White Truffles Mushroom

Truffle is a wild product, it is a natural product. It is not something you can cultivate or control,” Giordano explains. This unpredictability contributes to the extreme prices truffles can fetch. People have tried for generations, to no avail, to farm truffles. White Truffles Mushroom

And while recent attempts in the U.S. and Australia to recreate truffle-conducive habitats by planting chestnut, oak, and hazelnut trees have shown modest success, the crop has been insubstantial and rarely are full truffles salvageable. White Truffles Mushroom

Instead, Urbani works with a network of 18,000 people to hunt for truffles around Italy. “A single truffle hunter with a dog can find a small amount—two ounces, three ounces, quarter of a pound—so we need a lot of people to make sure we are able to collect quantity we need,” he says. All those employees only drive the price up further. White Truffles Mushroom

A truffle is the fruiting body of a subterranean ascomycete fungus, predominantly one of the many species of the genus Tuber. In addition to Tuber, over one hundred other genera of fungi are classified as truffles including Geopora, Peziza, Choiromyces, and Leucangium. These genera belong to the class Pezizomycetes and the Pezizales order. White Truffles Mushroom

Several truffle-like basidiomycetes are excluded from Pezizales, including Rhizopogon and Glomus. Truffles are ectomycorrhizal fungi, so they are usually found in close association with tree roots. Spore dispersal is accomplished through fungivores, animals that eat fungi.^[2] These fungi have significant ecological roles in nutrient cycling and drought tolerance. White Truffles Mushroom

Some truffle species are highly prized as food. French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called truffles “the diamond of the kitchen”.^[3] Edible truffles are used in Italian, French^[4] and numerous other national haute cuisines. Truffles are cultivated and harvested from natural environments. White Truffles Mushroom

History

Antiquity

The first mention of truffles appears in the inscriptions of the neo-Sumerians regarding their Amorite enemy’s eating habits (Third Dynasty of Ur, 20th century BCE) and later in writings of Theophrastus in the 4th century BCE. In classical times, their origins were a mystery that challenged many; Plutarch and others thought them to be the result of lightning, warmth, and water in the soil, while Juvenal thought thunder and rain to be instrumental in their origin.

Cicero deemed them children of the earth, while Dioscorides thought they were tuberous roots. White Truffles Mushroom

Rome and Thracia in the Classical period identified three kinds of truffles: Tuber melanosporum, T. magnificus, and T. magnatum. The Romans instead used a variety of fungus called terfez, also sometimes called a “desert truffle”. Terfez used in Rome came from Lesbos, Carthage, and especially Libya, where the coastal climate was less dry in ancient times. White Truffles Mushroom

Their substance is pale, tinged with rose. Unlike truffles, terfez have little inherent flavour. The Romans used the terfez as a flavour carrier because the terfez tends to absorb surrounding flavours. Because Ancient Roman cuisine used many spices and flavourings, the terfez may have been appropriate in that context.

Middle Ages

Truffles were rarely used during the Middle Ages. Truffle hunting is mentioned by Bartolomeo Platina, the papal historian, in 1481, when he recorded that the sows of Notza were without equal in hunting truffles, but they should be muzzled to prevent them from eating the prize.^[7]

Renaissance and modernity

During the Renaissance, truffles regained popularity in Europe and were honoured at the court of King Francis I of France. They were popular in Parisian markets in the 1780s, imported seasonally from truffle grounds, where peasants had long enjoyed them. Brillat-Savarin (1825) noted that they were so expensive they appeared only at the dinner tables of great nobles and kept women. They were sometimes served with turkey.

Cultivation

Truffles long eluded techniques of domestication, as Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1825) noted:

The most learned men have sought to ascertain the secret and fancied they discovered the seed. Their promises, however, were vain, and no planting was ever followed by a harvest. This perhaps is all right, for as one of the great values of truffles is their dearness, perhaps they would be less highly esteemed if they were cheaper.^[3]

Truffles can be cultivated. As early as 1808, attempts to cultivate truffles, known in French as trufficulture, were successful. People had long observed that truffles were growing among the roots of certain trees, and in 1808, Joseph Talon, from Apt (département of Vaucluse) in southern France, had the idea of transplanting some seedlings that he had collected at the foot of oak trees known to host truffles in their root system.

For discovering how to cultivate truffles, some sources now give priority to Pierre II Mauléon (1744–1831) of Loudun (in western France), who began to cultivate truffles around 1790.

Mauléon saw an “obvious symbiosis” between the oak tree, the rocky soil, and the truffle and attempted to reproduce such an environment by taking acorns from trees known to have produced truffles and sowing them in chalky soil.

His experiment was successful, with truffles found in the soil around the newly grown oak trees years later. In 1847, Auguste Rousseau of Carpentras (in Vaucluse) planted 7 hectares (17 acres) of oak trees (again from acorns found on the soil around truffle-producing oak trees), and he subsequently obtained large harvests of truffles. He received a prize at the 1855 World’s Fair in Paris.

Others imitated these successful attempts in France and Italy. In the late 19th century, an epidemic of phylloxera destroyed many of the vineyards in southern France. Another epidemic killed most of the silkworms there, too, making the fields of mulberry trees useless. Trufficulture became an important source of income for those affected.

^8][13] The calcareous and exposed vineyard soils were well-suited to the cultivation of truffles.^[12] By 1890, truffières (truffle plantations) covered 750 km² of land in France, and 2,000 tonnes of truffles were produced in that year.^[8]

From the 19th century to the present, truffle production fell by 97–99% to 20–50 tonnes annually. Reasons given for this decline include the Industrial Revolution, the subsequent rural flight and the multiple European wars of the 20th century, which reduced the rural population.

For example, World War I resulted in the mobilisation of 65% of the agricultural workers from the region of Lot alone.^[13] Knowledge of truffle cultivation, the soil and the seasons was lost along with the people. White Truffles Mushroom

Another consequence was no more grazing sheep or shepherds who pruned trees for feed and fuelwood, so former truffle plantations turned into closed forests that no longer produced truffles. White Truffles Mushroom

Truffles were once sold at weekly markets (bi-weekly in the case of a market in Martel, Lot) and in quantities of two to six tonnes in good weeks, but only Lalbenque and Limogne today have weekly truffle markets. Prices have increased so that truffles, once seen as a food of the middle class, have become a luxury.

The situation changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with researchers in France and Italy establishing mycorrhizas with truffle spores. Beginning from the 1980s, truffle plantations are compensating for some of the decline in wild truffles, and exist in various countries including France, Italy, Spain and Australia. White Truffles Mushroom

^[15] About 80% of the truffles now produced in France come from specially planted truffle groves.^{[citation needed]} Investments in cultivated plantations are underway in many parts of the world using controlled irrigation for regular and resilient production. White Truffles Mushroom

A critical phase of the cultivation is the quality control of the mycorrhizal plants. Between 7 and 10 years are needed for the truffles to develop their mycorrhizal network, and only after that do the host plants come into production. White Truffles Mushroom

Complete soil analysis to avoid contamination by other dominant fungi and very strict control of the formation of mycorrhizae are necessary to ensure the success of a plantation. Total investment per hectare for an irrigated and barrier-sealed plantation (against wild boars) can cost up to €10,000.

Considering the level of initial investment and the maturity delay, farmers who have not taken care of both soil conditions and seedling conditions are at high risk of failure. White Truffles Mushroom