gareth

I ride the farm bike (four wheels, a buggered exhaust so it roars rather than purrs) round the vineyard several times a day at the moment, in the hope that this will deter voracious avian thieves from feasting on my crop. Last year, they reduced a tonne to 300kg, but this year (fingers duly crossed) a number of large vineyards down the valley seem to be intent on providing fodder, and so the flocks of starlings and waxeyes haven’t yet come this far upstream. And if they do, I have a shotgun waiting. To scare them, of course, though four and twenty blackbirds might very well make a nice pie. A lot of feathers to pluck, though. We have also acquired a pheasant in the vineyard to go with the quail that parade across our lawn. I haven’t got the heart to shoot either…

Grape news: We plan to bottle The Faultline’s first vintage this weekend, and harvest the next the following week. The pinot will be first, with the syrah a week or ten days later. Meanwhile, Peg’s nose is going to start hunting for Burgundy truffles, and I will be checking for saffron milk caps at regular intervals (none yet – but we have had some very nice birch boletes from my father-in-law’s lawn and a giant puffball from a grassy bank in Rangiora).

Book news: Hot Topic has made the shortlist for the Royal Society of New Zealand’s first Science Book Prize. Richard Dawkins will announce the winner at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival on May 15th. I have many minor appendages crossed.

Five things to eat before you die

/ Gareth

I‘ve been tagged for a food blog meme, which is a first (thanks Bron). Not being a proper food blog, but a blog that does food from time, I’m probably a bit of an interloper — and I’m certainly going to find it hard to “tag” five more food blogs (one of the rules). I’ll do my best.

The meme comes from The Traveller’s Lunchbox, and the idea is to come up with five “things you’ve eaten and think that everyone should eat at least once before they die”. It’s an interesting challenge, and over the last couple of days I’ve been remembering all sorts of meals in all sorts of places. And therein lies one of the challenges. I have especially fond memories of a plateau de fruits de mer, eaten in a restaurant on the inner harbour at La Rochelle, but do I remember it because of the excellence of the plateau, or the happy combination of circumstances surrounding that meal? Same thing with a bottle of white vin de savoie that was elevenses at a little restaurant on the slopes at Serre Chevalier. A magic moment to be sure, but worth inflicting that wine on everyone? Probably not. So I have settled on five things that I have eaten and enjoyed and remembered and loved, not simply because of time and place, but on culinary merit (though you may choose to differ). And whakapapa plays a part too.

  1. Andouillete
    Offal sausage, or awful sausage? A specialty of Troyes, and found in every Relais Routiers in France, this is a working man’s saucisse, a sausage of strong flavour and challenging appearance. Cut it open and admire the strips of pork tripe and large intestine, flavoured with onion and parsley. I’ve seen grown women turn away in horror… but with good mustard and some fine pommes frites, the andouillette is something I have to eat at least once when visiting la belle France.
  2. Bara lawr
    Welsh seaweed dish, known to the Sais as laver bread, traditionally eaten fried in oatmeal with bacon for breakfast. The seaweed is quite common around the world (I’ve eaten it in NZ) — there is a Japanese name, but I can’t recall it — and in Wales it’s washed and then boiled for four hours or more until it’s a green glutinous mass, still redolent of the sea. And if the bacon you eat with it is farm-cured and bought in the market at Carmarthen or Cardigan, then you have something simple but wonderful.
  3. Germknodel
    This is pretty close to a time and place thing, because I have only eaten it in restaurants on the slopes at St Anton or Lech, although it is a speciality throughout the Tirol. Consider a dumpling the size of a baby’s head stuffed with stewed plums, topped with poppy seeds and icing sugar and dressed with melted butter, and reflect on the challenge this presents to post-prandial skiing. Delicious, but difficult.
  4. A sun-ripened apricot, warm from the tree
    Looking through other bloggers’ lists of five, there are plenty of exhortations to take freshly picked, sun-ripened or just landed things and apply them to the palate. So I am not being original, but I include my apricot because I planted apricots (and other fruit trees) at Limestone Hills because this was an experience I’d read about (Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, I think) and wanted to try. Every summer I watch the apricots, willing them to ripen, so that I can revel in the sheer apricotness of the fresh, sun-warmed article. This isn’t just worth doing, it’s worth moving to a place where it’s possible in order to do it.
  5. Tuber magnatum, on anything
    No surprises here. The first meal of this truffle set in train a sequence of events that led me to Limestone Hills, and it is one of the tragedies of modern science that no-one has yet worked out how to successfully cultivate this fungus (though there are tantalising hints that it might soon be possible). Not oil — never oil — just the fresh article, shaved thinly on a buttery tagliatelle, or plain risotto, or stirred into and shaved onto an emperor amongst omelettes. So good I wrote a book about it.
    So who to “tag” with this: I can’t do five, but I will suggest that Mark Bernstein — another occasional foodie like me — might like to have a go.

Truffles on the BBC

/ Gareth

Aunty’s been showing a bit of interest in truffles recently. Aunty BBC, that is. I don’t quite know how they got hold of the idea, but the Charlie Crocker Show on BBC Radio Kent decided they wanted to talk to someone about truffles in New Zealand, and they picked on me. Charlie invited me on to her sofa (virtual, in this case) on Monday evening, Kent time – 7-15am, sunrise in NZ, and we chatted merrily for half an hour. You can listen to the show on the web, at least for a week. It’s a fair while since I’ve been on the BBC. Back in the early 80s, when I was being a video guru, I used to claim that the only BBC station I’d never been on was Radio Three (the classical music station).

Meanwhile, over on Radio Four, their correspondent has been truffling his way round Bill & Pat de Corsie’s truffiere south of Sydney, where 500 five year-old trees have produced six kilos of truffles this winter. On the way they’ve encountered one or two uniquely Aussie problems…

“The bloody wombats were getting in over the fence,” Bill tells me. “We had no idea they could climb.” Installing an electric wire has solved that problem, but it is still no deterrent to the local kangaroos, which simply hop over.

You can probably ferret around on the BBC and find the audio. From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 26 August, 2006 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4.

Oh to be in England

/ Gareth

Email of the morning arrives from Nigel Hadden-Paton at Truffles UK, who has just had a good day out in Wiltshire:

“We sat at a table in the garden and brushed our spoils clean, then weighed them. Over 4 kilos of top quality [summer] truffle and a further 2.5 kilos of damaged or maggotted truffle – to be used for inoculum. Not a bad day at the office!”

In 40 minutes. With time to take some excellent pictures. I feel a bout of Home Thoughts From Abroad coming on.

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…

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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.

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…