Dogs frantically digging through dew-covered dirt and heavily armed men with bags of money holding clandestine midnight meetings on country roads seem about as far from a plushly upholstered dining room as you can get.
But the escapades are all part of the quest for the most expensive delicacy in the world, the white truffle.
Throughout northern and central Italy each fall, hundreds of people and specially trained dogs hunt the truffle, as cooks throughout the world wait eagerly for the fruits of their labor.
The appearance of the underground mushroom belies its beauty and value to those who know the white truffle.
The pitted, unappealing lumps, which grow from an inch to a foot underground, are ugly. But shaved paper-thin over the simplest dish of eggs or the most elaborate foie gras or pheasant, the earthy perfume that is the white truffle becomes intoxicating.
Centuries ago in Italy’s Piedmont region, Romans hunted the truffle for its reputed aphrodisiac and therapeutic powers.
Today, Paolo Cerutti walks through a wooded valley outside Monta d’Alba, in the same region. He urges his 10-year-old-dog Kira along the overgrown terraced path.
“Mosta bene,” he gently says, telling the dog to search well. Unlike the French, Italians don’t use pigs to hunt truffles.
“They’re too stupid and they eat the truffle before you can get it,” says Cerutti, 38, a third-generation trovatore, or truffle hunter.
More Top Picks Best Table Lamps
“I’m not as good as my father or grandfather. They could sense the truffle,” he says modestly. At age 21, he was Italy’s champion truffle hunter.
“My old dog, Lucky, found 24 truffles,” he says. “The next best found only three.”
When Lucky died, Cerutti paid almost $4,000 for Kira, a mixed breed with a little hound and little something else.
“The type of dog is not important because none are born to hunt truffles. They all must be trained,” he says.
However, he cautions not to use a pure-bred. A good mixture is better; they stay calmer on the hunt.
His other truffle-sniffing dog is black.
“They’re harder for the other trufflemen to spot at night, and the competition is incredible and sometimes rough,” Cerutti says.
Forty-four other men in his village also hunt the truffle.
“We want to keep our best places secret. I’m not even sure my father has told me all his sacred spots, and I’m his son,” he laments with mock seriousness.
Kira dashes to an oak tree, sniffs the roots, moves on to take a whiff beneath a heavily laden grape vine, but quickly loses interest. She then darts to a nearby hazel tree, pauses, slowly examines the nut-covered ground and suddenly sprints to a spindly poplar 20 feet away.
She touches her snout to the ground, slowly moves it a few inches to the right, then a few more. She starts digging like mad. Her paws a blur, dirt flies everywhere.
Cerutti drops to his knees, shoves Kira aside, reaches into the fresh hole, grabs a fistful of dirt and smells it.
“The flower of the truffle. It’s here,” he says of the distinctive truffle aroma that permeates the light-brown soil.
“Mosta,” he yells and Kira buries her head in the hole and again the dirt flies, a full frenzy but only for a moment.
“It’s there,” he says.
Nudging the dog away, he brushes the dirt at the bottom of the foot-deep hole with his open hand and carefully eases out a tan, golf ball-size, gnarled truffle.
“Too small,” he says, but some chef will gladly pay between $90 and $160 for it and use it to anoint the meals of six to eight people.
“But it’s better than Viagra,” he says with a mischievous grin.
The shelves in his small store in the plaza in Monta are filled with bottles of truffles in olive oil, and jars of truffles with whole anchovies, with cheese, with salami, creamed with vegetables.
“They live for such a short time. We must find ways to keep the taste,” Cerutti says.
Truffles have only a 10-week growing season, and this year a severe lack of rain in the Piedmont has reduced the already scarce crop. Prices in the truffle market in Alba, eight miles away, have doubled.
Last year in Alba’s market, hunters were paid about $615 a pound for the beautiful whites. Last week a pound was bringing about $1,280. And those prices can double again when the truffles are resold in this country.
Chicago chef Charlie Trotter recently bought a 1.2-pound white truffle for $2,200. He was told it was the largest sold in this country this year.
That size is rare.
“I keep hoping that I’ll find the huge truffle, you know, as large as a soccer ball. I’ll be rich, so I keep looking,” Cerutti says.
But he’s not doing too badly. The refrigerator in his work area has plates and boxes of carefully wrapped white truffles, some the size of fists, one as big as a softball.
“These will go to the chefs,” he says.
But not without some difficulty.
“Everything about the truffle is a gamble except the taste,” says Massimo Vidoni, the head of Boscovivo Tartufi in New York, which imports hundreds of pounds of the subterranean jewels each week.
The selling of truffles is filled with risk, intrigue and secrecy that would make Colombian drug cartels take note.
There are formal markets for truffle sales in places like Alba and the other major white truffle range, Acqualagna, near the Adriatic. But much of the trade is done by recruiters who work for two or three major truffle exporting firms.
“You try to recruit the best truffle hunters in each region. You try to get their loyalty, so when they get the big one, they call us,” Vidoni says.
It worked last year, when he got a call at 3 a.m. from one of his partners who had just bought a 2.2-pound white truffle from a hunter near Alba.
“It may be the biggest ever,” Vidoni says.
It took him one phone call to sell it to a New York restaurant for $3,600.
Headhunters for his firm and others sit in their cars all night or in coffee bars, waiting for the hunters to call their cell phones.
“Carrying scales, $50,000 or $60,000 in cash and guns to protect themselves, they meet the hunter in some out-of-the-way place where the other trufflemen won’t see them as they do their business,” Vidoni says.
“Competition for the white truffle is very rough. Last year, some trufflemen were stealing or poisoning each other’s dogs.”
Even getting the truffles to the chefs, especially in this country, is no minor matter. The life of a fresh white truffle is four to six days, eight at the outside.
“They’re sold before we even get them,” Vidoni says.
With the care and speed used to ship transplant organs, the truffles–chilled and fastidiously wrapped–are flown to New York, where U.S. Customs Service and Food and Drug Administration inspectors examine the lumps for dirt, mold and other unauthorized hitchhikers.
More Top Picks Best Ocr Pens For Reading
Every day this month, representatives of Vidoni and other U.S. importers cluster around the customs office at John F. Kennedy International Airport, waiting for the precious shipments to arrive and praying that a suspicious inspector won’t cut a large truffle in half to check for contraband.
After they pass customs, Vidoni examines, weighs and carefully rewraps them, then gets them on the next plane out.
Italy exports truffles almost year-round, and the prices and flavor vary as drastically as the seasons.
The jewel in the flavor crown, the white truffle, is shaved paper-thin and used as a garnish, never cooked. It can be found from late September to the first hard frost in central Italy, usually mid-December. Depending on availability, prices to the consumer can change explosively, running anywhere from $1,200 to $2,600 a pound.
The black winter truffle usually grows from January to March. It has far less flavor and should be cooked in sauces. It brings $300 to $400 a pound.
Truffles vary dramatically in quality and price. In Chicago, Treasure Island sells a 1/2-ounce jar of preserved black truffles for $7. Neiman Marcus’ Epicure department sells a 7/8-ounce jar of Petrossian preserved black truffles for $158. (Treasure Island also sells fresh black truffles for about $29 per ounce.) Fresh truffles are also sold via mail order through Dean & Deluca in New York (call 800-221-7714 or visit its Web site, www.dean-deluca.com). Fresh white truffles can run from $275 to $400 for 1 1/2 ounces; the same amount of fresh black ranges from $80 to $110.
The black summer truffle has a thin black shell and whitish-tan meat inside. It is the least flavorful of Italy’s three varieties, but can be used, in large amounts, to impart the flavor of truffles to a meal.
Black truffles are also exported in small quantities from France, Spain and China.
White truffles also grow in this country. The Oregon white truffle can be found in the fall from the forests of Northern California to a little north of Olympia, Wash. They cost a fraction of their cheapest Italian brother, about $100 a pound.
Are they good?
“It depends on whether they were collected properly. If so, they can be delicious,” says Jim Trappe, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University and one of America’s leading truffle experts.
“If the Oregon truffle is well matured, it is quite comparable with the Italian white, but therein lies the problem,” he says.
To capture the full flavor of any white truffle, it must be harvested during the very short window when it reaches maturity. Trappe and experienced chefs agree that, picked too soon or too late, the truffle can be tasteless.
“The dogs are trained to find the truffle by its aroma and that aromatic compound is only emitted when the truffles are mature and just ready to harvest,” he says.
But truffle hunters in the Northwest don’t use dogs.
“Here we use rakes to harvest the truffles, and they get lots of immature ones and old ones, which are pretty much worthless,” he says.
“If you really care about that intense white truffle flavor and you can afford it, go with the Italian truffle.”
TRUFFLED EGGS GUBBIO
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 9 minutes
Yield: 2 servings
Italian chefs insist the absolute best way to showcase the flavor of the truffle is to shave slivers over plain, soft scrambled eggs. But if that doesn’t sound showy enough, try this adaptation of a truffled egg recipe adorned with cheese and arugula, from the Taverna del Lupo in Gubbio, Italy.
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
10 arugula leaves, thinly sliced, optional
4 large eggs
3/4 cup each: grated
Parmesan cheese, whipping cream
1/3 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 ounce fresh white truffle or 1 preserved black truffle
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Butter an oblong baking or 4-inch gratin dish. Sprinkle arugula leaves, if using, evenly over bottom of dish.
2. Crack 2 eggs into dish, being careful not to break yolks. Whisk cheese, cream and nutmeg in medium bowl; spoon around eggs, without touching yolks.
3. Shave 8 or 9 slivers of black truffle, if using, into each dish. Bake until egg whites are firm, but not overcooked, 9 to 10 minutes. Remove from heat. Shave fresh white truffles, if using, onto eggs and cheese.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories ………… 735 Fat ………… 66 g Saturated fat .. 38 g
% calories from fat .. 80 Cholesterol .. 605 mg Sodium ……. 860 mg
Carbohydrates ……. 6 g Protein …….. 31 g Fiber ……… 0.3 g