420 All Month: White Truffles

Just the name of this strain constantly reminds me of something completely unrelated to cannabis (or is it?): my wife and I accidentally turned our children into food snobs at such a young age that it has completely shaped the kinds of eaters that they have grown into in some really strange ways. And of course there’s a little backstory. When we were 20 weeks pregnant with our first, we went to an ultrasound appointment which was supposed to yield the sex of our forthcoming kiddo. While we did learn that information, we also found out that he had some heart complications that would require seeing a pediatric cardiologist fairly immediately. Which of course meant “next week, while you panic all weekend about this.” We found out he was going to need surgical interventions to reconstruct his heart over the course of three procedures across the first few years of his life, including one right after he was born and another a few months later. After he was born and had had the first surgery he wasn’t stabilizing as easily or quickly as expected and his stay in the hospital was much longer than we had planned for. Eventually after a whole other story’s worth of back and forths, we ended up home with him even though we were still dealing with in-home treatments that we had to be trained to provide. It was intense. Skipping to the relevant part, he went into heart failure at 9 weeks old, and we ended up back in the ER, where he was stabilized and in what was basically a medically-induced coma. Our two options were to bring him home and hope for the best or be transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital for a heart transplant evaluation. 

In Boston, we found ourselves living in various closet-sized parent rooms and dorm-style accommodations while we waited for and after the transplant. We spent our days sitting in his hospital room with him hooked up to all sorts of monitors and feeding tubes. He was able to be awake once we were there, but he was attached to so many things that we were fairly tethered to the space. The program at the hospital was really good about comping meals in the cafeteria and otherwise providing a lot of support for us as the parents, which was invaluable. But after a little bit of time – I completely forget how long – a nurse recommended that we make our way into neighboring Brookline to get out of the hospital and get a meal that wasn’t (admittedly excellent) hospital food. I think the blur of what was happening to our new little family had made us (I know for me at least) kind of forget that there was an outside world.

The first specifically recommended spot was a fantastic, tiny, corner-store-style pasta restaurant, Botega Fiorentina. If you’re in Brookline, Massachusetts I highly recommend this place. Anyway, to bring it around to white truffles, they have a house specialty which is basically mushrooms and peas in truffle oil over pasta, topped with parmesan flakes. My wife fell in love with this pasta. We’ve had to go back down to Boston so many times for check-ins and procedures for our son (who, at least concerning his heart transplant, is doing really well, and is 12 years old now) and for a long time we would pop over into Brookline on our way out for a meal before the two-to-a-thousand hour drive back to Maine, depending on Boston traffic. Until he decided that the only restaurant he would go to was the insane Thai place Dok Bua [edit: they’ve recently closed permanently, which is a tragedy] just down the road from Botega, we would grab some pasta and bring some home for whichever parent stayed home with his younger sisters. Add to this that my wife started making this pasta at home, and we ended up with kids as young as 3 or 4 who were really into truffle oil. I’m going to point out that we are middle class. But our preschool-aged kids would only eat pasta for a stretch of time if it had truffle oil on it. Tiny little pinkies out while holding those sippy cups, everyone. And don’t get me wrong, truffle oil is amazing, and immediately makes whatever it’s on seem classy and decadent, but we had it so much I actually got really sick of it, which seems crazy to me.

So, White Truffles the cannabis. Would that I had access to this in those earliest days in Boston, two of us trying to sleep in a windowless closet with just enough room for a single twin bed and… the door to open. The nugs themselves are the kind that when a customer asks for “something really purple” I always think of first. They’re a relatively even mix if pale green and a rich purple that isn’t quite black but is awfully close. The light brown pistils are some of the smallest I’ve seen, really letting you see the green/purple and the light frosting of trichomes. They’re generally decently sized and shaped nugs, with a dense form typical of many indica cultivars, and the flower leave a lightly sticky feeling on the fingers even though the bud itself feels dusty.

The aroma is really nice, reminiscent of truffle oil, even if it doesn’t smell precisely like it. White Truffles is a Peanut Butter Breath offspring, and it brings that rich earthy and herbal flavor over, topped with a funky skunky tone from GG4, its other parent strain. This might be my favorite spin-off of GG4, now that I’m thinking about it specifically. The smoke is clean, with a medium body to it, easy on the inhale and lightly effervescent on the exhale. As I’ve been writing so many of these this month, I’ve been stretching for differences while maintaining some amount of common vocabulary, and realizing that so many strains had different smoke experiences on the way in from on the way out has been a strange revelation. I hadn’t separated them intentionally or explicitly before this month’s writings, but I’m paying much closer attention to it now. Oddly, more have been harsher on the way out, where I would have guessed before I’d paid attention to it that it would be the opposite. Anyway, the flavor is pretty similar to the aroma, changing much less than most strains, only losing some of the funkiness of the skunky tone, and though the skunkiness is really mild it lingers on the tongue. I keep saying I’m not into skunky strains generally, but again, this one I like, relatively speaking.

The high is super relaxing. While I’ve never put White Truffles in the “knock you out” category, it can get there if you really want it to. The head high transitions from being gently stoned with a pleasant halo of fuzzy euphoria to heavily fuzzy and stoned. There is a calmness to the mind throughout, which ties it all together with a throughline of being chilled out. The body effects are somewhat predictable given the lineage and type of strain it is, but there is one particular noteworthy point, which I’d noticed with some other strains recently, but hadn’t thought to mention specifically, and now I’m wishing I’d written this down for the others as well so that I could remember which strains I felt this with. The body relaxation and pain relief from White Truffles did the odd thing where everything hurts a little less, except for one specific thing. In this case it’s my right hip that is being affected by a compressed disk in my lower back radiating out a nerve into the hip joint itself. Everything else hurting less made this stand out like crazy for a bit. I was able to get myself to relax it and the discomfort subsided, but I just find that so odd. A few strains ago it was my left big toe that is either arthritis or I strained it somehow recently. Another high recently left just my knees still aching. I’m not blaming White Truffles or those other strains. Sometimes a thing just hurts and getting high isn’t enough to fix it, and that’s okay. Regardless, White Truffles is a kind of staple strain that we see a lot of, so if this (other than the kid needing a heart transplant and my hip aching) sounds like a high you could benefit from, give this one a try.