Summer truffle season is here! An affordable alternative to the omnipotent winter truffle, they are grat on salads( warm scallop) and especially on grits!

[coolJ]

Where can I get some and secondly how much do they cost ?

summer truffles may be obtained from Plantin America www.plantin.com $50 for 40z. at last reply. Enjoy

[Jeremy]

Summer Truffles, look great but do not taste of too much though....what do you think?

[elakin]

can someone help me out here? what's the difference between a summer truffle and a regular black truffle?

i absolutely love truffles! i used to work at a very fancy restaurant where we used loads of truffles. we made truffle butter (served with warm brioche with our foie gras roullade), truffle vinaigrette, truffle risotto, and shaved them all over the place. they are so heady and intoxicating and i really think you can get kind of a "high" or a "buzz" from eating them.

i've had some good success with using canned truffles. urbani makes very good canned products. you can't slice them like fresh, but you can make great oils and vinaigrettes with them, cut them into little sticks and kind of lard them into a roast chicken, use them in mashed potatoes or risotto...whatever. what do you all think of canned?

and, again, what exactly do you mean by "summer" truffles?

[shroomgirl]

Eddie, summer truffles are white and don't have the pungency of black truffles.
Fresh truffles are amazing, heady for sure but what attracts me to them is the way they change flavors in your mouth.....

[Ruthy]

To my mind summer truffles are totally worthless - no tastge and no aroma. Yes they are a quarter the price of fresh winter truffles - better to save one's money and buy one real truffle in season.

[cape chef]

actually, white truffles that we see in autumn from italy are the finest and most pungent. the pure aroma and earthy flavors of the white truffle are amazing,in my opinion they are far more intense then the black truffle. Summer truffles all though very good are usally seen in the states as peelings or sliced in juice. Truffles do enjoy a season...fall and early winter are the best times to savour these gems. Eddie,how's it going? are you home from italy? If you had the luxary to compare a fresh white truffle to a black truffle, I think you would find the white truffle is the pure gift.
cc

[elakin]

hi cape chef....

no...still in bologna. we got back from sicily a couple weeks ago and i've been working a lot.

we bought a white truffle here around christmas to shave over mashed potatoes. when i asked a lady at the market here if she had white truffles, she looked very excited and said "venga, venga!" (come here!) and i went back in her stall as she brought out a stash wrapped in layers of newspaper and plastic at the very back of her fridge. lots of ceremony as we bought one, about the size of a golf ball, for around 50 bucks.

i have found that restaurants using truffles tend to skimp on them, or use mainly truffle oil or paste for flavor...but there is nothing like shaving fresh truffles over hot pasta or risotto or mashed potatoes...just an amazing heady flavor and smell...

i like black and white equally well, and since white are about double the price, i think i'd opt for black. white tend to have more of that intoxicating headiness, but black truffles, i think, have more flavor and an earthier, woodsier taste.

are summer truffles grown exclusively in europe too? or can they be found in the US?