Hillbilly Truffle "In France, they call them Périgords—and they’re known as the diamonds of the kitchen. You probably know them as black truffles, those baseball-sized fungi that are sniffed out of the earth by pigs or dogs, get sold for thousands of dollars, and transform any meal into a luxury item. So what happens when—sacrée merde!—an obsessed Yankee learns to grow them in the scrub woods of Davy Crockett’s Tennessee?"
posted by vronsky
on Nov 30, 2009 -
66 comments
Truffle Hunters "The pig is not content to wag his tail and point when he has discovered a truffle," says Peter Mayle, author of 'A Year In Provence'. "He wants to eat it. In fact, he is desperate to eat it. And you cannot reason with a pig on the brink of gastronomic ecstasy. He is not easily distracted, nor is he of a size you can fend off with one hand while you rescue the truffle. There he is, as big as a small tractor, rigid with porcine determination and refusing to be budged." Which is why Hungarians are teaching dogs to do the work -- but should they be asking a canine to do a sow's job?
posted by feelinglistless
on Apr 27, 2003 -
6 comments
An L.A. restaurateur just won a rare 2-pound mushroom in an
annual "charity truffle auction" in Santa Monica. The winner paid $35,000 for the truffle after a fierce bidding war between a New York-based restaurant owner and Gunther IV, who placed his bids through a subsidiary due to the fact that he is, in fact, a dog. The canine heir to a vast German fortune lost the auction, and the honor of placing the highest recorded bid ever for a mushroom. Go ahead, read it again. This is all, mind you,
before anyone actually got their hands on the giant 'shroom.
posted by XQUZYPHYR
on Nov 11, 2002 -
42 comments
