Hunter and Gatherer: Truffle Hunter

look sweetheart good really good can I see thank you for helping ah there you go all that work for that hey good girl truffles aren't something that you eat there's something that you experience all about aroma when you use them in cuisine you add them as a way to enhance what you're eating they make everything that you add them to in terms of a dish more complex more ethereal more more wonderful yeah good girl yeah good girl I think I'm right in saying they are the most valuable foodstuff but I don't know the going price of gold right now but you know it might be comparable the general rule is the more terrible it is outside the better the truffle hunt a cold miserable wet snow is fine you know the driving rain is my least favorite so we're in a primarily doug-fir forest second-growth so replanted the certain species of truffles tend to like kind of like the tree farms so where people plant Douglas fir fir timber purposes my first truffle hunting experience was in the mark a region of Italy which is like Tuscany but without all the tourists and it involved this Tartuffe IO which is what the guy is called who's the the dog handler and the dog was a little go to a romagnolo named Toby I saw the handler and the dog working together and they had a great relationship and it just it's like a switch flipped and I was hooked good girl slow down hon the industry existed in Oregon and we have the same habitat basically you know as Oregon same soils a lot of the same stuff and so I was like if they're there they're here there were maybe two people and like the entire state and we're kind of doing it at all and so I basically just started approaching timber companies and asking them and they were like oh fascinating okay cool yeah sure come check oh there it is good girl yeah it's a tiny way look at that thank you so every species of truffle has different value to select the European species tend to be more expensive native ones the Italian white truffle kind of being the pinnacle of that we're not getting rich doing this it's not particularly lucrative but they're valuable but they don't have time and effort we put into this is astronomical so we do it because we love it we are headed up into the woods there's a stand of trees we haven't been to it yet that's a deeper forest there's a very muddy road ahead of us it's a little bit off right it'll be fun actually I like doing this yeah please don't get secretary no one dog is going to necessarily be better at truffle hunting inherently than any other dog it's not breed specific it's personality based cally is verbally yeah Kristen is my business partner at truffle dog company you know we complement each other's strengths did you find something cally loves finding whites we often refer to her as the great white truffle dog oh yeah that's that's true the Oregon whites tend to like more exposed habitats the blacks are more likely to be found in the deeper forests hi can i okay let's not eat the rest good girl thank you so it's a complete fallacy the dogs will not eat them some do Raoul has come a long way she used to eat a bunch and just of the blacks she never has eaten white she just think frankly she likes fruit actually and they kind of have a fruit odor so just she picked it up probably and put it in her mouth until it fractured yeah yeah she smells now it's a partnership with you and the dog that you're both working towards a common goal you're out there and you're just a hundred percent focused on your dog else say a dog's alert is to scratch the ground to tell you all there's truffle here we need to know exactly where in this area the truffle is so the dog gets down on the ground and ideally will knows target and try to tell you where truffle is in the soil so after that happens you search in the soil yourself it's not just the dog going out finding the truffle it's a lot about the handler reward we share a connection with them and then we ask them to go find another good boy buddy hey revoir which way is out you want to take a break that'll do you did awesome you did super awesome that's his cue that he's finished he doesn't have to hunt anymore just like humans get burnt out at any job the dogs would get burnt out too and if you watch any like bomb detection dogs they'll work in 15 minutes there are areas in Washington and Oregon where the truffle economy is fueled by drugs often it's math somebody was on meth is just going to go out and just rake like crazy when we talk about raking we talk about people ripping up the forest floor and just leaving it massively exposed and that is really sad to see it kind of just breaks your heart when you see it cuz whole hillsides are just destroyed whereas when we use the dogs much lower footprint you know it ideally you don't know that we've been there when you rake for truffles you will find a bunch usually but most of them are not right and you can't really ripen them so that's why Oregon truffles and native truffles in the Pacific Northwest have a bad reputation in general and are less valuable his because for a long time chefs were only given stuff that was like mixed quality and wasn't ripe we need to teach chefs about it just because the quality is so much better because we're using dogs so that's what we found today need to clean them obviously so running water you don't want hot cuz you want to get rid of the vowels all those awesome aromas and stuff those are the volatile compounds I get very sciency with it so then literally you just take your toothbrush and you just get in there I always clean truffles with beer by the way because this can take a while so I might as well have fun you just brush and see all of that just calms away that's a really nice one you want to blot them you don't want to like leave moisture on them frost damage on the top perfectly fine on the bottom Marlon's good marbling is good this is one that you would want to buy and that we would sell to chefs this is a frost damage one right there that needs to all be cut off try to remove his little materials possible but see that see now you start to see some marbling better that's now sellable so we're in downtown Seattle I come down for deliveries at least once a week if not a couple times a week it's a nightmare simply because it eats a lot of time every time you do come into the city because you're stuck in traffic for a really long time and that's time we're not out harvesting a pound wholesale to a chef would be probably about $400 a pound so we are meeting Preston here he acts as a distributor for us around town he sells to a lot of restaurants and around town so I'm supposed to be meeting somebody else already right now - I'm just gonna tell her traffic is bad hello sir you want to do in your car you just want to do it here what do you want to do um probably be better my office so here's the stuff from this morning you're welcome to whatever you want and like I said we can get you more cuz like they're out right now finding more but um you know no that's not I'd rather have a little bit of something fresh right that's what I mean yeah I don't want to be sitting on it from you know cuz you want the fresh up right so you know I try to bring in with the best quality stuff that we have and usually those are whole truffles and not pieces we've developed a good relationship with Preston and he gets us in all kinds of places if you're finding native truffles on restaurants in Seattle they're most likely ours thank you have a good day okay I couldn't sell this chunk so we figured we turn it in ice cream I graded a bunch of Oregon black truffles and you just let it infuse over and I into the milk and cream and you can turn it into whatever you want it's going to smell like black truffle and it does and it's like a it's like a cool sweet aroma so what's in here right now chocolate vanilla a little bit of cream mostly milk a little bit of sugar not a lot because the truffles are actually so sweet naturally you don't need it and Oregon black truffles and that's it the flavors go really well the organ black terminals have like a chocolate aroma to them sometimes along with the floral fruitiness so it works really well in desserts whereas the organ whites work really well kind of in more main-dish kind of things and because they're a little more savory so we are making a quiche this is a family recipe actually that I just done doctored basically by adding truffles to it so in here is a eggs that have been infused actually with Italian white truffle because it's what I had at the time some Oregon white truffle which we just found a couple hours ago emmenthal our cheese some bacon and milk and cream and some spices we've been infusing the eggs with white truffle for a while you basically take a container with eggs and you put the truffles in there the odor is bind with fats and the whites sometimes you put them in for eight hours and the stuff is potent so you have to be careful with the whites they're really really potent you need to keep them in a sealed container because if you don't they will truffle everything in your fridge the presence of truffles is really what's so great about them it's the aroma you're not gonna just grab a truffle and bite into it the aroma is associated with truffles make food much more complex and they enhance and that's what's so wonderful about them is you can take a dish and you add truffles to it and becomes that much better great so that's done so we have Oregon black truffle ice cream and it's really good so it's really sweet it's really good they make everything that you add them to in terms of a dish more complex more wonderful it's a very it's a very mommy flavor it's like you put it in your mouth and the truffle fume is already hitting the back ear throat and the base of your nose before you ever start chewing it it's hard to describe it's tasty it's pretty much where I stop when you're out in the woods with your dog it is a very zen-like experience it's a little cliche to say but it's your very in the moment hey it's not just about oh we're gonna go truffle hunting and oh we're gonna find one I'm gonna put in my bag and we're going on the next and I'm gonna find it and move on it's a relationship I love being out in the woods with my dogs and I like foraging it's a hunter-gatherer kind of thing and I really get a primal satisfaction out of that

Channel: Munchies

Views: 411,086

Rating: 4.872488 out of 5

Keywords: truffle, hunter gatherer, alan mcgee, truffle dog company, munchies, vice

Id: gzmn-I5lDjg

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2015