Our First Truffling Adventure!

Weeks and weeks ago some of Aaron's friends invited us to go truffle hunting in Turner. The weather today was absolutely beautiful for a change. A man owns an 14 acres and let 30 mycophiles have free range of his property. It turns out it was unusually good truffling today. Here I am with my first truffle, it's actually a pretty big one.

It was so exciting to be digging along and have one pop out! I got a little obsessed, but I wasn't the only one. I can only imagine that all sorts of pleasure hormones were going off in my brain each time that I found one. Here's Aaron hunting:


My classmate Leah came along and also had a blast. Here we all are dirty with our bounty.


We gathered 1.25 pounds. Over $200 worth. Apparently what happened today is not normal, we were not only finding a ton, but really large ones as well. I found the largest one out of all of us, it is at the top. It had a few nibbles on the other side. You actually find them by looking for areas that voles have dug up. When you find one near a tree, you know there are usually more.



I carefully scrubbed them all with a new toothbrush. This was very tedious, especially with the small ones.


Here they are all clean. I laid them out on a towel to let them dry. We packaged some up for neighbors and put the rest in the fridge with paper towels.


They are famous for their aroma. I wish I could begin to describe it for those who are not familiar. Earthy, musty, spicy, fungal, but there is also a strange chemical element. I heard it described as similar to gasoline by one person and benzene by another. One woman today had some ready to ship to another state and the package was returned to her with a hazardous material sticker on it because the people at the post office thought there was something dangerous inside.
We plan to make:
infused butter
infused oil
truffle butter (truffles grated into butter, you have to freeze it if you do this or it will spoil quickly)

And also to put it on everything we can think of for a while. We had some on buttered toast tonight, it was really very good. Next time we go to my parents house we are going to see if they have any on their property.