Truffles: Underground Treasures

Published Apr 27, 2021, 9:00 AM

Truffles are rare, expensive and apparently delicious. Learn all about these earthy fungi today.

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Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and we're the Gastro Boys. This is stuff you should know. That's probably a podcast the Gastro Boys. Oh Man, Chuck, it's like we share our mind sometime. Yeah, that's exactly. Have you ever eaten truffles? Uh? Sure, I had some popcorn once with truffles and parmesan cheese. I'm sure it was real truffle. I was trying to think if I had, and I think, I mean I didn't. I'm a dummy because I didn't even know if you're like, yeah, i've had truffle oil. I know what it tastes like. Spoiler alert, that's not made from real truffles, right, it would be so expensive you could never do that. So I thought I had had truffle through that. But then I think I remember at a staple house here in Atlanta. I think one of the things on their tasting menu had truffle shaved truffle on it, but like it wasn't like an extra hundred dollars to cover your pizza. It was like a the tiniest little shaving on top of amuse boush type of thing, right, which is apparently the way that you're supposed to eat it, like you're supposed to eat it with a very yeah, very simple dish where the truffle is this star and just sit there and cry, maybe take your clothes off so you can get the full experience, okay and um, and not leave your house for three days afterward, at least according to all of the people who have ever been interviewed about truffles, meaning foodies who talk about this kind of stuff and use words like celestial and life changing and things like that when it comes to talking about truffles, So that is, you know, the truffles are one of the finer things in life. And another thing that I'd never had either here at my rip oled age was caviare until a listener recently who runs the California Caviare company sent some caviare and I had gone my whole life without trying it, and I didn't know what to expect. I had no idea what it would taste like. It was awesome. I get it now, It's really good. It's like I was. I was calling it ocean butter. That's kind of what it reminded me of. It's, you know, briny, but just buttery, and like it tastes like a rich person's food. And I totally got it. After I had someone was like, this is really good and I get it now. Um. I also want to shout out a couple of people, since you're talking about the finer things and people who've sent stuff in. Um uh, all one more time, we should shout out toad over it down East day Boats dot Com for the scallops, amazing scallops. Um our buddy Addison Rex, who's um Jurassic Wines. He likes to send those once in a while and they're amazing too. Yeah, he's here. I think I've talked about him before. He has the company Wine Spies, which is a really kind of a unique take on a wine club membership. And I am constantly buying wines and adding them to my little locker and then once you get twelve bottles in your locker, you get it shipped all at once. Yeah. He's just a cool dude all around too. He's awesome. And then, lastly, do you remember we talked about in the Groundhog Day episode. Um uh, pig whistle, No, whistle pig. Yes, yes, pig whistle. I'm so dumb. Um. Whistle pig makes rye. And they heard us talking about them, or somebody told them we talked about them, and they sent us like a whole bunch of rye, like really really good rye. And I'm here to tell you whistle pig is really good stuff. I have to say after now having experienced the firsthand, I haven't been in the office and forever is there whistle pig on my desk? Yes? Two bottles? Remember, I don't remember. It was a while ago. Yeah, it's still it should be still there. If not, we got problems. Yeah, boy, we need to look at the security team. But we're talking truffles and we're not talking chocolate truffles. Uh. I didn't even look this up, but I assume their name so because they kind of look like truffles, right, That's what I gathered as well. They're kind of um that coded in like a cocoa dust like spores a little bit. And yeah, they're they're bumpy and just kind of ugly. They do kind of resemble black truffles in a lot of ways. Let me ask you this, Did you read the Atlantic article? Uh? No, I did not. Actually, well it's I skimmed it and I'm gonna read it in full later. There's this writer, his name is Ryan Jacobs, who wrote an article in the Atlantic. He was he was basically on a mushroom story about Porcini mushroom foragers in Germany and people that weren't you know, sort of an not an illegal trade, but they were foraging where they shouldn't be. One of them ran over a forestry guard with a car and they got away with it. He called his friend in the UK. It was like, hey, is there a story here? And he was like, not really, he said, but if you really want a crime story, look at truffles. So this guy looked at the truffle underground truffle market and wrote this article that turned into a book called The Truffle Underground Colon, a tale of mystery, mayhem, and manipulation and the shadowy market of the world's most expensive fungus. And I kind of quickly scanned it and it is um like anything else in the world, like fine art or rare wines, anything that's sort of scarce and rare. There will be crime surrounding it, whether it's poisoning truffle dogs or blowing up someone's car, or heisting and robbing people of their truffle take, or selling fraudulent fake stuff. Selling fraudulent fake stuff I saw. One thing they would do is try and cram dirt into crevices to make them heavier. Um, trying to sell diseased like wormed out truffles and stuff like that. So, just like anything else rare and expensive, there is a dark side to it, and truffles are no exception, no note, um, and truffles are really amazing little creatures. I had no idea. Um. I mean, I figured that they were, like I think just about everybody else who never really looked into truffles that much, that they were very much like mushrooms. Um, and they are related to mushrooms only in that they are both part of the same kingdom. Fun guy. So to say like, um, truffles are related to mushrooms is basically the same thing as saying that human beings are related to starfish, because we're both part of the kingdom. That's how distantly related mushrooms and truffles are. They they they diverged at the division level, which is right under kingdom. So they're they're only related in the most basic way that something can be related, not in any kind of complex or even loose way whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest differences between mushrooms and truffles are mushrooms grow above ground and truffles, as most people know, grow underground, which is why you need to hunt. And it's called hunting. It's not technically it's not called foraging or collecting. It's called truffle hunting that you used to do with pigs because pigs, you know, don't need to be trained. They know where to go to get those truffles. Now they use dogs for a few reasons. One is because dogs don't want to eat the truffles and pigs do. So a pig finds that truffle and you gotta then you gotta get it away from that big like really quick. Dogs I want to eat those things. Dog just want to make master happy. And so you can kind of train a dog to do this and turn it into a game. And then you know, the other reason listed here was like you truffle hunt three months out of the year and then you got a pig for the other nine months, which I say is great, but other people are like, these are hundreds of pounds and dogs are better pets and easier to care right exactly. Um, the reason people use pigs in the first place, which seems kind of weird on its face, but truffles produce a um, a kind of volatile organic compound called andrew steen all or in drosten all um, and that is actually the same thing as a sex hormone scent that male pigs put out. So if you go truffle hunting, you want to take a female pig because they're actually rooting out a sex scent. Um. I guess they think that, uh, a male pig and his junk are buried just you know, between two and fifteen inches underground, and so they start rooting through the ground and end up finding truffles and then, like you said, try to eat it, so you have to wrestle it away from them. Sweet pigs, they are sweet, um. But yeah, so dogs make a lot more sense. So it's pretty rare from what I understand, to see somebody hunting with a pig these days, unless they're just like some pipster purist who also like butcher's the pig after the truffle hunt to you know, um, just out of respect man. And then um, there's another thing you can do. If you're like, well, I can't afford a pig, or I can't afford a dog because I've never found a truffle and sold one. I'm saving up um. You can get yourself just a little a little um. There's a kind of truffle spade called a sapin you can dig them up with. And there's actually other natural signs that you can look for um when you look for truffle um. One is the su Wilia fly, which likes to plant um itself. It's burrows just above truffles, so you see this specific kind of fly. If you learn to identify that fly, you can remind yep. And then also there's something called the brew ley like cranbrew lay, but it means burned in French. And it's a dark patch of earth um around the base of the tree where the truffles growing. And we'll talk about why they grow there in a second, but this dark patch of earth is actually basically antibiotics that um the truffle itself or the fun guy that the truffle grows from puts out two poison the ground above it, because it doesn't do very well if there's a lot of vegetation growing around it. It does really well growing around among the roots of trees. It doesn't like a very clear or it doesn't like a very thick under underbrush. It likes it to be nice and clear and airy. So it kills off any potential seeds or or um weeds or grass or anything that might be growing right above it. And then amazing, So the truffle says, I shall scorch the earth above me. Exactly, yes, exactly, that's amazing. So you see those signs, you probably have a truffle down there. So you don't need a dog or a pig. You just need to be good at that. Yeah, true hipster, the kind of the pointy chin beard. They just look for truffles by hunting for brulet. All right, well, let's take a break. That's a good setup. Our hipster is still a thing. I don't know. I haven't been out of my house in a year or so, so I can't tell if they're still around or not. Maybe they all went away during the pandemic. They were they rethought their lives, and they're gonna come out as sincere, non ironic humans. All right, which is what we're gonna do. We're gonna take a break and come back as that right after this. All right. So, truffles are these underground things that you eat. I don't even think we said that. We did. We talked about eating truffles at the beginning. I guess now I'm all paranoid that we're not explaining things soon enough. Why because the foodies are listening. Well, because people are like, you've waited fifteen minutes before you even said what X was. I think those people are joking. They're making fun of our paranoia. Yeah, that's how I've been taking it and thirteen years and it really doesn't matter, right, No, not at all, as long as people are still listening, we're doing okay. Truffles are these things that are very rare, They're hard to find, they're hard to get, they're very expensive, which we'll get to. Uh. And there are many different kinds. There are thousands of varieties of truffle. But if you're talking on a macro level, sort of the basics of truffles that you would hunt and eat you've got black truffles and white truffles and burgundy truffles and then some other you know, lesser known truffles. But you really want to talk about black and white truffles as the two leading truffles that you're gonna find on a plate if you have a lot of money, right, and if if they're um, you're actually specifically talking about the black French truffle um, the tuber milani sporum um from Paragore, France, southwest France. Um. And then that's so that's like the prized black truffle. The prized white truffle, which is actually even rarer and even more expensive than the Paregord truffle um is the tuber magnantum pico, the albo truffle from the Piedmont area of Italy. And then, like you said, the burgundy one, right, the black ones. If you if you look at it, it's sort of like a lumpy um. It sort of looks like has the texture of like a leechy, but it's not colorful. It's black and it's sort of lumpy, and it looks like a clump of dirt. Maybe some people say it looks like poop um. If you if you slice it open, it looks like it's very has that dense marbl ing like a really nice cut of beef might have, Yeah, like wye goo beef. Yeah, which is just amazing to see. If have you ever seen that stuff? For all the beef, for the truffle the beef. I've seen both, yes, okay, yeah, so why do you even ask? I don't know, but they do look alike that that really really dense veiny marbling. The white truffle, on the other hand, it looks sort of like a little you know, you know, the little round white potatoes. It looks like those, not like a baker potato, but it looks sort of like a white potato. Yeah, like Yukon gold, but white. Sure. I like the Yukon gold. Those are good. They're both pungent in the in The odor apparently, is really hard to describe. I've seen so many different creative, kind of fun and goofy ways to describe the aroma of a truffle um. I've heard a lot of people say they're stinky. Some people say like locker room like funky earthy, Yeah, funky and earthy. It's almost as much fun as describing what a theorem in sounds like exactly. I think burgundy truffles are a little more aromatic. But you know there, it's a very unique smell, and I think they're they're kind of stinky, supposedly. Yeah. One of the reasons they're stinky is because um truffles. So the truffle you're eating is the fruiting body, just like when you eat a mushroom, like a button mushroom. That's not the fun guy. That's the fruit that grows off of the fun guy, and it has the spores and the spores spread everywhere. Um, and and truffles have have spores as well, but they're sequestered inside of it. They're not on the outside all hanging out, letting its junk hang around like some common mushroom. Um. They keep theirs inside and until marriage, and by marriage, I mean until an animal roots them up and eats them and then poops it out somewhere else. UM. So in that sense, they're they're different from mushrooms as well, but they have that funky smell because on the outside, when they're in the dirt, they're actually colonized by all sorts of bacteria. And yeast and all sorts of weird little things that helped create the symbiotic relationship that the fun guy uh has with the tree roots that it grows within. So yeah, you mentioned trees. Uh, this is really interesting. Like I never I didn't know much about truffles at all, and my whole thought was like, why are these things so rare? Like why can't people just plant truffles like any other vegetable you might grow? And the reason why is is you can't. Really there is a process, but it's not like planting any other plant, I think, And they've been doing it for thirty five years in the United States at failure rate. So it's really hard to uh to grow. And I don't even know if that's the right word. Yeah, just kind of um yeah, because they're they're like there're a miracle of nature in a certain way. They're they're a micro riz a, which means that they're a fun guy that has a symbiotic relationship with the tree that they grow at. Right, and usually in Europe usually find them growing around the roots of um oak trees or hazel trees. Um in the US they grow at the base of pecan trees and then oak trees here to um in Oregon, they grow at the base of Douglas fir trees. So like certain species of um of truffles row like at certain the basis of certain trees, because they have these relationships where the truffle or the micro riza, the fung the fungus that gives rise to the truffle that we eat um, it has its own symbiotic relationship with a bunch of bacteria and yeast. Like I said that it colonized it and those things take nutrients from the soil, like nitrates and phosphates and convert them into nitrogen and phosphorus, which is usable for the tree. So the trees growing around all these different forms of nitrogen and fosters, but it can't do anything with it. This micro riz a, this fung gui converts it into usable form for the tree and pumps it into the tree's roots, feeds the tree nutrients and in exchange, the tree says, here has some carbohydrates, I'll trade you, and the microiza the fungi says, thank you very much. Yeah. So if you're gonna try and uh cultivate, I guess that's the word I'm looking for a truffle, is you inject a special uh these special fungi spores into this oak or this hazel nut tree when they're just little seedlings, and then you plant that tree and then cross your fingers basically that that tree is going to grow up and be healthy, because that's the first step. You gotta have a tree that works, and then that those truffles are gonna attach to those tree roots underground. And you can't you know, I imagine it's frustrating in that you can't look at your harvest and just see it growing on top of the ground. You just have to have a lot of patients because I think it takes uh like four years on average for this to work out to where you're yielding a truffle two percent of the time. In the United States, Um, we're trying here. It's just you know, apparently we have the right climate like on the West coast where you were talking about some mid Atlantic states Carolina's, Virginia's, southern Kentucky, northern Alabama, and I think New Mexico and Arizona are only where it's possible to get failure rate right. And we should say this is where they're trying to grow like paragore truffles or alba truffles, like the really highly prized one. The United States has its own indigenous truffles. There's something like four thousand or five thousand species of truffles. It was just right, their garbage truffles. It's just that there's like three species that are genuinely prized and that can go for like a thousand dollars a pound, depending on how bad or good the harvest was that year. UM. But the United States has indigenous ones, like there's the Oregon truffle, which grows to the base of Douglas first. There's Pecan truffles, which grow basically everywhere from Florida up to Nova Scotia UM west of the Rocky or east of the Rockies uh in North America. UM. And there's a couple of other kinds to from what I saw. James Beard, the revered UM chef and food guy, UH, he said that you could substitute um a Oregon truffle for a white alba truffle and it would do. Yeah, if he signed off on it. That means it's definitely okay. Well, they're not cheap either, I mean, I think these American varieties can go for like a hundred bucks a pound, which is a lot of money for a pound of something. Um, but it's not like you know, we'll get to the crazy prices at these auctions later on. But it's nothing like European mushroom around European truffles, uh, namely Italian and French. Like you said, I think Spain is the largest producer of truffles. Then you have UK, Australia, Chile, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and then China apparently is uh really involved in the truffle market and kind of undercutting price wise. Right. Yes, um, I actually saw that Australia is killing it in the truffle cultivating game. Yeah, they started in and that was when they first inoculated their saplings. I also saw another way to do it, chuck, is even easier. You just take a bunch of truffle puade up, dip the oak sapling roots into this puree and just grow those injections. No injection necessary. I'm sure the oak prefers that way too. It's just a little baby, um. But they the Australia's got their first harvest and they are growing paragore truffles, which paragore truffles are less rare, maybe because of Australia than the white alba truffles from the Piedmont of Italy and Croatia. Um and the alba truffles are far more expensive. But a lot of people prefer the paragore black truffle from France. Just taste um in general that a lot of people prefer the black truffle. So that's the one that the Australians are growing, and they now rival in the harvest by weight what France every year and they're good, Yes, there, it's the same thing. It's that truffle and they're supposedly amazing. Well, I'm sure there are some people that the French would probably say, no, no, no, the tera war is not the same, of course, you know, that's exactly what they would say. In the Australians would say, forget that mate. How is that Australia truffle season is short? Depending on the truffle, I mean, they're all short seasons. But you're gonna get your white and burgundies from September to December and then winter blacks from December to March. Being kit these in February and March, and then summer black and white truffles from May to August. And the reason why we are mentioning just when truffle season comes around is because truffles, they do freeze them and they do can them, but it's not the same. You want to eat a truffle within four to six days after you take it out of the ground. Yeah. This this the truffle market is one of those rare ones where there is a lot of hype and there's a lot of like Fraser and Niles Crane types running around buying this stuff up and caring about it and talking about it to their friends and all that. But it's not in it's not a bloated market in that respect, like it is genuinely scarce in supply, and in the United States it's even scarcer because, like you said, we've got a failure rate and growing them here ourselves, and they have such a short shelf life ten days tops if you're doing everything right and storing them, um that to get them here in the US in any kind of quick way from a place where they're already scarce, where they're growing over like in say Europe, Uh, you can understand. It actually makes sense why they're so ridiculously expensive. Yeah, and you know, I went online today because I was like, can you even buy truffles online? Not right now? I mean, yeah, yeah, they're just all out of stock right. Well, No, I found some that were in a jar. Uh, and it's it's not like the whole ruffle, it's just a piece of a truffle. And the price I found for the black French one was uh on this one website was a hundred bucks for point eight ounces. Okay, so less than announced was a hundred bucks. So I saw some some they were all out of stock, but some like gourmet sites, um said they can get them and they're more like, um, like forty eight dollars announce for for like the small size, medium sized. And I looked, I was like, is that is that right? And that seemed kind of in line with it. But you also see like crazy prices all over the place, like all these things are, you know, two thousand dollars a pound, or four thousand dollars a pound, or seven thousand dollars a pound. Those typically are the white Alba truffles and the black paragorre truffles are maybe a quarter of that, but it all depends on how the harvest was that year. And apparently the harvest has been going down, which is another reason that so expensive has been going down Italy for the last century or so. Well. Climate change, that's a big one apparently. Do you remember when I said that truffles like to grow in um light airy regions. Even though they grow underground, they like the above ground to be a certain way. They're real high maintenance in that sense and controlling. Um that there's so many people have moved from the Paraguay region or the Pibon of Italy into the cities. And since like the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties when they really started harvesting these for the international market. Um that these areas have become kind of unkempt and grown over, and that, in addition to climate change is affecting the yields like dramatically. I think there was something. Um, do you have the statistics for the yields between the nineteenth century and today? Chuck, get ready for your socks to be knocked off? Are they on right now? They're on? I just put on so you could knock them off. So in eighteen ninety a total harvest and I'm not quite sure maybe this was all commercial truffles, but there was a total of tons that were harvested in eighteen nine around the world. That's still pretty scarce if you think about it. For an annual harvest globally in it was down to three hundred tons from undred tons. These days it can be anywhere from twenty five tons to a hundred and fifty tons a year. That is scarce, and that's why they cost this kind of money. It's um and like you said, it's not an artificial market. Uh, there's there's one that sold at auction, a four point one six pound white truffle for sixty dollars. Yeah. It doesn't make sense to me because it's like, well, it's just a big giant truffle that seems way more than it would be if you bought that same amount, just the same weight, but in multiple truffles. It just seemed really I don't know if somebody's like, I don't want the world's biggest truffle kind of I think it like where they bidding using like a giant foam number one hand? Is that kind of guy? Maybe he paid he paid a million dollars for that foam, the largest foam rubber number one. It's right use. One of the things I was seeing also about climate change affecting truffles is that so truffles like it we they like it somewhat cool, and they like it kempt, and like I said, the regions that they normally grow are getting unkempt, and they're getting hotter, and they're getting drier, like climate change is bringing more extreme weather like droughts kind of thing, and they're also bringing hotter weather weather two regions like the southwest of France or the Piedmont of Spain or Italy. I'm sorry, um that where where it didn't used to be that hot back in like say, when you're getting like tons annually. So all of these combined on top of the idea that even under the best of circumstances, the normal life cycle for a particular micro riz, a that produces truffles that you you want, like an alba or paragore, maybe produces truffles for fifteen to thirty years in the wild, and then after that it says good night forever. And the French and the Spanish and a lot of the traditionalists in Europe say, well, then that's that we just need to move on and find another tree. Well, they're finding that they're they're not growing under other trees, and so there's kind of this pushed to start inoculating trees there in Spain and in the southwest of France, and Europe has long been pushing back on the idea of kind of introducing man's hand to this human kind's hand, I should say, and I think they're starting to kind of rethink that kind of thing these days. Should we take another break? Sure? All right, we'll take another break and we'll talk a little bit more about the flavor in the trade and what these things are even used for. Right after this. Alright, so the truffle trade, like we said, check out that Atlantic article. I'm gonna read it closer after this because it's just really interesting. Uh, there is a dark side of course to this trade. Um. They're people poison each other's dogs. It's awful. Um. The guy who wrote that article said that he, you know, anecdotally, talked to different veterinarians, said that they've got two or three a week dogs being poisoned, and there were a lot of vets in the area that we're saying the same thing. So that's horrific on its surface. Um slashing tires of course, robberies, heists. Uh. Fake truffle while not fake, but just inflated truffles with the weight like we were talking about. And you might like hear all this and just be like why, Like, I know they're rare, but is this caviare to chuck? Is it this thing that is so delicious that you must have it? And you know, I don't know because I've never had it. I do like the taste of truffle oil, and this this fake truffle. I think in the seventies, uh, an Italian chemist isolated one of the flavor producing compounds and recreated it, so we do have the asynthetic truffley taste. But apparently that's like they isolated one of these compounds that is not what a real truffle tastes like. Is what people say that have had real trouffles. No, it's like so complicated and complex because again some at least some of the smells and tastes that are coming off of the truffle you're eating are coming from the colonizing bacteria and yeasts that are growing all over it too, and as they're exposed to air, they start to kind of eye off and that's where the smell in the odor goes, at least in part. So, to to just kind of nail one particular flavor compound and say that's truffle flavor. I think it's two four die thiah pentane. Yeah. Um, just to say that that's thank you, Just to say that that's truffle flavor not only misses all of the nuance of truffles, apparently I'm speaking from just somebody who's only been exposed to two for die thiah pentane pretty much. Um. But then also if you eat enough of that, if you eat too much truffle popcorn with parmesan shavings at the nice movie theater in town, um, you are going to kind of, um desensitize yourself to actual truffles. So if you actually say I'm gonna get some truffles this season and try it, uh, it might be lost on you because you're just used to that kind of the clunkiest version of the truffle flavor. I'm taking that risk, I guess. I mean it is good like truffle. Truffle will flavor at anything is pretty great. I like it it. Um. It is even hard to describe with just that one compound. It's hard to kind of you know, it's sort of a new mommy richness. Uh it is earthy. I like the flavor, and I'm not going to be, you know, eating many real truffles in my life if any. So, I'm not really worried about ruining my my trouble ballot. Uh So, I'm happy to have that stuff. It's fine, sure for this guy. It's truffles for the rest of us, that's right. So if you do come upon some truffles that you want to um that, if you just say, Okay, I've got a hundred bucks, I'm gonna spend on truffles, I'm just gonna do it. Um. Uncle Joe Biden sent me a check and I'm gonna use a hundred dollars of it on truffles. I'm gonna healthy, I'm gonna stimulate the economy and trickle down. Um. So what would you do, Chuck, What's what's your first move? Well, you want them within five to six days after they've been harvested. You want to keep them in a closed container, wrapped in a paper towel, because you really want to keep them dry. Wet truffle is no good, despite the fact that they love wetness to grow. You want to keep that thing dry if you want to get a little more bang for your buck and not actually use any of the truffle, but in part that flavor. You want to douse it in two four, store it in a in a clothes like glass tupperware. It's not tupperware if it's glass, but you know what I mean, glass dish with some cheese, open cheese, or even eggs that have not you know, just eggs in their shell, and it will actually somehow by way of magic. The cheese makes sense, but it will actually penetrate that egg and flavor that egg somehow in that nuts that is nuts. That's how potent those things smell. That they actually make it through eggs shells inside and then just um inculcates them. But like you said, you want to keep it simple. I mean, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say bland, but they say like shaving truffle on a very simple risotto dish or just plain parmesan scrambled eggs, plain parmesan Pasta pizza is a big one, like a you know, just sort of a cheese pizza, like a really nice one. Would fire pizza with shaved truffle on top is supposed to be great. Yeah, that's the thing. You don't have to do anything with it. You just shave it raw. You don't have to cook it. It's not like some hard thing to to use. You just you shave it onto something and let it shine. Apparently the ancient Romans used to cook it and eat it with honey, but they also thought that truffles were created when lightning struck damp earth, So don't put a lot of stock into their thoughts, Like, just use it, you know, shaved fresh truffles onto a very nice dish. Yeah, and you know, if you want to go to a nice steakhouse and get truffle butter on your steak, it's not gonna be real truffle. But who cares? I no, no, I could see Kevin Rath when using real truffle. Do you think? How about this? If you are getting that steak and it's outside of truffle season, it's not real truffle. But if you know when truffle season is right. So say you're going between um November and the end of March to a really nice steakhouse, it's possible that they are using real truffles that night. Yeah, and it's shaved super super thin, like when you see it on a on a food item. It's you know they have these razor sharp well I guess they're razors. And it always reminds me of of Good Fellas. I cannot think of of shaving something with a razor blade and not think of the scene and Good Fellas in prison where Polly had his technique where he would shave it so thin it would it would what would you say? It would liquefy in the fan. It's so great, man. I love that part when they were in prison and just like living high on the hog yep um have Do you ever eat roasted garlic like on toast? Not on toast, but a roast gar like plenty? Sure, but yeah, just like spread it on toast? About that? Just take a whole bulb, spread it on some toast and thank me later. It's really good for your guts. You know what I've been doing lately is the I don't know why I didn't know it existed. Everything bagel is my favorite bagel, and they make everything bagel shakers Trader Joe's. Uh no, but I'm sure that's good too, but just at a regular store. And uh so I just keep that. I put that on a lot of stuff, like, uh, just avocado toast with that that stuff. My buddy Eddie trened me onto that was shaking that stuff on some avocado toast. Mm hmm. I know. Yeah. You can put it on just chunks of avocado and it sounds it tastes very good too. You can put it on anything. Let's be honest. Do you can put it on an old shoe? What else you got? I got nothing else. That's it I want to eat. I want to eat a real truffle. Uh. If you eat a real truffle, it'll probably taste so good it'll make you do a truffle shuffle. All right, very nice? Uh Well, since I said truffle shuffle, everybody, I think it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this Titanic role play. Did you see this one? No? This is really neat and this is not kicky. No, No, I mean it didn't even cross my mind. Just the just on its face, it's hilarious. Okay, hey guys, my name is Anica and I've been listening since about really love learning from you guys and listening to your episodes. Uh. Last year, during beginning of quarantine, many of my family members, including myself. We're quarantining at my mom's house and is you and everyone else knows, we hit a point in our house where everyone got a little loopy. I'm not really sure how it got started, but we decided to have a Titanic party on the anniversary of the ship sinking. Everyone was assigned a real passenger crew member on the Titanic and had to act out the part for the evening, including dressing up. Even dogs got parts two. By the way, send in pictures of them dressed up with their animals dressed up, and it was pretty great. We had a meal based off one of the menus recovered from the ship, and we had to eat in certain areas according to our class. Wow, this is so great. After dinner, we read a short memorial and with my friends, uh, my friend playing Nearer my God to Thee on the cello, took a and this was all in video. It's fantastic. Took a five minute plunge in the freezing pool to commemorate the sinking. Uh. Then to finish out the night, we round we found out if our passenger crew member had lived or died, and then watched the movie from I want to go to this party? Man? Yeah, how much fun is that? It's pretty cool? Your episode was more than perfect because we decided to make this an annual party. Oh, there you go, and they held it a few weekends ago. Well, Anka, send me the invite. I don't know where you live, but your family looks awesome and I want to go to that thing. Yeah, totally. I can't find that listener mail anywhere. I want to see these pictures, but right I'll try and find it. Incent it to you. Her name was Anica. Maybe you could search that way, Anica. That was an amazing listener mail and we appreciate it. Um, that does sound like a lot of fun. We need to go on the cowboy weekend with the black cowboy who wrote in and then go to the Titanic role play party, and then in between we'll like maybe cross the country and marry a few couples officiate at some weddings. That sounds great. I just found the email and sent it to you, and I'm looking at picture. That dog dressed up gets me every time. It's going to be the summer of stuff you should not chuck it. I still don't have a chuck. I don't know what's going on. Oh there it is. Uh. Do you have anything else to talk about while I look at these? No, let's just sign off. Okay, Um, well, since we're signing off, everybody, if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email like Anka did, Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuff pot cast at I Heart Radio doc Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD,  
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