Background and Notes

I have been trying to find a way to make harvesting truffles easier. Having harvested many jars with my fingers and a sieve, I can tell you that it does get tedious. On top of that, it is not very easy to get the pieces clean, or even identify the pieces in the first place, causing wasted truffles/inefficiency. I think I found the way.

Obvious warning:
Do not use warm or hot water to prevent extracting any alkaloids during this procedure. While it might make sense to speed up the process (soften up the grains and cause them to fall off the truffles), we don't want to make a tea out of the jar contents. The grains will soften up and fall off using cold water just fine. Any alkaloids lost using this cold water method should be negligible.


Small Scale Version

Items needed:

• Sink with sprayer (or tub with handheld shower head)
  
• Two buckets (5 gallon buckets or similar)
  
• One sieve, 1/4 inch mesh (for example, the Bosmere N480 Sieve)
  

Steps:

• Open jar, break out contents into empty bucket #1
  
• Pour cold water into bucket until you have added roughly double the volume of the grain/truffle blocks. (Give yourself enough water to work with.)
  
• Put both hands in the water and start to break down the truffle/grain chunks by rubbing them between your hands
  
• Keep doing this until it is mostly small pieces that don't seem to break down any further. (Shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes.)
  
• Put bucket #2 into the sink or tub
  
• Put the sieve over top of it
  
• Pour the contents of bucket #1 through the sieve into bucket #2
  
• Spray cold water on the truffle/grains in the sieve while using your free hand to move the truffle/grain pieces around, allowing the remaining free grains to fall into the bucket below
  
• Pick out all the easy to spot truffle pieces. They will stand out as white-looking nuggets and flat looking brown shards (the flat pieces are the ones that were up against the glass).
  
• Repeat the sprayer step, this time pushing around the remaining truffle/grain pieces on the sieve a bit more roughly, to knock off some more grain and wash them into the bucket below.
  
• Pick out more nuggets that have revealed themselves. Clean manually as needed. (At this point, the grains are very soft and can be easily removed from the truffle pieces.)
  
• Repeat until you have gotten everything except for the tiniest pieces
  

Large Scale Version (untested)

Obvious warnings:

• Do not use warm or hot water
  
• Do not use soap, lol
  

Other Items Needed:

• Laundry bag--something woven tight enough to keep pieces the size of grains inside, but not tight enough to block water. I suppose a pillow case might do?
  

Steps:

• Follow the small scale procedure above, except:
  
• Empty the bag/jar contents into a laundry bag
  
• Seal the laundry bag tightly to prevent anything from getting out
  
• Put the bag in your washing machine, shortest cycle, using only cold water
  
• Truffles should be separated after cycle is done. Use sieve and bucket to pick them out.
  

I assume the large scale version could be used for small amounts too--the washing machine would take away some of the work of the small scale version. I am just worried that it might be too rough on the truffles and break them down too far. (Aside from having them in the water longer, which is something we want to minimize.) I'll have to give this a try next time and see how it goes.

Interesting, indeed! Having yet to harvest any sclerotia, this will be very useful when the time comes!

This was a great experiment. I was worried that I might screw it up and lose a whole jar, but I figured, what the heck, I have 12 more. The results are so clean that they look like the pictures of truffles you see for sale on the internet. It also removes the unknown pieces from the output--everything that comes out is for certain a truffle. Way more efficient than doing it dry by hand.