subject: Truffles - One Of The Most Extravagant Meals In Italy [print this page] Try to visit Alba in October, and you'll be just in time for the main line truffle festival. The streets will be filled with food sellers, plus the air thick with the aroma of this delightful, edible fungus. Each restaurant in town will feature its most excellent truffle dish. Witnessing such a scene you would never guess at the comparative deficiency of the truffle.
Each and every year a farmer heads out in the dead of the night. They take their truffle sniffing pigs or dogs and steal off to the fields. The location of a truffle crop is normally a really closely guarded secret. Poaching is a genuine issue, and with good reason. A harvest of black market truffles could make a poacher wealthy, and it could bankrupt the farmer. You see, ounce for ounce truffles is probably the most costly natural food in the world. It's not at all unusual for this fungus to sell for as much as $250 dollars an ounce. According to Wikipedia probably the most expensive truffle of all was sold at auction for $330,000 dollars. As such there are some very strict laws regarding the harvest and sale of this prized edible. A truffle thief could end up in jail.
The cost of the truffle is due to its actual scarcity. The truffle grows in symbiosis with trees. The fungus covers the roots from the tree and feeds off carbohydrates produced by its host. In return the fungus helps the tree absorb vital minerals from the soil. The truffle is really the fruit from the fungus. Just as an apple is the fruit of the apple tree. Generally, the host is an oak or a willow, but no one can understand exactly what causes the fungus to take hold.
Natural growths from the delicacy have been greatly depleted by deforestation and environmental concerns like pollution and global warming. The yearly truffle harvest is less than a quarter of what it was a hundred years ago, and it gets a little smaller each and every year. Scientists and farmers have tried in vain to reproduce the circumstances needed to spread the truffle but to date no 1 has succeeded.
If you have a yen to try a truffle, now is the ideal time to get one. The harvest is obtaining smaller each year, and also the costs are obtaining higher. Actually, there's some fear that the truffle may decrease and turn into disappearance.
