Reply To: Lois and Monza (August 2014)

[Alana McGee]

TDC Instructor:

Welcome Lois & Monza 🙂 We are very excited to have you on board for class and look forward to watching you work together! Your previous experience introducing a truffle scent will come in handy here as you start building a reward history for the fresh summer truffles. The wonderful thing about truffle hunting is that many truffles have similarities for odor recognition. This means that often by building a reward history for one species, you are also strengthening your dog’s ability to locate another species!

Looking forward to watching you and Monza progress! Let me know if MSL will have the truffles for you to start with- we do have other suppliers, but we like to work with MSL because they support small farmers and communities, have high standards (for truffles and for the working conditions of dogs/handlers), and generally offer really reasonable pricing.

Let me know though, you likely can get things through the Urbanis (they control about 70-80% of all truffle distribution worldwide), but we know a few other small producers/ distributors and I’ll start asking around.

If you will be hunting for Summer/Burgundy truffles (Tuber aestivum/uncinatum) this is what your fresh samples you use for odor should like on the interior. They should be firm, not squishy, clean, ideally not riddled with worm/bug holes, and as free from the white fuzz (another fungus) as possible. The interior should show a nice marbling, and not be translucent but be taupe like this to a deeper browny-red hue. If the interior pattern looks different than this (aka all veins kind of radiate out from one point) you have a Bagnoli truffle or Tuber mesentericum. Also tasty, and ok, but they often get thrown into lots of Summer/Burgundy truffles and sold as such, so FYI. They are a different species.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Alana McGee.