Recently I wrote a post about the domestic truffle industry in the US, and in my reading about the new truffle growers, I found that there is a lot of confusion about truffles. On one level you have a good portion of the country that thinks they are round candies. Yes, those are called truffles but they are not actually natural truffles — they are chocolate. Others know it as a fungus, but not much more. And even if you know there are edible truffles for cooking, the different types can be confusing too.

Well, the simplest way to understand a truffle is that it is an underground mushroom that grows attached to tree roots. It doesn’t have a stem and its spores are enclosed in a lumpy-roundish sack, but it is still very similar to a mushroom. The fungus is actually not the round truffle that cook’s use — that is the fruit of the fungus, much like the fruit on a tree. The fungus is actually the web of filaments attached to the tree roots. These filaments help collect nutrients for the tree to grow, and the tree in return provides carbohydrates to the filaments, which then become underground truffle masses. Truffles are often found along with oak trees but also with poplar, willow, Douglas-fir, and hazelnut trees among others. And the traditional areas where truffles are found are in France, Spain, and Italy. Here in the US, they are also found in Oregon.

So think of a truffle as an underground sack of spores. That sounds tasty, right? Well, there are over a hundred varieties of truffles but only a dozen or so are kitchen worthy. The reason why we love certain ones in food is because of the aroma and delicate flavor they can pass on to the food. Truffles have dozens of chemicals that create a unique and powerful aroma.

But the reason truffles smell so strongly is because they reside underground. Mushrooms living above ground can rely upon the wind to spread their spores and help them reproduce, but underground truffles need some help. That is where the smell comes in. The aroma attracts deer, raccoon, mice, squirrels and other animals so they can eat it, digest it, and then deposit those spores somewhere else through their excrement. (Yes, I said ‘excrement’ in a cooking blog.)

So the reason a truffle smells so strongly is so it can reproduce, but it needs an animal digestive tract and some little furry legs to help spread its spores.

Traditionally, female pigs have been used to hunt for truffles as the smell of some truffle varieties mimics the male pig sex hormones, but more recently dogs have been trained to locate truffles. Dogs are easier to train, feed, transport and won’t eat the prize. Truffle hunting dogs are trained by putting truffle oil on their mother’s nipples when they are young and then they progress to playing with truffle-oiled rags which will then be buried to complete the training.

But even if you are foraging in the Pacific Northwest for Oregon truffles, you can often identify where truffles are hidden without a dog. You just have to look for the places on the forest floor where mice and other animals have dug up the ground. It may be that they are looking for their truffle dinner.

So what does a truffle smell like, and why is it attractive to so many chefs? Well, most varieties don’t smell good and even those that do can be an acquired smell or taste. The aroma varies depending upon the soil, moisture, tree roots, climate, the type of fungus and a host of other factors. Common descriptors of truffles include musky, rustic, garlicky and they might compare the aroma to soil, forest floor, cheese, nuts or turnips. But truffle aroma can even vary from tree to tree within the same small area, so there is no one answer. They just smell natural.

Truffle flavor is very delicate and most of its qualities come from passing on aroma and not through taste, though the French black Périgord has better flavor and is used more in the cooking process than other types of truffles. Any truffle cooked too much will lose its flavor. The most expensive type of truffle is from Northern Italy (and Croatia) and is called the white Alba truffle. This truffle is very pungent and not meant to be cooked. Chefs will often just shave the truffle onto some risotto or mix in a dressing or sauce. These are the truffles that are in season right now, and it will cost you about $180-240 per ounce.

But the key with all truffles is that you should eat them quickly and when they are at their freshest. The aroma only become strongest when the spores are ready to release and then it fades quickly. Don’t let them sit for a week in the fridge or you may risk disappointment.

Because of the delicate nature of truffles, they are traditionally used with certain ingredients and in certain dishes. Truffle aroma actually binds well to fat molecules, and that is why you often see them mixed with butter and put into oils. You also see them a lot in egg dishes and with pasta sauces.

The famous French Chef, Eric Ripert, loves to put truffle slices on buttered country bread, warm it slightly in the oven and sprinkle with coarse salt and fresh ground black pepper. The American truffle grower, Frank Garland, chops truffles into a sour cream mixture and uses it to fill an omelet. You can see his video below from the Martha Stewart show. And on the Piedmont Valley Truffles website there is a list of very tasty sounding recipes that use truffles.

If this post inspires you to try your hand at cooking with truffles, in my next truffle article I will be listing various online sources to purchase truffles and give more information about when they are in season and the different kinds you can use in the kitchen.

For 10-15 years now the domestic truffle industry has been growing in the US. Farmers from North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, California, and Oregon are all venturing into the commercial farming of the expensive and highly-sought-after subterranean fungus.

Since the French learned in the late ’70s how to inoculate trees with spores to produce the famous black Périgord truffle, the industry has been inching forward worldwide. Spain, Australia, and New Zeland were early adapters and are ahead of the US in production, but the domestic truffle market is now finally coming online. In fact in the next few years, there will likely be a significant increase in truffle farms coming into production.

There are two main ‘truffle’ figures that have been gathering most of the attention as of late, and both are inspiring. The first is Frank Garland out of Hillsborough, NC who runs Garland Truffles. After reading about the French inoculation development in the Wall Street Journal in the 1970s, he visited France and embarked on his own process of inoculation, which remains secret under his trademark RFM process. Even the RFM acronym seems to be a secret.

Garland has been inoculating hazelnut (filbert) trees for years, and in 1992 after many years of trial and error, he became the first person to successfully grow French Périgord truffles in the Western Hemisphere. Now he has even found ways to shorten the time from seedling hazelnut tree to black fungal fruit. It used to be 6-10 years, but now he has pushed it down to 3-6 years.

Garland is secretive about his process, and even growers who buy his seedlings have to sign confidentiality agreements. A large part of his business involves inoculating hazelnut seedlings and selling them to potential truffle farmers, and to date he has sold over 150,000 seedlings. At one point 14 out of 15 commercial truffle farms in production in the US were using Garland’s seedlings, and I am sure the next batch of farms in the coming years will no doubt have similar lineage.

Garland has been featured on the Martha Stewart Show and in many publications, and Martha Stewart also did a feature on-location in North Carolina, which you can see below.

But 4.5 hours west on the border of North Carolina in Chuckey, Tennessee there is another major player in the domestic truffle industry. Tom Michaels is a true expert in every sense of the word. He received his Ph.D. studying truffles from Oregon State University which is a truffle hotbed in the US, he inoculates his own trees, owns his own farms, and sells his own truffles online.

As of late, Michaels has been garnering a lot of press, and in August 2009, the James Beard award-winning journalist Alan Richman wrote a great article on ‘Hillbilly Truffles’ in GQ magazine. It’s an entertaining and informative article that I would highly recommend.

Michaels’ company is called Tennessee Truffles, and from the website you can order his Tennessee French Périgord, but he also takes orders for Australian Périgord truffles when his are out of season. That is the nice thing about the globalization of truffles: when the northern hemisphere is out of season, the southern hemisphere is just coming into season.

This video below features Tom Michaels’ truffle operation and is taken from his website.

Tom Michaels – Tennessee Truffle from Derek Morgan on Vimeo.

There seems to be, however, a bit of a rivalry between these two great truffle growers. In Michaels’ video he mentions how his truffles were the first grown in the area, yet 4.5 hours away in 1992, the first commercially grown black French truffle was produced by Garland. And in a Salon article, Garland talked suspiciously of “the other guy” [Michaels] and even, according to the article, sent a cease-and-desist letter to him.

It is strange that a truffle revolution is happening in the US so close together, yet the two are working so separately. I guess this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Garland focuses on seedlings and spreading truffle farms, and Michaels just happens to be one of the most successful and knowledgeable producers in the country. He just may be a better force for getting truffles into restaurants and popularizing them. In fact an Italian restaurant I go to in central Minnesota will be featuring his truffles in December. I guess they each have their role in popularizing truffles in the US, and that is a good thing for us all.

Note: I will feature truffles in another post soon and will give online resources, recipes, and more information about this amazing fungus.

Well, making mozzarella cheese is both easier than I thought and harder than I thought. First of all, let me say that I failed to do what I wanted to do: make mozzarella cheese. And that is by no means my picture to the right.

Things were going well, and all looked pretty much like the photos until the whole microwaving thing at the end. The recipe I used was a quick, 30-minute mozzarella recipe from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, and in the recipe they give the option of using the microwave or a water-bath when getting the cheese all stretchy at the end. I used the microwave, and I don’t think that was a good choice.

Now with that said, I did end up with nicely broken down cheese curds that resembled a ricotta cheese, so I first gave a bowl to each of my dogs and then added fresh ground pepper and salt for me. It tasted really good, so I guess I didn’t completely fail. I just didn’t make the cheese I wanted to make, but did end up with to very happy dogs.

So what went wrong? Well, it could be many things. What I learned today is that in cheese making there are a lot of variables that can go wrong. Your milk may be too pasteurized or not fresh enough. The temp of the milk may be too high or too low. The curds might be too weak or your microwave too strong. I think these last two were my problem, and just browsing the FAQs at the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company site gives some indication of how many things can go wrong. I don’t think it is hard to make this kind of cheese, but I think it is easy to go wrong.

So for my next round, I am going to do a few things differently.

(1) Get a better thermometer. The one in the kit I bought was pretty basic and cheap, and I used another thermometer to double check the temp. At one point I had three thermometers in and they all had different readings. Not a good sign. And proximity to the bottom or edge of the pot affected the temp as well as stirring. It was a guessing game regarding the temperature of the mixture.

(2) I think my curds were too weak, so the next time I am going to read up on how to fix this.

(3) I won’t use the microwave. They say the temp is important at the end, and if it gets too hot the curds break down. On the other hand, if it is not hot enough, it won’t allow the cheese to get to the stretch stage for proper kneading. When I heated the bowl of curds in the microwave, the bottom portion of the cheese against the bowl was really hot and breaking down, yet the interior was not nearly hot enough. It’s the same problem with microwaving any food I guess, so I don’t know why I thought delicate cheese would be any different.

I guess I learned a fair amount in this process, and I am not going to give up after one mishap, but I do have mixed feelings about the cheese kit itself. In the package I received citric acid, cheese salt, rennet tablets, cheese cloth, a thermometer and an instruction book. The whole kit seemed a bit on the cheap side though.

From what I understand, instead of cheese salt you can just use non-iodized kosher salt — the key here being non-iodized. The thermometer is a waste really as you probably already have one or will end up buying a nicer one. You may have cheese cloth around too or you can easily pick it up locally. It is really just the citric acid and rennet tablets that are useful, but if you have a good health food store, you can probably find it there too. And once you factor in shipping, the kits seems less worth it yet. I even used the website recipe more than the cookbook that came with the kit.

So that is my first try at cheese making. I hope things turn out better the next time — though I am sure the dogs like it just the way it is. My failure equals their food.

On the Food & Beverage Buzz blog, I saw a post on cheese paper. Preserving cheese can be a tricky task, and it is one I have messed up more than once. But a person can now buy good cheese paper and with a little bit of wrapping instruction (below), cheese can last a lot longer. You can read the blog post for more information or go to the company website linked below. Dave the Wine Merchant tested the paper with various cheeses and found it worked very well at maintaining the quality of the cheese.

The paper is produced by a company called Formaticum out of Portland, Orgeon. It is not cheap at $9 for 15 sheets, but when you are preserving some of the most valuable food items in your fridge, I think it is well worth it. The paper consists of two layers: an inner one of porous plastic and an outer one of waxed paper. The materials allow the slow exchange of oxygen while also regulating humidity as this is what cheese needs to stay alive. Sealing it in plastic will suffocate it and ruin your cheese.

The best thing to do is look on the Formaticum website to see if there is a retailer near you, but you can also shop online with Formaticum directly or through Sur La Table. If you buy it through Amazon and 15 sheets will cost you $7.89. The New England Cheesmaking Supply Company also sells cheese paper, but it is not the same brand. I am sure it also works well.

Here is the video on how to wrap cheese. With the some cheese paper and a little instruction, you will look like a pro cheese monger.

How To Wrap Cheese from Formaticum on Vimeo.

I’ve heard some loose definitions of “umami” on cooking TV shows and found that I could never really describe it other than saying it is that feeling you get when you eat a great juicy cheeseburger with curly fries. I don’t even know if that is correct, but it is basically when something is really yummy.

Umami comes about when protein-rich foods such as meats, cheese, and mushrooms break down during cooking, aging, fermenting, or sun drying and produce L-glutamate. Glutamates are the salts from glutamic acids and since 2002, scientists have proven that humans do have taste receptors for L-glutamate. So it is essentially that yummy taste when something is really flavorful in a non-sweet, sour, bitter or salty way. That is umami.

Umami was first discovered by French chef Auguste Escoffier in the late 1800s when he figured out for the first time how to make veal stock in Paris. This was a surprising new sauce back then that made everything taste really good but didn’t fit neatly into the standard four tastes. A little later in Japan, a chemist by the name of Kikunae Ikeda was tasting some seaweed broth and he discovered the same thing: a yummy taste that wasn’t one of the four tastes. So he called it ‘umami’ which is the Japanese word roughly meaning yummy or deliciousness. Eventually, he narrowed the chemical compound down to monosodium glutamate and helped bring MSG into our culinary world through a Japanese food company. Thanks for that one Ikeda. Of course, I would still love to get my umami through veal stock instead of MSG, but they both have the same roots.

So what is umami: It is the fifth taste. It is that tasty feeling that isn’t sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. It is still really hard to describe. It’s that cheeseburger pictured above.

If you want to know more, you can listen to an NPR story on this subject from 2007 or read a book on it called Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. There are also several books out on the subject now which you can find on Amazon.

In the quest to tackle my top-10 cooking goals for the year, I decided to lead off with making cheese. I recently found a home delivery dairy service from a nearby town in Minnesota that will give me fresh local milk. The dairy is called Stoney Creek Dairy, and they currently offer non-homogenized milk, but they they will be discontinuing the product line in November. Too bad. 

So I put in my first (and last) order for my non-homogenized whole milk and just ordered a cheesemaking kit online for making ricotta and mozzarella. In the future I will just have to use regular milk instead of non-homogenized, but I thought I’d try it while supplies last. Getting milk delivered at home is also going to be interesting in an old-school sort of way. They deliver to small towns in the area, and I love the fact they offer to personally put it in your fridge if you are not at home. Now that is small-town service. I just hope the kit and the milk get here about the same time.

I decided to go with a kit instead of buying the supplies locally as I wasn’t sure I could find all of the ingredients on short notice. For instance, I need rennet and I had no clue what that was. After a quick wiki search, I learned that it was a complex of enzymes produced in a mammalian stomach to help digest mother’s milk. You can also get vegetable rennet if you are a vegetarian. At grocery stores you can find a brand of rennet called Junket usually near the Jello, but some say that it isn’t strong enough as it is used in making ice creams and custards instead. And to top it all off, a lot of recipes call for special cheese salt, citric acid, lipase powder and calcium chloride. So it was an easy choice: I bought the kit and now I wait for everything to arrive.

If you wish to purchase cheesemaking supplies you can shop online at cheesemaking.com, leeners.com or thecheesemaker.com. All three have a large selection of products, kits, ingredients and offer help for the novice cheesemaker.  

After making making ricotta and mozzarella, I am going to move on to chèvre as there are two goat dairies near to where I live. I will just have to call them up to see if I can buy some milk off of them. I also want to make goat-milk butter, but that is down the road and for now I need to focus on my intro cheeses. Just reading through the eGullet forum gives me an indication that these cheese making kits aren’t quite as easy as they seem, so this should be interesting.

Recently I wrote about Italian food resources on the web and mentioned Salumeria Biellese’s cured meats. After reading about the meat maker in Saveur magazine and browsing its site, I ordered the double variety pack, and I must say the meats are excellent. They have two variety packs on offer for a limited time from their website, so order now before supplies run out. I am sure the recent coverage will increase demand.

Out of the five meat varieties, the two I liked the most were the hot napolitana pork and the wild boar cacciatorini. The napoitana has a very good spice, and it took only about two days to finish a whole log of it. All of the meats were good, but I probably liked sampler A a bit better. These would be great additions to an upcoming holiday meal or a nice gift for a meat lover.

The shipping was quick, and though the site isn’t that high-tech it gets the job done. I also tried to order some rabbit and veal sausage, but they didn’t send that. I guess it is easier to ship dry-cured meats than fresh sausage.

You can see the variety packs on their website, here.

Today I created a local foods page for this site. You can see it in the navigation bar at the top of this website.

It will be a work-in-progress, but right now it includes information and websites for a range of local producers to include: artisan bread makers, yak meat providers, CSAs, orchards, honey producers, cheese makers, and sausage makers.

Most of the farms and producers exist in the corridor between St. Cloud and Minneapolis, Minnesota but I will also add unique specialty food items from other areas of Minnesota too. I won’t, however, list every orchard, CSA, or bread and honey maker in the state. There are just too many.

Please take a look and if you live in the area and know about other local food producers, please send me the information using the contact form.

I know fresh brewing is always better when it comes to coffee, but I was intrigued that at Chowhound there was a forum discussion about the best brand of instant coffee. Sometimes a person just doesn’t have time to brew a batch or maybe you just ran out and instant is the only option.

One of the recommendations on Chowhound was that Nescafe Clasico Instant Coffee is one of the best, and if you can’t find that in stores Taster’s Choice is best. Both are owned by Nestle, but the Nescafe brand apparently adjusts their products for tastes in different countries, and some suggest looking at hispanic grocery stores to find the instant coffee aimed at the Latino population.

The vintage instant coffer jar above was purchased at H & B Gallery in Minneapolis for $39. It has a sterling silver cover and base with etched glass.

Butter for a long time was maligned, looked down upon, and seen as unhealthy, but it is great to see that it has comeback and its cooking place has been firmly re-established. In the October Bon Appetit, they pose the question “Is butter better?” They make the point that butter has less fat than olive oil and about 20 percent fewer calories, and the article mentions that lard and duck fat also have redeeming nutritional value. You can read the article here.

Of course to be a truly healthy food, one must consider the bad saturated fats versus the healthful monounsaturated fats, and butter does have fewer of these healthy fats and more of the bad stuff than lard, duck fat, and olive oil. But there is no denying that there is some value in butter too; you just have to moderate intake a bit more.

I personally love butter. While living in France, I would become giddy just walking down the dairy isle and looking at the great selection of butter (and yogurts). And tasting them changed me for life; there was no going back. European butter had more flavor and it was creamier.

The reason European butters generally taste better is due to the culturing and fermenting of the cream before making it into butter. In Europe this culturing process is standard practice but it isn’t in the US — though you can find more and more European-style butters being sold in the US now — both domestically made and imported.

The butter shown above is a premium hand-made one from France. Gourmet wrote in 2007 about how Jean-Yves Bordier, a boutique butter maker, was selling his product to many of the best chefs and restaurants in Paris. It is called Beurre Bordier, and though the English portion of the website wasn’t working when I visited it, you can still browse the site in French and see some wonderful butter.

Bordier hand churns his butter in Brittany, and he offers plain cultured, salted, smoke-salted, and seaweed butter. Bordier uses slightly soured cream from cows that graze on organic farms in Normandy and Brittany, and utilizes a wooden device that grinds the churned butterfat particles at a very slow speed to yield an exceptionally smooth butter. Salt and seaweed are added by hand. This article in Saveur talks about his process in more detail, but if you want to buy it you will have to go to France.

That butter sounds great, and one reason it also tastes better is that European butters have more fat. Taste in many cases equals fat, and domestic butter generally has a lower amount (80% fat) and European butters have 81-86% fat. That is one to six percent more flavor on top of production differences that make the butter creamer and more flavorful.

Cook’s Illustrated did a taste test of premium unsalted butters in November 2008, and even if you don’t live in Paris, you can still find good butter here. The tasters preferred Danish Lurpak but also recommended Vermont Butter and Cheese Company Unsalted Butter, Isigny Ste. Mère Beurre de Baratte, and Beurre de Chimay. Land O’Lakes Unsalted Butter was recommended too, though it was clearly plain compared to the flavor of the other varieties.

The San Fransisco Chronicle did a butter taste challenge for European-style butters, and Lurpak also did well, coming in second place. The butter of choice though was Challenge European Style, but it is only sold in western states. Plugra came in third, and you can find this widely throughout the US, including at Target stores. When tasting on itself, this butter outperformed Lurpak, which performed better for baking. In a different challenge, Food & Wine editors tried 20 butters and they chose Organic Valley’s Cultured Unsalted Sweet Cream as their winner.

Regardless of which brand you use, just remember to take butter out the fridge to let it soften and develop its flavors before using. Also it is best to keep your butter in a storage container in the fridge or wrap it tightly as it will absorb odors. It will also develop a rancid taste over time so try use it up within a month’s time, and if you won’t immediately be using it, keep it in a zip lock bag in the freezer. Butter keeps for about 4-6 months.

For storage, I personally use the Butter Bell Crock which inverts a butter cup over a vessel of water. This prevents the butter from going bad by eliminating air and light exposure, and you always have soft butter because you can keep it on the counter.

If you want to browse 30 good butters, Saveur has pictures and descriptions here. Many of the varieties may not be available in the US, but several of the brands are sold at stores and online. There is also an interesting article at saveur.com about making your own butter and they also have a good summary of types of butter.

For online ordering check out:
iGourmet
Zingerman’s
Marky’s
Vermont Butter & Cheese Company
Gourmet Library
Gourmet Food Store

Oh yeah, and as for me personally, I use Land O’Lakes for cooking, Lurpak on its own, and I am also trying right now an Italian butter from Delitia, which is made from the same cows from which parmegiano reggiano cheese is made. If you can’t find it locally, you can order it from Gourmet Library.

Some other suggestions if you want to try something new are Amish-style roll butter and goat-milk butter. Goat-milk butter is offered by several online retailers.