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

A captivating exploration into the secretive and sensuous world of truffles, the elusive food that has captured hearts, imaginations, and palates worldwide—now in paperback.

The scent of one freshly unearthed white truffle in Barolo was all it took to lead Rowan Jacobsen down a rabbit hole into a world of secretive hunts, misty woods, black-market deals, obsessive chefs, quixotic scientists, muddy dogs, maddening smells, and some of the most memorable meals ever created.

Truffles attract dreamers, schemers, and sensualists. People spend years training dogs to find them underground. They plant forests of oaks and wait a decade for truffles to appear. They pay $6,000 a pound to possess them. They turn into quivering puddles in their presence. Why?

Truffle Hound is the fascinating account of Rowan's quest to find out, a journey that would lead him from Italy to Istria, Hungary, Spain, England, and North America. Both an entertaining odyssey and a manifesto, Truffle Hound demystifies truffles—and then remystifies them, freeing them from their gilded cage and returning them to their roots as a sacred offering from the forest. It helps people understand why they respond so strongly to that crazy smell, shows them there’s more to truffles than they ever imagined, and gives them all the tools they need to take their own truffle love to the next level. Deeply informed, unabashedly passionate, rakishly readable, Truffle Hound will spark America’s next great culinary passion.

About the Author

Rowan Jacobsen is the author of the James Beard Award-winning A Geography of Oysters as well as American Terroir, Apples of Uncommon Character, and other books. His books have been named to numerous top ten lists, and he has been featured on All Things Considered, The Splendid Table, Morning Edition, and CBS This Morning, and in the pages of Bon Appétit, Saveur, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.