Truffle Hound: On the Trail of the World’s Most Seductive Scent, with Dreamers, Schemers, and Some Extraordinary Dogs (paperback)

The human obsession with truffles, rivalled perhaps only by the passion with which pigs forage for the pungent fungus, inspires a remarkable range of behavior, much of which is chronicled here by Rowan Jacobsen, an award-winning food writer who succumbs both to the truffle and to his need to understand why other people are also obsessed.

Wandering through the restaurants, countrysides, kennels, laboratories, and farms of half a dozen nations, Jacobsen reveals the financial stakes, intense opinions, secrecy, passion, and larger-than-life idiosyncrasies of the many players in the world of truffles. There are Grand Masters of the Saint Ladislaus Order of Truffle Knights, former Microsoft execs growing truffles in Kentucky bourbon country, and Chinese aficionados who never ask the price of what they are buying.

Deftly conjuring the personalities of the people he interviews and forages alongside, Jacobsen also provides details on the most commonly used truffle varieties, from the famed white truffles of Alba to Oregon blacks and Hungarian honeys.

Paperback. Color photograph insert.