Since the first year that the Napa Truffle Festival held its Marketplace at Oxbow Public Market (2012), chef/co-owner Dario De Conti of Ca' Momi Enoteca has presented lively cooking demos of their popular Pizza al Tartufo Nero. This year, their new Napa downtown restaurant Ca' Momi Osteria also offered truffle menus throughout the winter truffle [...]
This year's Napa Truffle Festival invited local restaurants to participate in the winter truffle season with a truffle dish or menu. We'll be sharing some of their recipes and stories, beginning with the lovely, bistro-style Angèle Restaurant & Bar's Warm Ricotta Custard with wild mushrooms and shaved black truffles by Chef Rogelio Garcia. Custard suggests [...]
Chef Ken Frank is the official host chef of the annual Napa Truffle Festival. Each year, he helps select the master guest chefs and provides his beautiful La Toque restaurant as the venue for the festival's signature Truffles & Wine Dinner. Widely considered the top truffle chef of North America, he holds the distinct honor [...]
This has been a very exciting truffle season for us with the harvesting of our first cultivated truffle in the UK and now a second first harvest at one of our orchards in Macedonia, planted seven years ago. These truffle orchards were inoculated by us with the black truffle fungus (Tuber melanosporum) and managed and [...]
Joining our host Chef Ken Frank of La Toque for the 2016 Napa Truffle Festival are three master chefs, including San Francisco's David Barzelay of Lazy Bear, Italy's Stefano Ciotti of Nestrano and New Orleans’ Rick Tramonto of Restaurant R'evolution. As a special preview, Chef Rick shared his delicious, soul warming recipe for truffle cappuccino [...]
This coming weekend, I'll be presenting a truffle seminar and hosting a truffles dinner in Sheffield, England (where I reside with my family). I'm in a celebratory mood as things are 'hotting up' here (as much as they can in a cold wet field in October!) with several of our plantations hitting maturity. On the [...]
Spore mats are an intriguing phenomena. For certain fungi, they may be quite visible as dense mats of fungi in the ground that produce spores. Spores are, of course, the seeds of a fungus and those that are found on spore mats are often mitospores, whereas those that form from a fruiting body, such as [...]
Dr. Paul Thomas' recent cultivated truffle harvest--the first in the UK--is still the topic with excited foodies. Read his recent 'Talking truffles...' interview with Luxury Lifestyle Magazine: "We caught up with Paul to find out more about this industry and about his love for what French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called “the diamond of the [...]
During our recent trek Down Under, Dr. Paul Thomas and I spent time in Manjimup Western Australia researching and foraging for black European truffles—the very same black diamonds that ATC cultivates with our truffle partners here in North America. Our time there was educational and exhilarating. See Dr. Thomas' July blog for insights about the [...]
Last month, Robert Chang and I visited Western Australia to explore several facets of their native truffle industry. While there, I was particularly keen to look at the issues many orchards are having with truffle rot. Despite the fact that some plantations in Western Australia produce very good yields, there has been a localized problem [...]
