SHANGHAI -- When award-winning Canadian-Chinese chef DeAille Tam went into the mountains of Yunnan to help pick highly prized matsutake mushrooms, she found more than the terroir -- the flavors imparted by the local environment.
"It was the hardship," she says. "I spent five hours walking and trying to find those mushrooms, with a group of women, all small so they could make their way through low bushes and brambles, up and down through the trenches. That gave me a new appreciation of what comes into a restaurant and left me with a new emotion."
