CHINESE TRUFFLES
The Chinese are providing us with some good quality wines, a roaring caviar trade and now home grown truffles, which they once fed to the pigs, while in return, their blooming middle class, has developed a huge appetite for European luxuries.
In 1987 the first trees were mycorrhized in Taiwan with Tuber Formosanum (related to Tuber Indicum) and 8 years later the first 10 kg of cultivated truffles were harvested in that orchard.
The Tuber Indicum (their biological name suggests they originated in India the other side of the mountainous Himalaya except India does not grow any truffles) is the most popular variety.
Interestingly inside they are black during the winter and white during the summer months, but with less fragrance.
Another variety Tuber Himalayensis grown in huge areas of Yunnan and Sichuan, bordering Tibet, resembling the French truffles, but these are always black inside and being available from Nov. to Jan.
The truffles are’ tubers’ and are not fakes, are edible and with the same nutrients as the French and Italians but generally less aromatic and possibly rubbery.
The Tuber Indicum is the bigger, but the aroma of Tuber Himalayesis is better and more expensive, looking similar to Tuber Melanosporum, with the females of both being smaller with a weaker smell more like a Tuber Borchii.
There are now dozens of plantations in Sichuan and Yunnan of about 4-7 years old, along with collaborations, several nurseries and research centers with the Hunan Academy of Agriculture producing 10,000 melanosporum trees annually.
Meanwhile, the Italians are alarmed in case Tuber Indicum has invaded their soil because they have found tree roots in Piedmont that had Chinese DNA, so terrifying them the two species could even cross breed.
The problem was thought to have started in 2004 after a drought and 30 tons of Chinese truffles might have been imported.
In a global market where a white single Italian truffle can reach £165,000 any invasion by a lesser item is absolutely perilous.
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