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...

Invasion!

I know, I know...It's been a while. Too long really. What can I say? We've been busy. First I got married, then we realized when you're married you live together so we moved the hubby up to the farm, then we travelled, and now he's gone to Europe for two months. Add to that the arrival of my brother and nephew, complications involved there, and running a truffle farm starts to seem a bit trivial.

Good news is that things have settled down for a while and the first sign of spring, in the form of grazing sheep, is here!
Yes, those little blobs in the distance beind the farm are sheep. It's open grazing territory out here so they just kind of roam around in the spring helping with yardwork. Fortunately the sheephearders put up a little fence to block them from invading the farm. Here's another view of them:
They've been around for a few days and it is kind of nice sitting out watching them.

In other news, I found my first sign of fungus on the farm while I was out laying drip line the other week:
See it at the bottom? A dried mushroom. Nope, not the valuable kind. Hopefully it's a sign of fungus to come!!! Oooh, and look at that lovely drip line. Such nice work...

More truffle news

It's snowing again today in Tehachapi so no one's in the mood to plant. The good news is that the 450 trees in the ground look to be recovering from the shock of planting and are doing well and showing new growth.

Rather than plant trees or do my taxes (researching farm profit and loss for those interested), I Googled "truffle cultivation" and found a few more stories on truffle farming in the U.S.:

Click here for an article about Franklin Garland of Garland Truffles in North Carolina and Bob Pasarelli, a North Carolina chef, and their successes with truffle cultivation in North Carolina.

I also found a new truffle company, Truffle Cultivation, Inc., who are based out of Oregon and purport to have a sales office in France. Interesting to this attorney-farmer is the fact that the end of their website presentation states why they chose the corporate structure they did. Kind of funny if you ask me. They don't list pricing, products, or scientific information so I'm not sure what to make of them. I didn't find them in an online search of the Oregon Department of Corporations so if you're interested in them, be sure to check them out.

While at the Oregon Department of Corporations I did happen to search for corporations with the word "truffle" in their name. Here is the link to the list of 29 such names!!! Some appear to deal with those other kinds of truffles (the sweet ones), but several appear to be farms. I'll check into them and get back to you.

I found that kind of interesting, 'cause I'm kind of geeky that way, so I went over to the North Carolina Secretary of State's Corporations page and found these seven truffle-related businesses - all located in North Carolina. Interestingly enough, it shows that Garland Truffles, the above-referenced media darling of the North Carolnia truffle world, has a suspended corporate status as of today's date. This may mean nothing but is something those of you doing business with them should know and clarify who you are sending money to because I don't know about North Carolina, but it's sometimes illegal in California to do business with a knowingly suspended corporation.

Of course, no search would be complete without checking out my home state, California. I only found three "truffle" corporations here (probably because of our high corporate taxes...). Here is the link. Nope, we're not incorporated yet because, well, we don't have any business to worry about until we actually find that legendary black gold. One pound should just about cover the annual fees...

You can do these searches in your own state by going to the Secretary of State/Department of Corporations page and doing a search for businesses with the words "truffle", "truffiere", or whatever turns you on in them.

Back to those farm taxes...

West Side Story

Believe it or not, we planted (me, Diana and Mark (my new husband) 450 trees in just five days. It all started with Mark running the trencher down 420 feet of property line. He claims he wasn't drunk but the row looks like a sobriety test gone bad to me...Still, a trench is a trench, right?
After that, we put my poor new hubby (less than a week into wedded bliss) to work marking rows and digging holes. Doesn't he look happy?
Diana (Mom) and I then followed with trees, tubes and stakes:
Before we knew it, the first row of oaks was in!!! Isn't it pretty?We crossed the gully to the east side and decided to save 20 spare hazelnuts in pots to replace any we might lose over the next year or so. Plus, we were just too darned tired after planting 450 trees to do another row.
And a few days later, the entire west side of the gully was full of oaks and hazelnuts. How cool will this be in five years???
More as soon as we complete the east side (152 oaks to be exact) and our new favorite pasttime - installing drip irrigation.

Note to future truffle farmers: It's a lot of work planting 600 trees so get some help!!!

One bourbon, one scotch, one french black truffle???

If your up on truffle cultivation I'm sure you've heard that Tom Michaels recently harvested his first successful crop of Perigords in the small town of Chuckey, Tennessee. In fact, they are so good he's sold them to restaurants in Manhattan. Here is the link to a nice article on Tennessee Truffles in none other than the New York Times.

The gist of it is that he has about 2,500 hazelnut trees he planted in 2000. So it took seven years. He's getting $50 an ounce for them (that equals $800 a pound).

His success was such big news it even made the papers in the UK - where they are also trying to cultivate the famous fungus and give France a run for its truffle money.

And here is another good link to an article on Mr. Michaels and his success from the Knoxville News Sentinel website. It even has a picture of his hazelnut orchard so you can see what our orchard might look like in seven years!

Finally, here's a link to an inspiring article in the Vancouver Sun about cultivating the spores in British Columbia.

I'm still looking for Mr. Michaels' website to link to and will post it as soon as I find it. In the meantime, I've got some irrigation to install!!!

600 Trees and a Snowstorm

Three days after we received our trees a nice snowstorm blew in. This is what the truffle farm looked like a week after accepting delivery:
Scenic as it is, it's not very good for planting so we threw the trees in the barn (our version of cold storage) and waited for what we hope was the last storm of the season to pass. As happens in life, it passed and we've been busy planting trees ever since. Pictures of the planting to come soon!

One if by land...

OK. I'll admit it: We are, by nature, procrastinators. And I mean that in the nicest way. Quite frankly, we are adrenalin junkies. Until the pressure is on, we are distracted and less than productive.

And so we waited for some signal, like Paul Revere: "One if by land, two if by sea." And while our shot may not have been "heard around the world", it still reverberates in my ears.

One loud shot. A wake up call. Only the message was not delivered by Paul Revere. Instead, it was UPS. Our trees arrived Friday: 8 boxes...600 trees!

And so, the pressure is on. The water tank is in place. The plumbing is ongoing.

We are scrambling to locate tree tubes and limestone, and of course, shovels. And for the next week, like the Patriots, we will be caught up in battle, because mother nature is playing some very strange tricks on us with the weather.

So we will labor in the sun for the next few days, and then we will probably freeze for a while. But whatever the weather, those trees will go in the ground.

That's the thing about procrastinators: They tend to get things done.