What Is the Black Truffle? A Guide to Getting to Know It
The black truffle is a wild edible fungus that grows underground, also known as the truffle, the "motherless fruit" and so on. Its surface is rugged and uneven, and its colour ranges between dark brown and black, with small bumpy protrusions and a marbling of grey or light black and white. Its smell is peculiar and hard to describe; some people describe it as resembling mushrooms, garlic, rotting leaves, wetlands, fermented corn, pickled vegetables, honey, gas, wet straw, cheese, cinnamon, musk, and even sheets that have not been washed for years, and some even describe its smell as resembling semen. As far as is currently known, it is mainly distributed in a few areas of the Alps and the Himalayas.
The black truffle is extremely fussy about its growing environment: if sunlight, moisture or the pH of the soil changes even slightly, it cannot grow, making it the only delicacy in the world that cannot be cultivated in neat, orderly rows. One tree may produce truffles, while another tree right beside it that looks exactly the same cannot, and to this day people still do not understand why. Unlike ordinary fungi such as mushrooms, truffle spores are not spread by wind but by the animals that feed on the truffles. They mainly grow under pine, oak, hazel, beech and orange trees, because truffles cannot photosynthesise and cannot survive independently; they must obtain nutrients through a symbiotic relationship with the roots of certain trees.
The black truffle's ripening season usually runs from November each year to March of the following year, and the best season is usually between December and March of the following year. The people who gather truffles are called "truffle hunters", and each truffle hunter carries a family heirloom treasure map recording the places, times and sizes of the truffles that previous generations once found. The process of searching for truffles is very interesting, and the methods used by hunters vary from country to country. In France, people are used to employing sows as capable assistants in harvesting black truffles; a sow's sense of smell is extremely keen, and it can smell a truffle buried 25 cm to 30 cm underground from 6 m away.
The black truffle is rich in protein, 18 kinds of amino acids (including the 8 essential amino acids that the human body cannot synthesise), unsaturated fatty acids, a variety of vitamins, essential trace elements such as zinc, manganese, iron, calcium, phosphorus and selenium, as well as large amounts of metabolites such as sphingolipids, cerebrosides, ceramides, triterpenes, androsterone, adenosine, truffle acid, sterols, truffle polysaccharides and truffle polypeptides, giving it extremely high nutritional and health value. Among these, androsterone has a notable effect in supporting yang and regulating the endocrine system. Sphingolipid compounds show clear activity in preventing senile dementia and atherosclerosis and in fighting tumour cell toxicity. Polysaccharides, polypeptides and triterpenes help boost immunity, resist ageing and relieve fatigue, and can be used for health preservation.
The taste of the black truffle is very peculiar. The flavours of mushrooms, garlic, wet mud, honey, corn, bugs and rotting leaves have all been used to describe the truffle's aroma, and some people often say they give off the smell of musk, semen and sheets that have not been washed for years; some professional perfumers even describe them as a petrol smell mixed with a little garlic and rotten egg, and of course there are also notes of fallen leaves fermenting in forest wetlands, blended with a hint of yeast and honey. As for what the taste actually is, everyone comes to a different conclusion.
Over the past two thousand years, the black truffle was found in the world only in the southern Alps in Europe, which is the main reason why Chinese people are unfamiliar with it. At the end of the last century, Chinese scientists discovered the distribution of the black truffle in the southeastern region of the Himalayas, which caused a worldwide sensation. From then until now, black truffles produced in China have all been used exclusively for export. In recent years, research on the folk uses of truffle-producing areas has shown that, in fact, among the folk communities of ethnic minorities such as the Tibetan and Yi peoples in southwestern China, the black truffle, called the "motherless fruit" for hundreds of years, has long been used by local mountain people to boost physical strength, improve sexual potency and regulate women's menstruation, and its effects are said to be outstanding.