Truffles in Eastern Sierras in July???

I almost forgot to tell you about this. Hubby Mark and I went up to Tahoe in July to visit family. On the way there we stopped for the night in Mammoth Lakes to break up the drive. Yes, it is a rough life we lead...Mark knew of a nice little restaurant at nearby Convict Lake aptly named, The Restaurant at Convict Lake, so we headed there for dinner. As we perused the menu what do you think we saw?

Chicken Marsala - Penne Pasta

sauteed with roasted red bell peppers, truffles, capers, cremini mushrooms
and finished with asiago and fried basil.....$21.95

That's right - a dish with truffles in it! Truffle snob that I am, I complained that they must be frozen seeing as how the harvest season had long since passed. Mark ordered the dish anyhow and when it came you could definitely smell the pungent propanish-garlicish scent of truffle. I personally couldn't taste them in it and couldn't distinguish between the cremini mushroom slivers and truffle shavings, if any. I'm thinking it may have been truffle oil that was used. It was still pretty good, though.

Incidentally, the restaurant is nice, if a bit pricey. Then again, if the dish had real truffles I guess $21.95 is cheap. Note that they do not, however, serve chocolate milk, and could not figure out how to take the chocolate syrup that is no doubt behind the bar or in the cooler and add it to milk. Forget the truffles, I judge a restaurant by its ability to produce a glass of chocolate milk for me even when it's not on the menu.

Yet another reason I don't like sheep.

So I've never liked sheep. They are stupid, sleep in their own poo, smell bad, and are downright annoying. They are so boring people count them to put themselves to sleep. I do, however, enjoy when they come around the rural parts of Tehachapi and graze this time of year, because, really, how many folks can look out their windows and see herds of sheep dotting their hillsides? That was then, this is now...

I was never sure what exactly they were eating since it's so dry until I came home the other night and found about 300 of them being herded out of our yard.

Yep, imagine my surprise when I pulled in to the driveway just in time to see a herd running and stampeding their way off our property. Of course, they took the route right through the truffle farm, which they had apparently already grazed. That's right, the herd got through the herder's fencing and onto the truffle farm. In case you were wondering, this is what a two year old hazelnut tree looks like after a few sheep have had their way with it:No leaves, no tree tube, just a twig sticking out of the ground. Not cool, sheep, not cool.

They didn't actually get all the trees. About 30 are MIA completely, and another 81 look like the example above. They also trampled the irrigation lines so each has to be reset, destroyed about half the tubes and stakes, and generally terrorized the place in no particular order:Seeing as how I was the only witness to the fleeing herd and had just seen CSI: Rural Communities Edition, I spent the next morning assessing damage and collecting evidence. First, I got the hoofprints in the driveway:And still some more hoofprints showing the path of the exodus toward the homestead:And then more distinctive prints near a missing tree:And a few pictures of the rest of my non-truffle crops having been thoughtfully pruned to a height of about four feet. There will be no Christmas jam this year folks:After completing the investigation I filed what may be the first ever "sheep ate my truffle trees" report in North America with local authorities. I'm not sure the deputy understood the gravity of the situation or the fact that he was making truffle history but at least he took the report and it is now probably on the bulletin board at the local sheriff's office next to the extraordinary report of the man who robbed the Circle K with a machete.

I have the phone number of one of the non-English speaking shepherds, the one who was no doubt asleep on the job when said sheep flocked to the estate and trampled it for hours on end. I intend to find the owner and send him a bill for the 111 damages trees, irrigation repair and replacement costs, and damages to my vegetables and fruit around the house. No, they don't know I'm a lawyer. They just think I'm a crazy pregnant woman babbling about expensive mushrooms.

Baaaaad sheep.

What's the deal with Chinese truffles?

Holy cow, has it really been since May since I've posted? Is anybody even still out there reading? If so, this blog's for you...

A friend recently called to tell me about the latest low quality import from China - black truffles. It was only a matter of time before some developing country caught on to our desire to eat hoity toity fungus and decided to capitalize on it. Seeing as how I once lived in China and am now a truffle farmer myself, I thought I'd investigate the burgeoning import market.

First, I googled "Chinese black truffles" and found www.chinesetruffle.com. If you go check them out, you will find that they are not representing the chinese black truffle as the same species as the french black truffle (tuber melanosporum) or any of the other high end truffles. Nope, these have different botanical names, Tuber Sinensis and Tuber Himalayensis, and are a product of China, rather than a European product being introduced in China. This is important to note when you are shopping for them and getting your undergarments in a knot at the thought of the Chinese capitalizing on what we Americans are trying to capitalize on first. Other truffle scientists claim the truffles being cultivated in China are actually Indian truffles known as tuber indicum, that some have compared to a weed or blight due to its resiliency and quick propagation.

This page explains the descriptions of Chinese truffles, going so far as to compare the Tuber Himalayensis with the coveted tuber melanosporum. The pictures look the same to me so I'm sure I could be fooled easily. Here is the pricing page info. At about $10 per kilogram they seem quite reasonable.

Even Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and NPR have recently covered the Chinese Truffle Trifle. Click on Truffle Kerfuffle to read Time's article, which is recommended because it covers both the Chinese and French perspectives and has some funny quotes, like

"Labor is very cheap here," Wu says. "In France they use pigs and dogs to find truffles. We can use humans."

Sucks to be human when your labor is less valued than that of a dog or pig...Then again, when I was in China they ate dogs.

The WSJ's article is shorter and has a couple of quotes from the same Mr. Wu of the Kunming Rare Truffle Company.

NPR has more in-depth coverage in its two-part article by Louisa Lim. She interviewed Mr. Wu and took the picture above. The article also discusses foie gras and force-feeding geese, something I'd never contemplated before today.

If you'd like to take a chance and order a Chinese truffle or two, just for your own amusement and tasting pleasure, here's a link to Alibaba.com's Chinese Truffle page. I'm not kidding, you can buy a chinese truffle from Alibaba. Sounds like a great Christmas gift idea to me...