Remedia was still bristling over a slight that the ubiquitous Tony May had recently made against Acqualagna truffles in an interview filmed in New York and broadcast on Italian national television. I had a hard time, in fact, changing the subject from the mayor’s attempt to extract an oath from me that I would make May visit Acqualagna to taste its truffles. (I tried and failed.)
It was hard to say whether Acqualagna truffles deserve the knocks they come in for. The mayor and I met at a roadside restaurant that he had chosen for its knack with truffles; he arrived late from his day job as head of the museum guards in the splendid ducal palace in Urbino, a 45-minute drive away. I paid close attention to the rather stingy shavings of truffles the waiter brought, over an antipasto plate of homemade cured meats and a plate of somewhat tough tagliatelle. The truffles were okay—nothing exalted, but certainly recognizable as white, and about as good as what you’d get in most restaurants.
Acqualagna is a truffle-packing center, partly because of its distance from the main white truffle markets and partly because of its location on an ancient Adriatic crossroads. I visited T&C, one of the most highly regarded of the several local truffle factories, which exports bottled whole truffles and truffle paste and other products all over the world. There I gained a clearer idea of why so many people, including me, think that white truffles don’t taste the way they used to.
I had no doubts about the freshness or local provenance of T&C’s raw material, having watched and chatted with a bulbous-nosed local hunter who drove up in his mud-covered car and marched through the door in mud-covered boots bearing wrinkled plastic shopping bags filled with white truffles loosely wrapped in a dishcloth. The hunter didn’t want his name used or his picture taken, to avoid tax collectors (tax dodging is an Italian sport). He chatted with the owner of the factory, a relaxed fellow named Maurizio Bernardini, about what a hassle shipping to America is, what with the FDA’s insistence that truffles be absolutely free of dirt and the market’s demand for perfect-looking specimens, which seldom have the best flavor. “I’ve become a grand signore this year because I won’t ship to America,” Bernardini said jokingly. “That’s un lavoro di pazzi”—a job for a madman.
With his Marches openness, Bernardini let me see everything at his plant, including the line where he scrubs and vacuum-packs whole truffles to bottle in brine, which makes them look like something from a pathology lab. Truffles must be sterilized before they are bottled, and they naturally lose a great deal in the autoclave; black truffles, which are never served raw and thus depend less on their volatile aromas, survive heat treatment far better than white.
The rosebud moment came when I spied a tall plastic cylindrical bottle labeled “Aroma Tartufo Bianco” on a shelf above an industrial steel mixing bowl still full of truffle paste. The address of a Turin laboratory that makes flavor essences for the food industry was clearly printed on the bottom. The bottle was right next to a big plastic bag of Sicilian sea salt and near tanks of corn oil—which Bernardini says is necessarily neutral, even though the Marches produces some of Italy’s loveliest olive oil. Bernardini had no apologies for using the chemical essence. Everyone does it, he said tranquilly, and he pays more than others for the highest quality he can find.
One whiff of the gaslike odor evoked the dozens of times I’d been enveloped by the stench of truffle oil dousing risottos and pastas and dishes of all misbegotten sorts at restaurants across America. These synthesized products are made from second-rate olive oil and a few cents’ worth of cheap essence.
It is possible to aromatize good olive oil with fresh white truffles, and some people actually do it—but only at home. Using enough truffle to confer actual flavor is prohibitive at the commercial level, and the oil doesn’t keep. Any bits of truffle at the bottom of a bottle of commercial truffle oil are sterilized, tasteless decoys.
This colorized version of white truffle flavor has as much to do with true flavor as cherry cough drops do with fresh sour cherries. And yet the success of oils, pastas, pastes, and flours that rely on these essences has greatly increased worldwide lust for the genuine article. Chemically heightened expectations can only be dashed by a taste of real white truffle, however near or far from the ground where it was dug.
I was in a place that proudly admits to using essence, something most producers hotly deny—and a place whose products are, in their way, far more honest than most. I realized that my own first time might have been enhanced, and not just by the “magnifying glass of memory,” as Victor Hazan recently wrote me about the folly of going in search of past flavors. I had an uneasy memory of the fine print on a tube I had recently bought on a nostalgic trip to Florence—something about “aromi naturali.”
“Do you know the truffle paste at Procacci?” I asked the genial Bernardini.
“Know it?” he replied in his booming voice. “I make it!”
Da Guido Piazza Re Umberto 127, in Costiglione d’Asti (0141-966-012).
Alba’s truffle market, the largest in Piedmont, takes place Saturdays during truffle season (October through December) along the via Vittorio Emanuele or the via Maestra, and in the Piazza Maddalena.
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