Salinity Presents: Rowan Jacobsen, Part 2

Speaking of crazy flavors, you then wrote a book called Truffle Hound, which got a lot of people thinking about something that they'd probably never thought about.

Truffles.

And not chocolate truffles, which we'll talk about in a minute.

But tell us about truffles.

What are they? If somebody's not familiar with them, and where are they found these days?

Yeah, part of the reason I wrote the book was because so many people are not familiar with them.

Or they have the sense that they're this super snooty food that you can only get in Italy or something.

Yeah, shaved by the gram over some fancy pasta.

Yeah, literally.

That's what they'll do in Italy in the fall.

They'll bring a scale to your table with this truffle, and they'll weigh the truffle beforehand, then they'll shave it over your pasta, and then they'll weigh it again and charge you for the difference in grams.

It can be $100 that they've just shaved over the top of your dish.

It's just stupid money, but it's all built into what the truffle is and why it's so hard to find.

Truffles are very closely related to mushrooms.

They're the fruiting body of a fungus, just like a mushroom is.

And that fungus lives in the soil in a symbiotic relationship with trees.

And it's all these microscopic threads.

That's the life form itself.

It's hard to even see it in the soil, but when it wants to reproduce, It makes this fruiting body, which is full of spores.

If it's a mushroom, it pops above the surface and opens up its little parasol and the spores just come out in the wind.

But a truffle, it's like a different strategy where it doesn't pop up.

Basically a mushroom that never opens and always stays underground.

They probably evolved in places where it was too dry or where it was too risky to pop up and be a mushroom.

You might get dehydrated.

For whatever reason, they decide to stay underground.