Savory Ingredient Spotlight: The Truffle

Savory Tv will always be dedicated to recipes, although our goal is to help you learn about delicious ingredients as well. Savory ingredient spotlights will focus on the origins and history of gourmet foods found in nature, so that you can prepare meals including these ingredients with knowledge and complete confidence.

We are thrilled to honor the delicious truffle in our first ingredient spotlight post.

Known as “the diamond of the kitchen”, the truffle is a highly coveted and sought after gem. They are a subterranean fungi known as a tuber. Because they are difficult to cultivate and are found underground, they are often hunted for with specially trained dogs, and occasionally female pigs. The scent of the truffle has is know to have a compound that is similar to the male pig pheromone’s, hence the female pig attraction. Because pigs tend to eat the truffles, the dogs are a more favored choice.

The highly prized nature of the truffle and labor intensive hunting has driven truffle prices into the sky. The most expensive known truffle sale to date has been the sale of 3.3 lb white truffle found near Pisa in Tuscany, Italy, which sold at auction to a Macau casino owner for $330,000. Another impressive sale involved a 2lb and 10oz Italian white alba truffle, which sold for 95,000 Euros (approximately $140,000) in 2005.

In this video, Australian celebrity chef Benjamin Christie hunts for black truffles with dogs at a truffle farm outside of Camberra, and they find a few diamonds!

Visit Chef Benjamin and watch more of his videos here.

Looking for recipes including truffles or truffle oil? Here are several:

Truffled Egg Toast with Fontina Cheese from Inoteca restaurant in NYC
Truffled Macaroni and Cheese from NYC Chef Patrick Vaccariello
The World’s Most Expensive Grilled Cheese from Gilt Restaurant in the Palace Hotel NYC