The €105m truffle

[Jon Tseng]

Yeah, and before you yell, it's a typo. They mistranslated "thousand" in the local reports as "million"...

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/more-than-a-mere-truffle-2134221.html

More than a mere truffle

Monday, 15 November 2010

A huge white truffle is presen annual truffle auction in Alba, More than a mere truffle A huge white truffle is presented to potential buyers during the annual truffle auction in Alba, northern Italy. The 900-gram truffle was sold for €105m (£89m) to a Hong Kong buyer. The Piemonte region in northern Italy is reputed to grow the world's best white truffles –which connoisseurs describe as having aromas of garlic, hay, wet earth, honey, mushroom and spices.

[JudyB]

They seem to have corrected the online version now, after a comment from "Jonathan" about their error...

[MarkIsCooking]

I was Eataly NYC a week or so ago and they had several white and black truffles in the case, each one individually priced. There was a nice-sized, white truffle with a price tag of over $700. How long will these keep in the case (or go bad) if not purchased. Anyone know?

[ChrisTaylor]

Depends a bit on the storage conditions but I'd imagine they'd be a bit sad after maybe a week in the fridge.

[MaxH]

... The 900-gram truffle was sold for €105m (£89m) to a Hong Kong buyer. The Piemonte region in northern Italy is reputed to grow the world's best white truffles –which connoisseurs describe as having aromas of garlic, hay, wet earth, honey, mushroom and spices.

I can enthusiastically support that accolade as leading source of quality white truffles (partly reflecting the species, Tuber magnatum pico here -- central to truffle quality). Some experts writing in the food literatures of the last two centuries go further, describing the best white truffles from there as surpassing the best black truffles (T. melanosporum) which however are more abundant (and take to cooking, unlike the Piemontese whites, so are usually used differently). I'd have skipped those last aromatic comparisons because they're absurd: truffles are unique, and smell like truffles -- as for instance garlic is unique, and its aroma can't be evoked in words to someone who hasn't smelled it. Imagine that garlic were suddenly 1000 times as expensive, and you have the situation of classic truffles.

This picture, which was clear and widely understood (and supplemented by interesting comparisons of other truffle species and regions) until recently, is lately clouded because prices make traditional species inaccessible to most cooks (which was not always true). That has opened marketing opportunities for secondary or "minor" truffle species and new geographical sources. Some sellers of these secondary truffles (much less expensive, generally also much less flavorful or aromatic) have aggressively promoted them and occasionally taken pains (I have specific examples) to mislead naïve consumers into assuming that they're the same white or black "truffles" cited in 99.8% of the Western cooking writing that mentions truffles. They're not; that's sleazy fraud, preventable by consumer self-education; but some of the new truffles are good when approached on their own merits, rather than as fake classic truffles.

Five years ago I put a brief broad truffle tutorial (including some history, botany, species examples, and why prices rose so much -- lots of info that mainstream journalists never seem to mention) on several food and wine Web sites, which apparently didn't include this one, but some of today's "truffle hustles" have appeared here in other threads, search under "truffle" for more.

That journalists and editors and some readers might initially believe an erroneous price in the millions reflects how out-of-sight these underground mushrooms have unfortunately become. Even the corrected price bespeaks novelty or status-symbol appeal. The Romanée-Conti syndrome.