Also please see Mushrooms & Truffles articles submitted by our visitors.
Truffle is a kind of wild mushrooms symbiotic with certain species of
trees, mostly oak, chestnut, hazelnut and beech. This is one of the
most expensive culinary delicacies: the price of white truffles
sometimes reaches as much as 6-10 thousand dollars per kilogram.
The
word originates from Latin word tuber (growth, expansion). Usually truffle
has round shape which is never the same, and can be of various sizes.
In color it can be black, dark brown, gray and even white. Truffles
grow in calciferous or clay soil, almost on the surface (less than 30
cm under the ground). Truffle industry of France (mostly in the
southeast and southwest of the country) was undergoing a sharp decline
in the beginning of 20 century because of deforestation, deterioration
of soil quality and use of pesticides. Before 1914 regular harvest of
truffles in the province of Perigord was 1800 tons; now no more than
200 tons is gathered in the whole France. These figures show how
impractical it became to use truffles in classical recipes. |
