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He’s found another one.

A few moments ago, Tembo was wandering happily along the track, mooching around and looking at a hedgerow. Now, he is digging furiously under a hummock, soil flying backwards as he traces the scent he picked up moments earlier.

In a flash, he has switched from relaxed amble to laser-focused pursuit, his ancestors screaming inside his brain as his quarry hoves into odiferous range.

Jonathan takes off in chase, scrambling down the bank under the beech trees after Tembo, hoping to catch him before any destruction occurs. He grabs the treasure, holding it up to the light to examine it for completeness and assess the quality.

Theirs must be a tricky working relationship. Tembo does the hard work while Jonathan is relegated to chauffeur and bag-carrier. However, the talented Tembo can get carried away with himself at times.

Most dogs do, even the ones trained to seek out truffles.

Jon The Truffle

Jonathan McGowan is a truffle hunter – or rather, the Tembo/McGowan partnership makes up a truffle-hunting team. They ply their trade as professionals in orchards across England and the Welsh Borders, locating the esculent fungi for the landowners. Truffles are nothing more than the fruiting bodies of a few distinct species of subterranean ascomycete fungus – they’re funky mushrooms that just happen to develop underground. They are ectomycorrhizal, symbiotic with the roots of the trees that they are found nearby, and their aim in life is to be eaten by a passing mammal.

Jonathan (or "Jon the Truffle," as he appears in my phone contacts) is, in his own words, obsessed with truffles. He got in touch with me a few months ago via Instagram, not particularly interested in my foraging courses or other wild food work – he was intrigued by the 1950s beech plantation that appeared in the background of a few of our course photos. It was, he told me via DMs, a likely spot for finding truffles – particularly Tuber aestivum (Summer Truffle). If granted permission to explore, he could confirm one way or another.

I scoffed at his naivety – everyone knows that North Wales is a famous ‘blank’ for truffles. We simply don’t have them here. The last specimens were found in the 1950s, mostly in Gwynedd and a few in Flintshire, with none found since. He countered with a few photos of truffles he found in a North Wales woodland in winter 2023.

I called him immediately and set up a date. The woodland he had spotted on our Instagram was one we rented to run our foraging courses, and if it was stuffed with truffles I wanted to know all about it. You can hear how that all turned out in this episode of the Wild Food People podcast – it includes hot, live truffling action from a damp woodland.

A British History of Truffle Hunting

Truffle hunting is like metal detecting – you can wander around and hope to spot something on the surface, but if you want to actually find anything, you need a good detector. The ‘detector’ breed of choice for many is the Lagotto Romagnolo – the diminutive (and sturdy) Italian equivalent of an Irish Water Spaniel. Originally bred for retrieving waterfowl in the marshland of Northeast Italy, they were later repurposed for their ability to sniff out truffles.

They’re certainly safer to work with than the pigs used elsewhere in Europe – it’s not unusual to find a pig-wielding truffle hunter missing a finger or two. Tembo is a fine example of the breed – springy and alert, with a tight mop of curls and keen eyes.

The accepted timeline for British truffle hunting goes back around 400 years, with a legend of a Spaniard who brought a pair of “Spanish poodles” to England, setting up shop in a cottage in the village of Winterslow, near Salisbury. It was said that he left the dogs with the villagers in the off-season, returning each year to hunt truffles between September and February. This continued for several years until he stopped appearing, and the dogs were left to grow in number until the villagers had had enough of feeding them and sold them off.

This dispersal of trained truffle hounds led to a 250-year dynasty of English truffle hunters, starting with a John Stone and ending in the 1930s with his descendant Alfred N. Collins – still of the Winterslow parish.

Alfred, who like his father before him, listed his occupation in the census as ‘truffle hunter and hurdle maker,’ was born in 1869. He began working to seek out truffles from a young age, using two ‘poodles’. If travelling within 20 miles of home he would commute by bicycle, with one dog riding in a basket and the other running behind – changing them over every 5 miles or so. The dogs were rewarded with a small piece of bread after each successful find, and were permitted to both ride in the basket on the homeward leg.

Alfred reported that in the 1920s he could collect 11 kilos (24 lbs) of truffles on a good day. The going rate for English truffles at the time was anywhere between 5 and 20 shillings per pound, depending on the source you consult. Sales were conducted by correspondence, with truffles being despatched by mail out to his clients around the country.

Loss and Withdrawal

The demand for (and even awareness of) English truffles waned somewhere around the first quarter of the 20th century - possibly due to the loss of rural knowledge in the carnage of the trenches, or the gradual shift from rural to urban living as mechanisation took over in the fields.

Habitat loss also played a role – the nationwide felling of hardwoods for the war effort. Truffles tend to be found in newer woodlands – less than 100 years old for oaks and 50 years for hazel – so the move away from coppice management and the lack of replanting may have reduced the potential habitat further. New plantations trended towards softwoods, and the huge changes in land management practices after the Second World War further compounded the issue.

Throughout the latter half of the century, there were whispers of truffle hunting happening out there in the shires; mentions of someone selling truffles in a country market, or stories of someone paying their bar bill with a box full of ‘black gold’. It became generally accepted, however, that the English truffle was lost – and only those wily Europeans had kept up the tradition of hunting them down.

The Truffle Resurgence

Like many things involving foraging and wild food, there was a bit of an English truffle renaissance in the late 20th century. Gourmet culture once again became popular, and finding weird and wonderful ingredients to include on the menu was financially and socially rewarded. As celebrity chefs and foodies turned their attention back to the field, hedgerow and forest - a few started looking out for the warty, black potatoes that once held so much value.

The rediscovery of the English truffle was driven by accident and rumour. There are reports of squirrels digging up truffles in gardens, of badgers excavating them from under hedges, and even gundogs returning to their masters with a soft-mouthful of truffle. Once people started specifically training pigs and dogs to hunt for truffles, they started to appear readily – it turns out that the lost English truffle wasn’t lost at all, we had simply stopped looking.

Commercial efforts turned to farming over foraging, with entire orchards of inoculated tree species being planted by diversifying landowners – the orchards that professional hunters like Jonathan and Tembo now work through every autumn. A bit like vineyards, establishing a truffle orchard involves some initial investment, the right conditions and something of a gamble - but once you reach the point where you are able to take a harvest you can yield a reasonable profit.

Chemical Oddness and Commercial Trickery

There are several layers to the complex scent of a truffle. The notable truffle-bound chemical that pigs – and trained dogs – are drawn to is androstenone, a steroidal pheromone that occurs naturally (and significantly) in the sweat of both male pigs and male humans. For the pig farmers in the room, androstenone is the active ingredient in products like Boarmate, the spray used to test sows for the timing of artificial insemination.

Some people claim they can ‘sense’ truffles in a woodland, that there is a certain aura around them. While I do not fully discount the idea that we have evolved some kind of shroomy-sense, what may be happening is that they are picking up this scent without realising it. Those who can sense truffles may just have the right configuration of the OR7D4 gene, an odour receptor that can trigger hormonal and biochemical responses in the brain – their mood changes almost imperceptibly when exposed to the chemicals released by the truffle.

There’s also some suggestion that repeated exposure to androstenone can change the way your brain responds to it; that truffle-obsessed humans can become attuned to the scent of fresh truffles through time spent around them.

When we followed Tembo through the woods, I took the opportunity to stick my nose into the spot where a truffle had just been excavated. The sickly-sweet smell of vanilla, milk, and… something indefinable was apparent – but only when I shoved my face right into the earth itself. The excavated truffles we brought home were a different story – the back of the truck reeked of truffles for days afterwards, and the bottom drawer of the fridge is still holding onto the odour.

You’ll find that fresh scent in commercial truffle oils and similar products, an almost overpowering essence that, amazingly, is a complete ripoff. Food labelling restrictions tend to skew towards safety rather than complete honesty about provenance, and a lot of what is referred to as ‘truffle extract’ or ‘truffle essence’ is actually ‘artificial truffle flavouring approximating the scent of some truffles.’ Most of the time, this will be the organosulfur compound 2,4-Dithiapentane, although you may find some products with a few shavings of dried (and odourless) truffle in the mix. The eye-watering shelf price of such products reflects the cost of that chemical ingredient – and the perceived value of anything with the word ‘truffle’ attached to it.

Increasingly Accessible Truffles

I would hazard a guess that we are on the cusp of a golden age of truffle hunting. Access to information and training resources for training a truffle hound has been made much easier thanks to the internet and social media, and the interest in foraging wild, edible fungi has never been higher.

More and more people are training dogs to hunt truffles, and I have three friends scattered around the country who have acquire a Lagotto purely for the pursuit of truffles. Wild truffles are repeatedly being found in places where they had never been seen before – including this October in central London by restaurateur James Chiavarini.

Judging by our brief excursion with Jonathan and Tembo, there are truffles in woodlands across North Wales and we are already planning our next forest raid.

Jonathan has also asked me to pass on his information to any landowners within a few hours of Cheshire – if you suspect you might have truffles popping up under your soil then please get in touch and I will give you his number.

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