|
We searched for truffles in Yahoo!, and found many vendors of the decadent chocolate candy, but it was truffles of the underground variety we were after. An advanced search on "+truffles +mushrooms" located the definitive answer at the Olympia National Park's official web site. From the moist and mushroomy Pacific Northwest comes the distinction between mushrooms and truffles: Fungi "that sprout fruiting bodies above ground are called mushrooms ... underneath the ground, we call them truffles." We hunted around for more detail and turned up Yahoo!'s Mycology category. At Dave Fischer's North American Mushroom
Basics we learned that mushrooms are not plants at all, they're the fruiting bodies of certain funguses (or fungi), members of the Fungi Kingdom, which also includes molds, mildews, rusts, smuts, and yeasts. The mushroom's purpose is to produce spores for reproduction. Some more mycological clicking around led us to an article titled "Truffles: Gold in the Soil." Here we learned that people have been enamoured of the taste and aroma of this round brown wonder for over 3,000 years. Truffles are found growing 3-12 inches deep among the roots of oaks, or sometimes under chestnut, hazel, and beech trees. Humans enlist the help of specially trained dogs or pigs to sniff out and dig up these fragrant and expensive
delicacies: the pigs are better hunters, but dogs tend to be more cooperative about relinquishing their finds. We also visited the web site of a French village in the Périgord, a region renowned for black truffles. Sainte Alvère claims to be the first village in France to put its truffle market online, so that between December and March you can direct order this seasonal delicacy via the Net. Just make sure you have several hundred dollars to spare for a pound of these "black pearls."
|
