I was just reading this article:
Hong Kong Tycoon Pays $160,406 for Italian Truffle
I’ve had truffles before, I believe. What makes white truffles so special? Even if they are rare, what makes them worth this price?
What makes them worth the price is that someone is willing to pay the price.
Circular, I know, but that’s really it. True, they can’t be cultivated well, and they are rare. But still, someone thinks that the price is worth it. Why? Probably so he can say he paid it.
But, like the tulip mania of yore, there’s nothing holding the market except for pride and arrogance. If no one would buy them, they would have no value.
I asked a related question a while ago. I will try to find it. Some types of truffles supposedly cannot be cultivated. They must be found using specially trained and gifted dogs or pigs. They are hunted like treasure in European woods. Once they are found, they are sold through back-alley deals until they reach the most exclusive restaurants and households.
That is the story anyway. People indicated that is just what they want you to think and it is much like the DeBeers situation with diamonds. Truffles are very strong tasting so you only need a little. This may help people justify the high price.
Here is my thread that has good info:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=365539&highlight=truffles
GREAT! Thanks.
Truffles really are special. They represent a taste most of us have not yet experienced: the first time you taste it, it seems to wake up taste buds that have never worked before - a surprising and weird experience. It’s not necessarily “nice”, but it’s a rich, distinctive flavor that’s almost an emotional experience.
That said, I’ve met a few Hong Kong tycoons, and they’ll buy anything providing the hype is good enough, and the price high enough. In Hong Kong worked for a dude who drove a gold Rolls Royce just of the hell of it; one time I saw, in a department sore, a single ginseng root that cost over HK$1 million (at least $1/4 million US). There’s definitely a market for this stuff.
Why can’t they be cultivated? How hard can it be?
Hong Kong is where that lady paid, like, 10 million bucks for dance lessons, if you recall.
However, on the trip I just took to Italy I had for the first time truffles in a dish in a quantity I could actually taste them. It’s totally unlike any taste I’ve ever tasted, indeed. All the words I have to describe it don’t sound nice (it tastes like compost, or rotting leaves, or something) but it was wonderful.
They can, but I’m sure that if it was as successful as wild truffle hunting, the market would have sorted it out by now.
I haven’t had a chance to try truffles yet in a way that is not so diluted that it is hard to tell what they taste like. I did hear a professional chef talk about them at a cooking class I once took. IIRC he said take your truffle and first seal it with eggs for a week or so and it will give you truffle flavoured eggs. Then put in a glass jar with uncooked rice and give it some time for truffle rice. Then put it in olive oil for a couple weeks to get truffle infused oil. Then use it for cooking with.
Wikipedia notes:
I guess we can blame it on “TRUPEC”. 
They aren’t buying the truffle, but the bragging rights for it.
Since they don’t keep long, like wine or art, the fame is fleeting, but rich people are not known for restraint in that area.
Sounds like the modern-day equivellent of that story of Cleopatra melting the pearl to drink just so her dinner would be more expensive than Antony’s.* It’s conspicuous consumption, pure and simple. Just how much status someone gets out of it is anyone’s guess. (I can’t imagine that one achieves lasting fame from being the dude who bought the expensive truffle.)
*Yeah, I know it’s not true.
It is all about the right to sing the blues, “Nobody knows, the truffles I’ve seen…”…
From that same article, it appears that the truffle’s proceeds are going to charity. I wonder if that had anything to do with its high auction price. Folks in the US will pay insane prices for silly things in the name of charity.
Gah, I hit return too early on my preview screeen.
From a cook’s perspective:
Truffles are expensive, but they are similar to safron in the matter that they are so fragrent, it takes very little truffle to flavor a dish. Also, like safron, they are over used in dishes, because the cook doesn’t know how to use them properly. Just a little splash of white truffle oil (infused olive oil) is all it takes to liven up a recipe and give it that “truffled” flair. I find that the fresh truffles are over priced and less flavorful then truffle oil, or shaved truffles from a can or jar.
Isn’t this true of everything?
Well sure, if you want to be technical about it. But there are things - grain, wood, oil - which are useful and pretty much required in our lives. These things could go up in price and we’d be more or less forced to pay it to keep our standard of living. Truffles aren’t one of them. Truffles, like tulips used to be, are absurdly inflated in price by rich folks who want them for the prestige of paying thousands of dollars for them. If they were widely cultivated and became cheap (as eventually tulips became, almost literally overnight), then no one would want them, the market for them would collapse, and you and I could buy them for $2.99 a pound at Kroger.
From your experience, if you have experience with various forms of truffles, do you find a major difference between ‘ordinary’ truffles and the truffles mentioned in this article?
Also, it quoted the chef who is going to prepare the meal (in the article). Will the winner of the auction profit greatly from this purchase (charge a huge amount for the meal)?
There was a very interesting story in the Wall Street Journal a while back about new research showing that people experience the taste of truffles very differently. The gist of it was that a third of people sense the taste as intensely pleasurable, a third sense it as intensely unpleasant, and a third just don’t really experience much taste at all.
I don’t have the story to cite, but the key point was that the study wasn’t about whether people just “liked” truffles or not. It wasn’t “a matter of taste” in the way that you either like dark chocolate or you don’t, you like curry or you don’t. The research showed that people actually physically experienced the truffle taste differently, which helps explain why some people go nuts for truffle and some are repulsed by it and can’t understand the fuss.
The research explained my own reaction to truffles. I tend to go for exotic flavors, strong and different tastes, and I’m a bit of a gourmet. I’ve had truffles plenty of times, in all variations, in some of the finest restaurants in the world, and every time I wondered why I hated the flavor of something that so many people love. (Not just going ''hmmm, not really for me" but more like gagging and unable to eat the dish at all.)