ShortcutsBritish food and drinkEngland's native truffles are growing in popularity - and price. Jon Henley explains how to spot them, no pig (or specially trained dog) requiredSo unappetising do they look that the uninitiated often mistake them for dried out dog's mess. But in France and Italy, truffles change hands for thousands of pounds a kilo – and they are growing, in abundance, in Britain. An unnamed Wiltshire farmer has told Country Life magazine he is harvesting up to 100kg (220lb) a year from a four-hectare (10-acre) site on his land, selling the black fungi to restaurants for up to £150 a kilo.
According to Dorset-based Truffle UK, which imports continental truffles and also cultivates them here, the fungi tend to grow best in south-facing beech, oak, birch and hazel woods, on chalk or limestone. Particularly favourable sites in Britain, the company says, include the Chilterns and North and South Downs, as well as Hampshire, Wiltshire and westwards into Dorset, and the area between Hull and Lincoln.
But you could find truffles almost anywhere: the two varieties native to Britain, the apple-sized summer truffle or tuber aestivum and the stronger-tasting Burgundy truffle or tuber uncinatum, found from October to December, have been recorded by the British Mycological Society from Brixham in the south to as far north as Darlington. Both are black, roundish in shape, and covered in polyagonal warts. Inside, the summer truffle's flesh, brown with white veins, tastes and smells mild; the winter truffle's flesh is marbled grey/black and smells very strong.
Britain's once-thriving truffle industry largely collapsed over the past 150 years or so as modern farming methods took their toll on the hedgerows and woodland where the warty delicacy thrives. Nor have the fungi traditionally been a prized ingredient in British cuisine (in France, the great 18th-century food writer Brillat-Savarin long ago anointed them "the diamond of the kitchen").
That, sadly, explains why neither of the subtler-tasting English truffle varieties is currently fetching the kind of prices paid for the black Perigord truffle, or tuber melanosporum, which regularly changes hands on French farmers' markets for as much as €1,000 (around £800) a kilo, and up to €4,000 at retail. And not even the Perigord comes close to matching the astronomical sums forked out for the legendary Alba madonna, or tuber magnatum. Twice in the past five years, specimens of this legendary Italian white truffle have changed hands for $100,000 (around £62,000) a pound.
But truffles are steadily gaining in popularity this side of the Channel. The good news is, the more subtle, delicately flavoured aestivum and uncinatum are much easier to find than their continental cousins, which tend to grow several centimetres deeper to be closer to water. In France and Italy you typically need a pig, or at least a specially trained labrador. Here, a dog will certainly help sniff out truffles lying just beneath the ground. But in our damper climes – which means especially this year – the fungi often break through the surface.
Just make sure you don't mistake them for dog's doos.
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