Sonoma County farm strikes black truffle gold after 9 years of waiting
latimes.com
latimes.com
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121023124105.h...
When it's the first one, yes.
I thought this article was going to be about they found an entire farm full of them
I know a bloke who spend 14 yrs between getting the special seeds to his first revenue for a specialist cherry. Now he could sell every cherry 10x over but instead charges about $5 per cherry.
Speciality agriculture is very long term.
I remember reading about a baker in California who finally found the secret to a making proper French baguette. But it required something silly like shipping water from France. Here in the UK they still having cracked it.
I can not for the life of me imagine how you might need water from France for baguettes. I think the limitation in the US is not the water, but the public preference and the way bread is marketed.
I am traumatized by this „decrusting“
And as a bakery enthuisiast that baked in many european countries it is the quality of the flour in my opinion. For every country i visited it were different results but the same recipe. The french have a way „finer“ flour
The crust on artificial bread like wonder bread isn't crust so much as darker more bitter bread. As a Frenchman you can relax because you probably wouldn't even consider it bread in the first place.
But this seems only valid for certain parts of the US and food outside of the supermarket or fast food realm. Here in french or most europe the food has a decent quality even the ready to eat stuff in the supermarket.
Btw was never in the US, corona killed that plan. But I had contact with US culture by living in germany near the us military base.
I suspect it's the latter but am curious.
Also, what would make flour be of higher quality?
Did some search and found this … if someone who reads this want to do a deeep dive, Please let me know the results, thanks
https://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-difference-between-regul...
Edit: in europe we have numbers for the flour and they have a relativ to their number a certain amount of minerals. But most european countries are have their own system. But they are mostly comparable
Edit2: did a little search and the waterfree mass of baguette flour should have 0,52-0,62% of minerals. Thats calles t55 to t65 flour. But even then those flour have different proportion of gluten … and worse gluten aint the same everywhere. As I said the milling could affect it but also the kins of wheat and how it is grown…. You see a deep dive into the world of french baguette could be hard… I am happy with beeing often in france and getting the stuff I need there.( I live in germany) … btw same problem with ground almond .. french stuff works perfekt, german stuff not… but for almonds i am sure it is how fine it is ground… because now I ground them myself and it works.
Hope it wasnt tooooo much text and i could help :)
>>The UK also has some very good mills and we're spoilt for flour
That's interesting, because I find the exact opposite - not in terms of quality of course, but in terms of variety. I find that usually you only have your normal plain, then self-raising, then maybe two types of wholemeal....and that's it. In Poland where I'm from you'd get at least 10 different types of normal white flour in every store, based on how finely they are ground and how pure they are(denoted as "type" from 450 to 2000), and then you have flour from Poznan, from Warsaw, from Wroclaw etc etc - all found in normal stores. In UK it's just "plain". Tesco's own brand or maybe one other "named" brand.
Okay that's impressive. I buy my flour from Shipton Mill online[1] because, as you noted, supermarkets only carry commercial flour with very little variety, if any. Worse even, you don't get much information on the packaging about how coarse/fine it is, many times.
Side note: I'm also not originally from the UK and had also noticed the lack of bakeries, or specialist shops here. Even smaller towns have your typical Tesco/Sainsbury and few if any local baker, butcher, etc. Where I'm from, a neighbourhood without a butcher, bakery, fishmonger, etc would be considered a bit strange. I don't know why but it seems like the assassination of British culture is almost complete. I don't know if it was consumers that drove it or if the big supermarkets imposed it. They've made the local merchant almost extinct. And don't get me started on food culture (most brits I know don't regularly prepare their own meals, and when they do, they're rarely traditional home cooking outside of the typical sunday roast with the family, or christmas dinner. It's a sad loss in a way.
1. https://www.shipton-mill.com/flour-direct-shop/flour/organic...
Exactly correct. Most of us grow up eating cheap, crappy bread and simply continue the habit. There is plenty of really good bread out there but most people are content with the mass produced supermarket fluff.
A lot of the "European mystification" about US eating habits boil down to the fact that we have a lot of really cheap food available. Given a choice, most people choose cheap over good for daily usage.
I think there is - as always - some truth behind what you call "European mystification", or at least the US people coming here (Italy) wouldn't be going "Wow" (like they almost invariably do) when entering a good (but common enough) bakery shop or at the restaurant (or even when eating a "real" pizza).
Or maybe they are only very kind, in order to compliment us, but anyway they generally give the impression they never ate some "good" food.
Try it for yourself: Baking bread is easy (and many have taken up the process as a hobby during the pandemic). Youtube is a great teacher of these things.
Anyway, here's a working recipe if anyone wants to try it : https://www.lesfousdeterroirs.fr/nos-recettes/pain-maison
I don't agree with your comment about UK baguettes though. In London at least, you can get very good baguettes from Orée, le Pain Quotidien, (to an extent) Paul, and a bunch of small local bakeries here and there. As a Frenchman, I find these to be just as good as what you'd get in any French bakery.
"Because truffle fungi produce their sexual fruiting bodies under ground, spores cannot be spread by wind and water. Therefore, nearly all truffles depend on mycophagous animal vectors for spore dispersal."
The truffle is full of spores. Because it is underground it can only spread far if something or someone digs it up and tries to eat it.
"When the ascospores are fully developed, the truffle begin to exude volatile compounds that serve to attract animal vectors."
The truffle smells good so something or someone finds it and digs it up.
The trick is that humans only care about a few species of mushrooms as truffles. You spread the spores of one of these good species around the roots of a tree sapling you plant and then you hope that it will establish a good healthy colony. If for any reason some other mushroom species outcompetes your truffle species you won't have any truffles. And it takes multiple years to know if that happened or not. So any experimentation in finding the right method or the right conditions to promote the truffle species and discourage the other species goes at a snail's pace.
- we could make a genetically modified truffle fungi which glows in the dark. Now, why would that help? The problem with monitoring the health of your fungi is that most of the body mass of it is in the form of tiny thread like stuff called mycelium. Even if you take a soil sample it is kinda hard to tell the mycelium of the right species apart from the wrong ones. With some species experts can tell them apart under microscope but the only sure way to tell what fungi’s mycelium you are looking at is to DNA sequence it. Which is expensive thus rarelly done. But if you could make your target specie glow under UV light it would make the analysis that much simpler and cheaper. So we could do it more often and thus learn about what factors favour our truffle faster.
- The other option would be to engineer a kind of “immune system” to our truffle species. Basically to make “nanobots” which leave our truffle but kill other fungi. Now how on earth would one do something like that? I would start by trying to modify mycoviruses (the kind of viruses which attack fungi). Many of them are already quite picky about what kind of fungi they infect, so probably that would help us. Bonus points if we can engineer the virus such that it dies out in nature after a few rounds of reproduction so we can minimize the chances of an escape.
Of course both of these ideas are very speculative, scifi level conceptual stuff. :)
This should be a top priority or you're describing the beginning of the next disaster/distopian movie.
Truffled to death.
I remember looking at old newspapers in the game, and it looks like the fungus was on crops. And I think there were allusions that the fungus was the same on which controls ants, but mutated.
Very fun game.
Possibly, that’s even throughout the yearS. Mast happens “at irregular periods of 2–12 years” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)) and we don’t really understand that, either.
-add a fungicide resistance gene into your truffle strain. Inoculate your tree with this GMO strain, treat the soil regularly with appropriate fungicide. This will kill off the competing fungi, leaving only your strain.
Ps: Excelent work on the fjords, they turned out really pretty.
Couldn't you just do some chemical analysis to verify if your desired fungi is present in the roots?
It'd be like trying to understand how plants grow without being able to see or measure light.
We only discovered these proteins in 1996.
Vanilla was not successfully pollinated by humans until 1841, which meant that it did not grow outside of the natural range of its pollinator in Mexico (and only a very small region of Mexico.) And today most vanilla does not come from vanilla beans but is synthesized from petrochemicals, because vanilla's pollination is still ridiculously expensive.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bittersweet-st...
Also, one of the issues with minoxidil is that it is a prodrug, the active form is minoxidil sulfate, and some people don't express sulfotransferase as much in the skin to be able to make that conversion. If minoxidil doesn't work for you, then you want to either use oral minoxidil (the liver will activate it to minoxidil sulfate, the side effect of that is you will have enhanced hair growth through your entire body), or a compounded topical that has tretinoin, since that helps upregulate sulfotransferase in the skin.
I don't have an opinion on how often minoxidil should be applied, but your reasoning here is wrong. If the treatment works when a particular concentration is maintained, you could absolutely need to apply a drug with a half-life of 22 hours twice a day.
For example, many anti-depressants have half-lives of a few days, but patients still take them once or even twice a day.
The only relationship between half-life and daily dose is initial ramp-up vs sustained treatment. That is, a treatment usually has a targeted amount of a substance being maintained in the body during the sustained treatment, and then the ramp-up and any adjustment needs to be done taking into consideration that the pill you took yesterday may still be 3/4 still in your body today.
The trouble is, once hair loss is visually noticeable you've already lost about 50% density, and most people don't notice their hairline slowly receding.
For some people its not.
The point remains though, if you were able to know that you would go bald, and started taking finasteride or dutasteride before noticeable hair loss starts, that would likely be sufficient for life.
I remember Bill Gates in some video said that pharma companies spend lots of money on research to prevent hair loss, grow hair compared compared to research on diseases like malaria etc.
Well if he says it.
> Gates answers, "No," which by itself could be interpreted as him standing up for intellectual property law and refusing to share vaccine formulas with developing nations. But then Gates goes on to answer the inevitable follow up question: "Why not?"
> The reason, Gates said, is due to the complexity of manufacturing safe vaccines.
> "There are only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines," he said. "The thing that's holding things back in this case isn't intellectual property. It's not like there's some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines. You've gotta do the trials on these things. And every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way."
> Moreover, Gates said getting COVID vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson to share vaccine formulas has already happened — such as the case with India.
> "We got all the rights from the vaccine companies," he said. "They didn't hold it back, they were participating."
We're not selling penis mightiers
Well you're sitting on a goldmine Trebek"
It's not clear to me this is true. I think there may be some niche market, but I think most men wouldn't even consider something like this.
A few people mentioned viagra, which has made a lot of money, but that's not about size.
I remember reading a long time ago that there is some kind of "enlargement" surgery available, but that the motivation is almost exclusively the "locker room" rather than a sexual issue.
Anyway, I'm sure that an invention as you describe may be interesting to some niche, but I don't believe it's one of the worlds burning problems, which is why it hasn't had any serious study.
girth is doable, length, not so much, is my understanding.
Otherwise, I was serious, I don't think penis enlargement is high enough on most people's priorities that the field attracts any real R&D investment.
I know of blunt statements and blunt/blunted knife blades but maybe I misunderstood your usage of the word. Care to explain?
(I’m not saying it’s wasteful, learning the secrets of truffle reproduction could unlock a new branch of scientific study. Just explaining why this is.)
When they say, "nobody knows" it means that nobody who does know is talking.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that there are people that have figured out how to increase yields in the wild or simulate correct growing conditions
Coke is all about marketing not the taste.
And when they got one, they ate it. I would have thought maybe breaking it up and I dunno, planting it or spreading it around might be a good idea.
Eating the truffe instead is advertisement and creating a net of future exigent customers.
For chefs is also an opportunity to verify that you have exactly the right stuff. There are other types of truffe that grow in Corylus and have a much lower market value.
I personally wouldn't pay ridiculous prices for them, but as I live in the SF bay area I keep an eye out when they're in season and you can usually buy them for $20 a pound or so (and a pound is a lot of mushrooms). trim off the dirt, slice them, sautee them in a little fat with onion and garlic, add in some soy sauce, white wine, maybe chicken stock, maybe strips of chicken.
The main thing with matsutake is, like truffles, they have not really been domesticated. You have to forage for them.
There's all sorts of interesting things about mushrooms- the mycelium ends up connecting multiple trees together, and they act in symbiotic relationship to each other, in terms of exchanging minerals and nutrients (which is apparently why they haven't been domesticated yet).
This video is pretty interesting about Japanese mushrooms in general, and has an segment on matsutake mushrooms in particular:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZujODgOqCI
(the Japanlology series is pretty entertaining / informative too -- it has lots of episodes and there's always a touching / memorable story at the end of each)
Japanese preparations are with rice or like a consommé. You can also fusion it with Lemongrass etc…but because they are seasonal and expensive, why ruin the pure flavour. They are also known as pine mushrooms..so the aroma is kinda piney/forest floor and cinnamon chai’ish. Mushroom cravings now!
In fact, if you don't care for the social prestige, common and good things are better because they're more easily accessible at better prices.
It isn't true for everyone, but I enjoy good foods I rarely consume more.
Take steak (common) and lobster (rarer)
Both are good, and I would rather live in a world without lobster than one without steak. That said, if you asked me what which I wanted for my next meal, I would pick lobster.
This doesn't mean you can't eat good food with variety on a thrifty budget. But even someone doing so might be especially excited to have something expensive that they don't normally have access to.
In October/November in the pacific northwest you can buy them at asian markets (though they're pricy) or find them in dishes at many japanese restaurants.
"Thousands of truffle-producing trees were planted, and production reached peaks of hundreds of tonnes at the end of the 19th century. In 1890, 75,000 hectares (190,000 acres) of truffle-producing trees had been planted."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Some 10+ years ago, I scrimped and saved and bought white truffles for something like 400 quid in London. I had only omelettes and pasta and risottos for days and I stretched it and stretched it. I didn’t want to try anything else fancy..just a blank slate to imbibe the aroma of white truffles. A Hungarian Tokay and a very pungent raw Camembert. I could only afford McDonalds soft serve and fries for a week after that but it was totally worth it.
As I am typing this..and I am obviously imagining it..I can almost smell it ..it’s like the aroma of those meals are still clinging to the inside of my nasal passages.
I used to work Michelin kitchens…and classical recipes were always revered..but there was always someone who’d want roast chicken with black truffle slices under the skin. A tame version of the original..roast chicken inside a pig’s bladder. I have had many humiliating experiences including shaving a piglet with a razor in a bathtub(not to mention Glorious 12th shenanigans which were probably not legal..who knows) , but never have done the bladder balloon bag for truffle chicken.
Others can be simple and not fancy at all. Or a consommé with black truffles in it and a puff pastry dome so a plume of truffle steam hits them when they break the dome. These are text book recipes..old fashioned escoffier stuff, but there will always be someone who will wax lyrical about them.. I wonder which generation will lose the nostalgia of it all.
When I came back to the states, I had a few usual suspects under my sleeve that I repeat again and again. The most popular one was seven hour gigot d’Agneau with robuchon pomme purée and a cream of garlic soup. The Americans refused the lamb because it was falling off the bone(that was the point) and suspicious because it was ‘still pink’. And insisted on truffles in the pomme purée even though none was available and I only had fake truffle oil at hand. That was the last meal I cooked and I stopped cooking meat all together. There is something about America that can’t get past beyond a well made burger. It’s very insulting to my craft. It makes me very sad because I love to feed people..but I also realized that I love feeding people only because they loved me.
Sorry..went off on a tangent and then down the mushroom path.
Fwiw re the OP, I think I know that Sonoma farm…I remember when they planted and many were skeptical. they planted in a hazelnut orchard. It’s the most suitable one for California. It’s not worth planting new growth oaks as they are protected under state law and can’t be felled if need arises. Further..oak disease is ravaging California..sudden oak death is clearing off old growth oaks. It’s all very depressing. But I am very happy that there are truffles in our own CA backyard. They use dogs now to dig them up instead of pigs, I heard…because pigs will gobble up everything. Thousands of dollars worth of truffles in one snort.
Seems like it’s around 10,000 euros/lb now. When I bought it..it was probably 2200-2500 euros per pound. That was almost a decade ago!
To me, after the Italian white truffle experience, black truffles are not worth it anymore. I just want to preserve that one special memory(of many meals) untainted!
So he planted an orchard of trees containing truffle spores, waited 9 years, and then found a single $300 truffle. Hopefully he finds more because otherwise that's a very bad ROI (unless he's doing it purely for the flavor/hobby in which case it's a good ROI).
I would say this guy might be a failure. He has earned $350ish dollars over 9 years. That buys like 2 bags of dogfood a year.
I can just imagine the conversation with his wife before he got the dogs. "Honey, I'm spending $2500 on a pair of dogs." And then inevitably later, "but they will pay for themselves with the truffles they find"
Lol
https://www.americantruffle.com
It was founded by a Stanford scientist.
Look at the page on a wide monitor or with a mobile sideways and i think you'll see the issue: the page is designed to have a left column, which is right aligned so that it goes flush with the picture to the right. But when you view the page on a narrow monitor or with a mobile vertically, below the cut off width it reflows so the right aligned text section goes to the top (which results in the odd layout complained about)
Not only does that make them harder to grow, it also makes them a lot more chill about producing fruiting bodies (a.k.a the actual mushroom caps that we eat). Saprophytic fungi need to move on once the matter they grow on runs out of nutrients. Mycorrhizal fungi can live comfortably for decades with their host tree and only produce fruiting bodies when the conditions are optimal.
Cubensis happens to be simple.
See: seeds that only germinate after they're eaten, after they go through a cold spell, etc.
Inevitable the native peoples of the world end up in poverty while some Johnny-come-lately capitalist in the US eats their breakfast.
This costs a lot of extra money on top of an already expensive bill. It's worth it.
The decay function on truffles is insane. Maybe the very top restaurants can get them from ground to plate in 48 hours but it’s pretty clear that the meal I had used truffles older than that.
I’m excited about the possibility of US truffles because I think a very tight supply chain is more likely.
It sounds like you've studied this market, so I'm curious if you have thoughts on Oregon, as it has been my understanding that there are meaningful quantities harvested there. Is it a matter of variety, lack of commercial production, or am I just misinformed?
For all I know, that truffle I saw was from Oregon. But regardless, there aren't very many. It was priced at about 4x the price of silver, per unit weight.
--
[1] https://www.alearned.com/wine/
[2] https://gizmodo.com/how-the-great-french-wine-blight-changed...
It's hard to compare modern wine, which is all grown on grafted vines, to pre-phylloxera wines (the notable exceptions being Chilean wine, and wine from the occasional European vineyard that was spared from the blight).
And:
Though modern chemistry and genetics have given agriculture plenty of new tools to fight pests, the ancient practice of grafting, honed during the Great French Wine Blight, remains the method of choice for protecting grape vines. "Rootstocks are the 'cure-all' for many soil-borne pests and diseases, but not all," Walker says. "In the past fumigation and pesticides controlled some of these issues, but if phylloxera are present, rootstocks are essential."
Meanwhile, if one of them tries to sell a Mickey Mouse t-shirt they'd get hanged before noon by the US govt doing the bidding of a US megacorp.
Grandparents post was all over the place
Anyway, I don't like the idea of wasting so much soil, water, chemicals for few pounds per acre. It really seems like between preserving nature and money we always choose money.