Last year, we travelled to the beautiful Istrian peninsula in Croatia with our friends Jack and Will, better known as the Fallow Chefs, to hunt white truffles in the magical Motovun Forest.

It was a fantastic adventure, and you can watch the whole experience on their YouTube channel.

We had such a brilliant time together that, a year later, we decided to reunite for a special white truffle dinner at Roe, their second restaurant in London’s Canary Wharf.

Jack and Will created an extraordinary menu, featuring truffle toast, potato risotto, cookie dough soft serve and, perhaps best of all, their now-famous fried chicken served with truffle honey butter. Not exactly a conventional white truffle tasting menu, but all the more enjoyable for it!

Throughout the evening, Jack and Will were on hand to generously shave our fresh white truffles over the dishes, filling the room with their incredible aroma. Among the guests was the legendary chef Pierre Koffmann, making it an especially memorable gathering of food lovers and friends.

A wonderful evening, bringing together some of our favourite chefs, beautiful food and the extraordinary white truffles that first took us all to the forests of Istria.

This November, our director Zak Frost will be joining some of our favourite chefs and venues for five special evenings dedicated to truffles.

Each dinner will be a unique experience, with exceptional cooking, beautiful seasonal ingredients and, of course, plenty of truffles.

We’ll be hosting alongside the chefs and teams, sharing stories from the fascinating world of truffles – the hunters, the forests, the different varieties and the extraordinary journeys that bring them to the table.

Places are limited and likely to sell out fast, so we recommend booking early to secure your table. We hope to see you at one of these very special meals!

Roe, Canary Wharf

Wednesday 4 November · Canary Wharf, London

From the team behind Fallow, Roe is hosting a special four-course white truffle dinner inspired by our visit together to the truffle forests of Istria in Croatia. Expect inventive cooking, beautiful white truffles and a chance to hear the stories behind them.

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Berry Bros. & Rudd, St James’s

Friday 13 November · St James’s, London

An evening combining two of life’s greatest pleasures: exceptional truffles and outstanding wine. Hosted at Britain’s most historic wine and spirits merchant, this promises to be a particularly memorable dinner, with carefully chosen wines to accompany the truffle-focused menu.

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The Woodspeen, Newbury

Thursday 19 November · Newbury, Berkshire

Set in the Berkshire countryside, The Woodspeen is known for its thoughtful, seasonal British cooking and its close connection to the ingredients it uses. A lovely setting for an evening celebrating truffles.

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Frog by Adam Handling, Covent Garden

Tuesday 24 November · Covent Garden, London

Adam Handling’s Michelin-starred restaurant is celebrated for its imaginative modern British cooking, remarkable attention to detail and theatrical presentation. A wonderful setting to explore the possibilities of truffles in the hands of a hugely talented kitchen.

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HIDE, Mayfair

Wednesday 25 November · Mayfair, London

Overlooking Green Park, HIDE brings together refined, Michelin-starred, ingredient-led cooking from executive chef Josh Angus and an extraordinary approach to wine. A fitting place for our final truffle dinner of the month.

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Can’t make it?

If you’re unable to join us at any of the dinners, you can of course enjoy the same wonderful fresh black winter truffles and white truffles at home – order by 3pm for free next-day delivery.

What an extraordinary evening at The Waterside Inn, celebrating an incredible 40 consecutive years of three Michelin stars – a remarkable achievement and a milestone in British culinary history.

We were treated to a spectacular celebration menu, including some beautiful dishes featuring our black truffles. But the most memorable moment of the evening was something nobody saw coming.

There had been no mention of white truffles on the menu, so it was a complete surprise for the other guests when cousins Alain Roux and Michel Roux Jr. suddenly appeared, each carrying an enormous white truffle. They were followed by a procession of more magnificent truffles, which were placed in the centre of the room. Within moments, their extraordinary aroma had filled the entire space.

Then came another surprise. A plate was placed in front of each guest, bearing the legendary Soufflé Suissesse from Le Gavroche. Alain and Michel then made their way around the room, generously shaving the beautiful white truffles over every plate.

The combination of that iconic dish, the incredible scent of the truffles and the theatre of the moment was something I’ll never forget.

It was a real privilege to be invited to such a historic occasion, and especially wonderful to see our truffles playing a part in it.

And beyond the extraordinary food and celebrations, the evening had an even more meaningful outcome: The Waterside Inn used its 40th anniversary to raise an astonishing £127,755 for good causes.

A very special evening, and one I’ll remember for a long time.

A very exciting day here at Wiltshire Truffles – the first truffles in our own new plantation!

We’ve spent well over a decade hunting wild truffles in the woodlands of Wiltshire, finding hundreds of kilos over the years. But this discovery is something rather different, and particularly special to us.

Nine years ago, we planted 3,600 young trees on a beautiful piece of land here in Wiltshire, inoculated with spores from our own wild English autumn truffles. The idea was to create a new truffle-producing woodland, using the very same native truffles we’d been hunting locally.

It’s a magical place, surrounded by ancient beech trees, with wonderful views across the Downs. Beneath the woodland floor, a rich, crumbly loam sits above a bed of pure white chalk – just the sort of natural environment in which truffles thrive.

And now, after nine years of nurturing the trees and looking after the land, we’ve had our first harvest – all small truffles but intensely aromatic. Not exactly a commercial crop just yet, but to us they couldn’t be more exciting!

It’s still early days for the plantation, and we expect it will be another couple of years before we begin to see more substantial quantities. But finding these first truffles here is a wonderful milestone, and we’re incredibly excited about what the coming years will bring.

English truffles for the future

Our ambitions for English truffle cultivation go much further than this one woodland. We believe there is enormous potential to establish new truffle-producing plantations across the UK, using native trees and spores from our own wild English truffles, and we are now working with landowners across the country to make it happen.

As a family business, with the next generation now beginning to take an active role, we’re always thinking about the long term. We’d love to see English truffle production grow substantially over the coming decades, and eventually for the UK to become a net truffle exporter.

If you have suitable land and are interested in establishing your own truffle woodland, we’d be delighted to hear from you. We’re always happy to share our experience and discuss the possibilities.

For now, though, we’re simply enjoying the excitement of those first truffles from the new forest – and looking forward to many more in the years ahead.

Last night was our son Ollie’s 18th birthday, so we decided to celebrate with something very special. What we hadn’t anticipated was that we’d end up eating quite possibly one of the most delicious things any of us had ever tasted!

At Ollie’s request, our dear friend Josh West, an incredibly talented chef, came over to cook his famous fried chicken and waffles with honey butter.

It’s a spectacular dish in its own right, but Josh had an idea to take it to another level: grate a generous quantity of fresh white truffles directly into the warm honey butter, then finish the dish with even more white truffle shaved over the top.

And, since it was an 18th birthday, we decided to go completely overboard and add a rather extravagant quantity of caviar too!

The result was extraordinary. As we took our first mouthfuls, the whole room fell silent. We just looked at each other in disbelief at how incredibly good it was. The combination of crispy fried chicken, fluffy waffles, rich honey butter, the intoxicating aroma of fresh white truffles and the salty bursts of caviar was almost ridiculously delicious.

If you’re looking for something truly special to cook for a celebration, we really couldn’t recommend this more highly.

Josh has very kindly shared his recipe below. Enjoy!

Josh West’s Fried Chicken & Waffles with White Truffle Honey Butter

Method

1. Make the white truffle honey butter

Place the honey in a small saucepan and bring to the boil, allowing it to reduce by approximately half.

Lower the heat to medium and gradually whisk in the cold, diced butter, adding a piece at a time initially. The mixture will froth as the butter is incorporated. Continue adding the butter until you have a rich, smooth sauce.

Remove from the heat and generously grate in fresh white truffle using a Microplane grater. Grating the truffle directly into the warm butter is a wonderful way to release its extraordinary aroma and infuse the whole sauce with its flavour. Avoid overheating the butter once the truffle has been added, as its delicate aroma is easily lost.

Set aside somewhere warm.

2. Prepare the waffles

Whisk all the waffle ingredients together until combined, then transfer the batter to a jug.

Cook according to the instructions for your waffle maker, keeping the finished waffles warm in a low oven until ready to serve.

3. Fry the chicken

In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk and a pinch of salt. Add the chicken thighs and turn to coat thoroughly.

On a separate tray, combine the plain flour, cornflour and another pinch of salt.

Take a couple of tablespoons of the egg and milk mixture and stir them into the flour mixture. This creates little clumps which will help give the chicken its wonderfully craggy, crispy coating.

Heat the frying oil to 175°C in a deep-fat fryer or a suitable deep, heavy-based saucepan, ensuring there is plenty of room above the oil.

Lift each chicken thigh from the wet mixture and press firmly into the flour, turning and coating thoroughly until you have a rough, cornflake-like texture.

Carefully lower the chicken into the hot oil and fry for approximately five minutes, or until golden, crisp and cooked through, with an internal temperature of at least 75°C.

Drain briefly, then transfer the hot chicken to a bowl and generously coat with the white truffle honey butter.

4. Assemble and serve

Place a freshly cooked waffle on each plate and top with the crispy chicken, drenched in its white truffle honey butter.

Pour over even more of that glorious butter, then shave an inordinate quantity of fresh white truffle over everything.

For the ultimate indulgence, finish with a spoonful or two of excellent crème fraîche and a generous helping of caviar.

Serve immediately, and enjoy!

We’re delighted to announce the return of our favourite Christmas collaboration – our Truffle & Honey Ham, made exclusively for Wiltshire Truffles by Brett Graham and his team at The Ledbury.

These very special hams are prepared entirely by hand in The Ledbury’s Notting Hill kitchen, using legs of free-range pork and Brett’s own carefully developed cure. Each ham is slowly roasted, then finished with 20g of our black winter truffles and honey from Aynhoe Park.

The result is something rather wonderful – beautifully tender, richly flavoured ham, with the sweetness of the honey complementing the deep, earthy aroma of the truffles. It’s a combination that works extraordinarily well, and quite simply the best ham we’ve ever tasted.

The hams arrive ready to warm and glaze at home, with simple instructions provided, so there’s very little preparation involved. Each weighs a minimum of 750g and will generously serve six people, making it a wonderful centrepiece for a Christmas meal or a particularly indulgent Boxing Day lunch.

Our Truffle & Honey Hams will be dispatched for Christmas week only, and as each one is handmade in limited quantities, we strongly recommend ordering early to avoid disappointment.

A very special collaboration with one of our favourite chefs, and something we’re enormously proud to offer again this Christmas.

A few years ago we shared our thoughts on the truth about white truffles – which goes into detail on why not all ‘Alba’ truffles are from Alba and the best white truffles don’t necessarily come from Italy.

Anastasia Avramenko has expanded on this in their article for Italy’s Tuorlo Magazine, which you can read here.

Truffles don’t know where the borders are, and suggesting they have changing attributes when they cross an imaginary, artificially drawn line makes no sense. We import a lot of truffles from Istria in Croatia which used to be a part of Italy. So surely, if someone says, Italian truffles taste better, the truffles wouldn’t change their flavour when they became Croatian!

Truffles have been enjoyed for centuries, but have been particularly gaining in popularity for the last decade. They’re now more in demand than ever.

We believe this is very much set to continue, as they are the perfect decadent food treat for the times we live in now.

Fresh truffles are such a magical ingredient and so versatile in the kitchen – delicious served simply but also capable of creating the most stunning combinations with many other flavours, working beautifully with every different food cuisine.

Natural and genuinely healthy

So many people around the world care more and more about what they eat. Truffles are one of the few luxury ingredients which are entirely natural and genuinely healthy – low in calories, high in vitamins and minerals. They’re also of course suitable for plant based and vegan diets as well as being free of all major allergens.

Good for the planet

Truffles bring massive environmental benefits to the planet. Hundreds of thousands of trees are planted every year specifically to encourage their growth. It’s a long-term process so these trees are left largely alone for decades, sequestering enormous quantities of carbon dioxide.

The truffles also help the trees grow stronger; their symbiotic relationship bringing increased nutrients and water from the soil to the trees, which in turn pass them energy. In fact new research is showing that symbiotic fungi are essential to life on earth, and could be an answer to many of the problems faced by mankind.

Truffles are grown and hunted largely without machinery or agri chemicals, and need very little labour – really just a man and his dog.

Therefore, because of the huge number of trees planted to produce them, their climate impact is quite possibly actually positive: their environmental benefits may outweigh their carbon footprint. Read more about our approach to sustainability.

Tiny food miles

Truffles are an ingredient that is eaten in tiny quantities, so even when flown around the world to reach their markets, their food miles are negligible. For example, the transport of the entire amount of Australian truffles that we import to the UK every year – about 1.5 tons, to supply hundreds of restaurants for an entire season – has a similar carbon footprint to just one average family holiday.

Better value than ever

Another big topic right now is the cost of food. Obviously truffles are a luxury ingredient, but as they depend so little on the energy, external inputs and mass labour that have pushed up other food prices, their prices have barely increased at all.

In fact we are supplying Australian truffles at exactly the same rate this year as we have done for the last few years. How many other ingredients do you know which haven’t increased in price this year? Therefore truffles are now much better value than they were when compared to other foods.

The future is truffles

So… healthy, vegan, not only climate friendly but actively environmentally beneficial, suitable for everyone and now relatively lower in cost… plus of course still absolutely delicious, decadent, unique, exciting and able to enhance almost every dish they touch to become something very special.

Little wonder that we are even more busy than we’ve ever been.

It was nice to be featured recently in a new book about truffles – “Truffle Hound” – by award-winning author Rowan Jacobsen. Rowan came to visit us in Wiltshire and it was a pleasure to show him a window into our world, as well as sharing with him some of our wider knowledge about the product and the industry.

We’re always slightly suspicious of TV, journalists and authors as so much of what’s written about truffles ends up being a disaster. However in this case we were right to trust him; Rowan is a sound and serious guy who, after two years of painstaking research, has produced what in our opinion is probably the best ever book about truffles.

It’s beautifully written and a joy to read, no doubt very enjoyable even for those that have very little interest in truffles. It’s also deeply informative and, unlike so much of what’s been written about the subject before, factually correct from start to end.

The book covers the darker side of truffles: the commercialism and stale truffles of the Alba fair, the massive industry based around synthetic truffle oil, and the systematic fraud on a vast scale by one of the big truffle companies in Italy.

However, it also sheds a light on a far more wonderful world of truffles – one that is infinitely more exciting: the passionate people hunting and working with truffles all around the world, the truth about where truffles really come from and the mysterious, magical world of this fantastic fungus.

Above all the book manages to put into words better than anyone has done before a feeling of just why truffles are so special, so exciting, so wonderful and unique.

We strongly recommend Truffle Hound to all those with an interest in truffles, or just a love of great food writing. It’s available now from most good independent bookstores and online at Amazon etc.

Kang from London Eater has shared this delicious grilled cheese sandwich recipe using our fresh black winter truffles.

Cheese, truffle, butter, all things that go well together. You need a lot less truffle to make this than you think. Only a couple of thin slices go between each slice of cheese. Leave it a few days wrapped tight, and the truffle will infuse the cheese.

Method

1. Get 4 slices of a medium strong semi-hard cheese (or whatever your heart desires, really). Either raclette (pictured), gruyere or young comte is my choice, and intersperse in between each slice with a single layer of sliced black truffle. Wrap tight in cling film, store in fridge for up to 1-2 days.
2. When ready to cook, temper for 30mins. Meanwhile butter two thick slices of brioche. If you have truffle butter, use it.
3. In a medium pan, melt a little butter until it starts to bubble and drop your sandwich in. When one side is done, drop another little dollop of butter and do the other side. Crucial step, believe me, it will smell and taste amazing.
4. Don’t let the sugars in your brioche burn, so flip it every 30 seconds. Once the bread has browned and crisped uniformly, turn the heat all the way down and flip until cheese centre melts. This takes a while. Slow down. Take your time.
5. With a serrated knife, cut off the edges, then straight down the middle. Admire your x-section, then quarter it so you get nice squares. Finish it under the hot grill in the oven at full blast for 30s to further melt the cheese.
6. Serve with pickles, endive or whatever salad you like. Enjoy.

Find more of Kang’s recipes on his Instagram.