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Comment by prvit | Hacker News Reader

> There are no white and black winter truffles out of season. They cannot be frozen, cooked, sterilized, packaged, or stored

Is that really true? I’m not a truffle expert, but I’ve seen several suppliers offering flash frozen winter truffles.

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They definitely can be frozen. My girlfriends Italian family does it all the time. They start to lose flavour after a month or two in the freezer though and the texture is very conspicuously different. But absolutely good enough for slicing onto pasta.

me neither, but I can attest to the massive difference between flash freezing and freezing from other foods. I would assume the same holds true here, as well: significantly less cell damage during flash freezing, preserving more or original flavor and texture.

This random culinary blog seems to say it's kind of true that you can't preserve the original truffle through freezing, the process changes them. They compare it to freezing fresh bread - the result is safe to eat, but not the same as the original.

https://blog.dibruno.com/2016/12/10/how-to-preserve-a-fresh-...

Bread can be frozen with very little impact on quality.

I have never seen bread frozen without a serious impact on quality.

That's why the places which have done that to you, without you noticing or even suspecting, don't show it to you: if you see it, you'll imagine you can tell. You can't.

The difference is quite stark and easy to tell. Putting bread in the freezer results in bread that is like week-old stuff. It's absolutely not a trick of perception.

But perhaps the effect differs according to the kind of bread.

Bread freezes just fine, I could name you a bunch of 3 star Michelin places serving frozen bread every day.

You still want a humidity controlled oven for reheating, so not necessarily super convenient at home.

A high-end baker I work with (https://triticum.net/) only sells frozen bread, everything comes with extensive instructions for reheating.

Needing special equipment or an unusual process to defrost indicates that it doesn't freeze well in the sense most people mean, but that it can be done with effort.

When I need to freeze bread, I don't bake the loaves fully first. I get them maybe 80% the way, then freeze. Then I can complete the bake after thawing.

I get reasonably decent results that way, although you can still tell.

> Bread freezes just fine, I could name you a bunch of 3 star Michelin places serving frozen bread every day.

Please do.

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