Yesterday I tagged along with Oregon’s truffle king Jack Czarnecki, owner and former chef of Dayton’s Joel Palmer House. We headed to a private property about 12 miles west of Dallas, OR on a pristine Oregon day — snow, sleet, rain, and sunshine showing up to the party.
Yesterday also marked the first-ever time that I interviewed a person (Jack) and then saw him interviewed on television — on the Food Network show Will Work for Food starring Adam Gertler.
I can’t say TV really captured the experience of digging in the dirt around Doug Firs for truffles. Like all good treasure hunts, sometimes hours pass between finds. Seeing all that hard work cut and pasted into a 15 minute segment (and one aired alongside a segment about the use of food in horror movies… the horror!) really tends to devalue the process.
My hands aren’t really ready to type the story of my own truffle hunt. In the end, I spent about five hours combing through dirt with a rake to unearth about twelve of these little black truffles and came back covered in mud and with newly discovered back muscles.
I’m exhausted.
But I’ll be blogging about how I cook them all this week on the blog, so stay tuned!
Yuuum!!!! My family and I went in on it together and bought about a pound of white truffles earlier this spring. I’ve got a bunch of ideas on not only cooking with the truffles (slices of truffle under the skin of a chicken, then roast), but also preserving it so you can have truffle butter to use for months and months. It’s such a decadent treat. That’s so awesome that you went out and dug them up yourself.
Were they expensive? We should trade truffle stories. I haven’t tried the whites yet, but I will. Jack C. tells me they are more plentiful. With blacks, you only get one per hundred rake strokes. Hence the aching body I have today. Exercise never tasted so good…
I think it was about $90 for a pound. I can’t remember exactly. I found a guy on craigslist, he sells blacks too. We got all smaller ones, they were cheaper, still as good. Whites are more mild in flavor, so you use a bit more for the intensity. In the back of my freezer, I still have about 8 tablespoon sized lumps of truffle butter, plus a tub of whole truffles suspended in butter. you can fish one out and grate it, still frozen, onto dishes. it’s so wonderful.
I’m jealous, it seems like a really fun activity to do, especially with such an expert. Totally worth the sore body.
yeah, I’m still recovering. I love my little aches and pains — they taste so damn good.
[...] I only used a few sprinklings. Thankfully, I didn’t pay for these truffles except for with the sweat off my [...]
[...] I started tagging along with Jack Czarnecki on his body-breaking truffle hunts last spring, when Oregon’s spring black truffles were in bloom. I later joined him for a white truffle hunt – the result of which is a longish [...]