Has a Startup Found the Secret to Farming the Elusive Truffle? | Hacker News Reader

Has a Startup Found the Secret to Farming the Elusive Truffle?

nytimes.com

78 pointsbko32 comments

This is something that I expect the tissue engineering community to break. I know that sounds weird but according to folks I've talked to who were looking at various lab grown structures, fungi are significantly easier than say meat. And an artificial hamburger at $350/lb sounds impractical, artificial white truffles at $350/lb sounds like a money making opportunity.

It's hard to directly compare the challenges of growing fungus vs. meat. Remember that in the case of fungi, the desired product for the food industry is usually a specialized reproductive structure (mushroom, truffle, etc.), produced by the fungus only occasionally, and according to complex environmental cues. So you need a more or less complicated fruiting protocol, depending on the species, on top of maintaining the fungus in culture. This is quite unlike meat, where you are "just" trying to grow a complex of somatic tissue types that is present by default in the wild organism.

On top of this, truffles have complex ecological requirements (mutualisms with plants and associations with soil microbiota), so unlike saprophytic species they are very difficult to grow in artificial culture to start with (even just spore germination is tricky). Fruiting is tied to seasonal changes in the host plant and we're only just beginning to understand the genetics underlying all of this.

I agree with you actually, but I think it is some decades away and will require lots of GM, and lots of work on how to get control over metabolic and fruiting systems without changing flavor profiles.

Truffles are like wine. The taste isn't the product. The product is the backstory, the where and how of the production. Those paying top dollar want their food to have a biography of picturesque farms tended by hearty farm folk, with a few inoffensive Labradors throw in. The boots and pants can be muddy, that shows that they are close to the earth. But never the shirts. No self-respecting farmer would dare be seen in a dirty shirt.

This is fashion food. They will pay extra for the lab-grown stuff once fashion shifts back away from the dirt and towards 'clean' synthetics.

Well personally I'm near obsessed with truffles and for me it's all about the taste. It's such a unique and complex taste and I think that's the real product.

Planet Money had a wonderful episode recently about a boy who's been selling truffles out of the back of his car since he was 15:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/11/04/500726210/episo...

Most notably, he budgets $10,000 pear year for parking tickets as a cost of doing business!

There's also a video following this guy (Ian Purkayastha) on one of his daily routes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sJ6IJZJhUU

It would be interesting if this were true. I live in Oppède in the Luberon and I can literally see the town of Menerbes from my back yard -- which is incidentally on of the most important world markets for black truffles. Every winter our roads are filled with people from all over the world (generally chefs) who make an annual pilgrimage to by truffles here.

I would be interested in the economic impact of suddenly making truffles as near-worthless as common mushrooms since truffles come almost exclusively from tiny producers -- for many, their entire year's income comes from the yearly truffle market.

I guess my feeling is I wonder if truffle scarcity is a problem worth solving. The downside is destroying a lot of people's livelihood for a product that really isn't that important (people that don't have truffles really aren't wishing they did for the most part.)

The scarcity isn't because black truffles are just so amazing but because there's an allure to eating them. They do have an amazing aroma and every year for about a month or two I am making truffle-everything. But if they were turned into a mass-produced commodity, I would expect them to not be quite so interesting.

This startup is sowing the seeds to destroying the very market they want to disrupt.

I think the price and relative scarcity of the truffle is a part of its allure. If it became cheap something else would occupy its niche.

At least for me truffles are extremely overrated in the taste department.

Well currently many truffles come from Europe and as I understand, they begin to lose value as soon as they are pulled from the ground. So if a company could produce them in the States, they could retain much more value and control the American market.

Agreed regarding the disappointing flavor. My wife and I enjoy sampling a wide variety of foods (e.g., we've recently tried horse tenderloin [delicious], pork brains [bland], wild boar liver [extremely tasty]). We went to a fancy place that had some truffle offerings, and we were excited about trying them, but neither of us liked it at all. It was a strong, not great flavor resembling minced garlic that had been burned to a dry charcoal crisp.

I'm curious, were these actual truffle dishes? Or were they simply flavored with truffle oil? Because truffle oil, is by most accounts, awful.

I love truffle oil.

The "real" truffle is the "white" one, the "black" one is considered (and it is) vastly inferior and there are several varieties of the "black" one (some wuite good, some a lot less).

Truffle oil is made (the good one) from the rests of the truffles or from too tiny ones, and not-so-surprisingly if you use real, good truffle and real, good olive oil, it is a good product.

Most of it is however made with inferior quality oils and with artificial flavourings, and quite frankly it is usually terrible.

Any dish with truffle be it the superior "white" or inferior "black" kind is usually any normal, not particular savoury in itself dish (like the mentioned "tagliatelle al burro") on which the truffle is added at the end in tiny slices, often (this is what is done at home and in "high level restaurants") by bringing on the table the truffles and the special tool to slice them, and everyone slices what he/she finds adequate on his/her own plate. The tool is like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NucklhqTRU

Yes, it's a very strong flavor and obviously you could not like it. Not everything is for everyone. It's also difficult to use ("cook") right and it's perishable, so probably the taste of white truffle here in Italy on top of handmade fresh tagliatelle...

At least here in Italy, it is something like 30 (thirty) years that someone claims to know how to farm (black) truffles (through this or that "new" procedure and/or "scientific finding") but at the end of the day the only money that changes hands is the actual cost of the plants (and the expenses for planting and irrigation) that is paid by the farmer.

It is not at all clear (to me) what the partnership provides, seemingly (just like all the others before them) they do sell the actual plants and delay to when the farmer get the profits the payment of their "training" and "ongoing assistance".

Their UK company sells also single trees online (which you can also conveniently pay via PayPal): http://plantationsystems.com/shop/

It is an interesting investment, considering how global climate change in only 35.7 (please note the .7) years will make Spain unsuitable for growing truffles:

http://plantationsystems.com/climate-change-truffle-supply/

>However, within just 35.7 years for Spain, the climate will fall outside of the known parameters for truffle fruiting.

P.S.: BTW I would have expected, if not fact checking, as if it was difficult to check Dr. Paul Thomas linkedIn page, at least to doubt that someone that is 35 in 2016 was:

>working on his Ph.D. in 1996

Nothing new. Some Canadians have been doing this for over a decade.

http://www.ducketttruffieres.com/

http://terranossa.ca/perigord-black-truffle/

"The Perigord Black Truffle was originally produced in France and Italy in truffle and oak orchards on calcareous soil. Techniques for successful Perigord Black Truffle production have been developed, tested and shown to be successful in New Zealand, Australia and parts of the US. There are now a small number of farmers attempting to do the same in BC, mainly on Vancouver Island, the lower mainland and the Okanogan."

Yep, I've had New Zealand black truffles before.

I haven't had European truffles, so I have nothing to compare them to though in terms of quality. The price was about the same as European ones though, I think it was about NZ$3 per gram?

Truffle is something you have to eat lots of to understand. I can taste that there is a difference, but I wouldn't judge one truffle as being any better than another. They all taste a little the the dirt they came from and I don't eat them often enough to care. I like a good stilton cheese, but I'm not going to criticize those who thinks it tastes "like feet".

It's not much of a secret: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#Cultivation

There's already an alternative truffle source - China. They are considered substantially inferior to European truffles.

Not to mention that there are Oregon White and Black truffles[1], which are quite good, already grow in the US, and are much cheaper.

Now, if they had figured out to grow the mycelium in vitro at scale, I'd be impressed...

1: https://whatscookingamerica.net/Truffles/OregonTruffles.htm

... and are also considered inferior (and are certainly different) than European truffles.

Some Europeans will always consider wine, truffles, etc. produced in the US as inferior and some Americans will believe it or adopt this opinion to seem more sophisticated but logic would have it that quality wine or mushrooms don't really care if they are European.

It's not chauvinism; American truffles are a different product.

> Has the American Truffle Company figured it out? “It remains to be seen how well their system will work,” Mr. Michaels said. “The frustrating thing about the truffle is we still don’t know the basic conditions.”

No.

Why do headlines still get written this way?

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines. Also https://twitter.com/BetteridgesLaw.

See tome's law: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549

I haven't seen that one before, but that seems more of a corollary rather than an independent law.

No.

Thanks for saving me the click.

The way I read it, the answer is more likely yes, but it's not confirmed yet, as it takes 5 yaers to get the first crop. This seems to be one of the precious few cases where Betteridge's law doesn't apply; the question mark is there simply because there is still a question, but all available information points to a positive outcome. Not to mention this is New York Times.

"A Startup Is Trying to Farm the Elusive Truffle" would have been a perfectly acceptable headline.

The way I see it, the title of an article should provide the key information. The title as is tells us nothing.

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