#truffles

Western cuisine universally recognizes three luxury delicacies: black truffle, sturgeon caviar, and foie gras.Surprisingly, China produces the largest quantity of all three ingredients, and I find this very strange, because local Chinese people barely eat them at all. At first, Chinese truffles had almost no market overseas. Auguste Escoffier called Yunnan's Tuber indicum a fake truffle, pig feed with weak aroma, unworthy of fine French cuisine. For a long time, the claim that "Chinese truffles are only for pigs" became mainstream opinion. Chinese people thought, "That’s true." Locals really fed truffles to pigs, and they even named it pig-root mushroom locally. After all, pigs dig them up naturally in the wild, and pigs love eating them very much. Nearly all wild fungi in China grow in Yunnan. Yunnan locals have a long custom of digging wild mushrooms from July to August. But truffles do not fully ripen until November. If harvested too early, they naturally have almost no scent. That was the real reason Chinese truffles tasted bland back then. Information spread very slowly in those days, so Chinese farmers did not understand what aroma Western chefs were looking for. Today we finally know the truth. Fully mature Chinese truffles became extremely popular in export markets. As a result, China’s total truffle output suddenly became No.1 worldwide, accounting for 80% of global production.