12/30/2023 0 Comments Boat iris watchWhen it turns out to be a false alarm, I literally yelp from disappointment. There’s a lot of false excitement - the first time Crno, one of the dogs, starts digging, I hold my breath while Ivan lays on the ground next to her and urges, “sho sho sho,” (“come on, come on, come on”). Ivan lets them run this way and that as they sniff out truffle gold. Truffle hunting, it turns out, is a lot like taking the dogs to an off-leash park. This being the first truffle meal of the day, we clean the plate.Īfter breakfast, Radmila’s son, Ivan, loads two of the family’s truffle-sniffing dogs - both female mutts (the males can’t stay focused, he says) - into his car and we follow him down the road into the forest. Once we’ve sampled her goodies at wooden benches in Karlic’s open-air stone kitchen, Radmila brings over a massive platter of fritaja, a local specialty that consists of gooey scrambled eggs (there are at least eight eggs on the plate), mixed with chopped black truffles and Parmesan cheese. Before we dig in, Radmila brings out a cloth-lined basket filled with white and black truffles - some of the black ones are the size of my fist - and gives us a quick primer on the two (whites appear in the fall and early winter, while black truffles grow year-round though tasty, the blacks lack the intense flavour and aroma that make white truffles so unusual - and expensive). We’re greeted with heaping plates of Radmila’s cheese, made from cow’s milk and speckled with black truffles, along with truffled salami, honey, olive oil and canapés of truffly cream cheese crowned with black truffle shavings. While the Karlic family - Radmila and Goran and their children - mostly make a living foraging for truffles that they use in cheese, pâtés and other products sold at about 400 restaurants and shops around Croatia, they also take visitors into the forest to forage for the coveted tubers themselves. It’s about a 20-minute drive from Motovun to Paladini, the small village where Karlic Tartufi, a family-run truffle operation, is located. In the morning, fog in the valley made us feel like we were among just a handful of people on an ancient island as the mist thinned, we could see Motovun forest, where white and black truffles grow in dense grey mud among the roots of oak and hazelnut trees. We arrived after dinner, driving up the village’s lone, steep cobblestoned road in the dark. We’d spent the previous night in Motovun, a tiny medieval town atop a high hill in the Istrian hinterland.
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