Good evening, welcome to my restaurant.
I’ll be your server tonight—do you have any questions about the menu?
Oh, you wanna know where the truffles come from?
I see you’ve heard about our specials.
This is the stinky little fungus we’re gonna shave over your stock footage pasta, and he’s
a miracle of logistics: proof that human beings can always find a way to get something from
point A to point B… for the right price.
A day and a half ago, Tom the White Truffle was about a forearm deep under some forest
in Italy, and now—thanks to a complex system involving many people, dogs, and federal agencies—it’s
on your plate in New York City.
Is it worth it?
That’s not for me to say.
But it’s logistics, and that’s very “for me to say.”
So what are these things?
Basically, mushrooms, but tastier, and with a bunch of added logistical problems.
The first being that unlike other mushrooms, you can’t just farm them by spreading spores
on some dead stuff.
Truffles develop in symbiosis with living trees, doing a botanical version of the post-trick-or-treating
candy swap where instead of going Kit-Kats for Reese’s, they trade nitrogen for glucose.
They form on the roots of oak, beech, poplar and other hardwood trees… sometimes.
Whether they show up depends on a bunch of stuff, like soil pH and rainfall, both of
which need to be high for there to be a chance at truffle formation, but it’s still not
a guarantee.
So different species range from “difficult” to commercially cultivate up to, in the case
of the white truffle, “never been done.”
That means if you want a taste of Tom Truffle, you gotta find him in the wild.
Which is tough, because unlike other mushrooms, truffles grow underground: one of the hardest
places to find stuff.
Don’t believe me?
Ask the body I hid in Acadia.
For a while, people trained pigs to sniff out truffles, but while the pigs excelled
at finding them, they also excelled at eating them, which kinda defeated the whole purpose.
Nowadays, the standard is dogs, who you can train to smell a truffle from 100 feet or
30 meters away, but who would rather eat the treat you give them than the truffle itself.
These dogs are worth thousands of dollars each, not that most truffle hunters would
consider selling a good one... some, however, would poison or kidnap the competition’s
if it would even the playing field.
When a truffle dog finds Tom Truffle, its owner will dig him up with either this thing
or their bare hands—anything else risks damaging his little truffle self.
So now Tom’s out of the ground and the clock is ticking.
Truffles are 72% water, and they lose 5% of their body mass per day to evaporation.
And don’t try fighting this by storing them in a moist environment, they’ll rot.
Even with the best possible storage, Tom’ll lose half of his distinct white-truffly scent
in five days, and he’ll be totally rotten in seven to ten.
So if you wanna sell him to some fancy-pants in New York, it’s time to get a move on.
Tom grew in this part of Italy—that’s where Italian white truffles come from.
But that’s assuming he actually is an Italian white truffle, which is a big assumption.
See, despite what the streets say, white truffles also grow perfectly well in all these places,
but people are less enchanted by the Balkans than Italy, so loads of white truffles from,
say, Serbia get sold as Italian ones every season which, sure, is fraud, but more importantly:
who cares?
It’s the same product, people just need to learn to romanticize Serbia.
So we’ll go ahead and say Tom’s from “outside Alba,” even if it’s this far outside.
The truffle hunter who dug him up will then sell him and any other truffs he spotted that
day to a broker, one of a handful of companies that stock up from hundreds or thousands of
hunters and then sell directly to restaurants.
Tom gets sold to a broker in New York, so he’s on an overnight flight to JFK.
In the morning, someone from the company is waiting at Air Cargo to pick him up because
going through delivery middlemen would add unnecessary time and increase rot risk.
Also, our truffle distributor is just a really nice friend.
Before he’s released to the broker, Tom undergoes inspection from four different agencies:
the FDA, the USDA, Customs, and Homeland Security.
Any one of them can throw him out, along with every other truffle in his box, if they see
something that could threaten American safety—like an invasive bug, a non-invasive bug that looks
like an invasive bug, too much foreign dirt, or a full-on bomb.
If that happens, it’s all to the trash and the broker is out a bunch of money.
But lucky for us, Tom passes with flying colors and now it’s into the broker’s van and
off to my restaurant, where I buy him out of the trunk for some exorbitant amount of
money.
And I do mean exorbitant: from September to December, when they’re growing, white truffles
fetch as much as four thousand dollars a pound, or eighteen hundred dollars a kilo.
So I hand the broker a stack of cash, and Tom’s mine.
I wrap my golden stinkball in a dry paper towel, put him in a sealed container, and
pop him in the fridge to ensure he survives to dinnertime.
And once dinnertime comes around, I’ll shave about 5 grams of him onto your pasta—an
amount as heavy as a nickel but for which I paid about 44 dollars.
Was it worth it?
Absolutely, if I can get you to throw me 97 Washos for the musky scent of luxury.
Because the world of truffles is a world of big money.
I’m talking $400 for an ounce if you want to order one for yourself.
I’m talking $10k for a 1.2 kilogram winter black truffle… sorry, let me be more specific:
$10k for an NFT of a 1.2 kilogram winter black truffle.
I’m talking $61k at Sotheby’s for this giant white truffle that, according to this
book I made my writer read for this video, rotted before it got to its buyer.
So, after all that, is it worth it?
No.
Or, at least that’s what I told said writer when she asked to expense a Michelin-star
meal to the company card.
Nice try though!
Here’s the thing: You don’t need a thousand-dollar fungus from the Serbian lowlands to have a
fantastic meal.
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