A gourmet is someone with highly sensitive taste buds which give him a keen sense of taste for the flavor of fine foods, The truffle, you might say, is the catnip of the gourmet world, for it is said to have one of the finest and most delicate of flavors  It might remind you of the most delicious mushroom, perfectly prepared  But there are extra tangs and tastes‑that belong only to the truffle 

The mushroom flavor is no surprise, for the truffle too is a 'fungus plant, In both cases, the true plant is a mesh of fine, pale threads living underground and feeding on mineral‑rich soil, Such a plant is called a mycelium and it has no green chlorophyll with which to make plant food from air, water and sunlight, For this reason, it must feed on prefabricated food from decaying tree trunks and other loamy vegetation,

The chubby umbrella we call a mushroom is the fruiting body of the mycelium which pokes above ground  Perhaps a million dusty spores ripen in the gills under the round dome and take to the air  The truffle, however, never pokes even its fruiting body above the soil  It is an underground plant and unless some gourmet digs it up it never sees the light of day 

The fruiting body of the truffle is a round ball anywhere from the size of a pea to a small orange  For all its fine flavor, it i s far from handsome  It may be pasty white, dirty brown or smudgy black and its skin is more likely than not covered with warty bumps 

The fleshy heart of the truffle is wrapped around four, and only four, large spores  Far this reason you might expect the famous delicacy to be rather rare  And so it is  Not only this, the truffle has been playing the cleverest game of hide and seek with hungry humans since it was first sampled in the days of ancient Grease 

The stubborn plant refuses to give up its wild life and so far no one has been able to coax its spores to grow to order  The truffle has never been cultivated  For countless generations it has fought to hide itself from worms, flies, bunnies, pigs, goats and a host of other burrowing animals  These creatures, it seems, are also truffle‑loving gourmets  They are able to sense or smell the delicate odor of the truffle below ground 

The truffle enjoys its life of seclusion in open woodlands, often nestled in the calcium‑rich loam among the roots of an oak or ash tree  It is most abundant in parts of France and Germany and, though they have never actually been discovered, certain truffle fanciers suspect that there are truffles hidden in certain woodlands of North America 

In Europe, the human truffle fanciers bane for generations made use of the more sensitive noses of the animal truffle fanciers  A dig, a pig or even a truffle‑talented goat is taken out on a leash to a likely plane and allowed to sniff around  If the nosy animal becomes excited and starts to paw the ground, he is given a tidbit while his owner digs hopefully for a truffle,