When I was 15, I went to Florence and had my first taste of gelato and white truffles. I was ruined for life. A worldly friend who was all of 18 had spent the previous summer in Fiesole, living with a family friend, the widow of a sculptor. She shared her wisdom in brown ink on beige paper, and I still pass on much of her advice to first-time visitors: Go to Perchè No? for gelato, hang out at the Bargello.
The revelation, though, was her instruction to pause of a late afternoon at Procacci, the carriage-trade gourmet shop on the via Tornabuoni, for a tall glass of seasoned-before-your-eyes tomato juice and a few panini tartufati—glistening oval finger rolls filled with white truffle paste. The suave ceremony surrounding the homemade tomato juice, kept in a tin sleeve set in a mahogany counter, seemed like something devised for Hemingway at Harry’s Bar: It involved squeezing half a lemon onto a saucer and stirring the liquid with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce before slipping it into the tomato juice. The bread itself was seductive—lightly eggy and ever so slightly sweet, what the French call pain brioché.
And the truffles! A small sting of salt, and then a flavor unlike any I knew: less like a mushroom than some white meat like veal, earthy and pungent and garlicky. It tasted of parts of the body I urgently wanted to know better. This was more potent than anything I’d ever had, or at least anything I’d wanted more of.
After that trip, I set out on a lifetime search for that same excitement, going back to Italy as often as I could and taking cooking courses, sitting through 12-course truffle dinners, buying tiny cans of Procacci truffle paste with pretty turquoise labels. Then I graduated from bringing home tinned truffles (which tasted of the tin) to buying fresh.
Buying fresh truffles proved to be a furtive activity. While on my first culinary assignment in Italy, I went one damp and gray morning just after dawn to the truffle market in Asti, near the legendary white truffle capital of Alba, in Piedmont. Grunting men in shabby coats responded to my overtures in halting Italian only when they saw that I was with someone they recognized—a teacher who brought many free-spending, naive students. Very reluctantly, the men reached into their coat pockets for lumpy newsprint-wrapped bundles, making it plain that we foreigners were lucky to pay whatever price they named. They put a few pebblelike truffles to their noses and weighed the ones they’d decided to give us—inferior, no doubt, to the ones they were saving for their good customers.
I nestled my three gold-priced nuggets in Arborio rice and tightly capped the jar, following the advice of my teacher. (This was a bad idea, I later learned, unless you’re content to lose most of the aromatics to the rice; paper really is better.) Back home, I honored my hard-won prizes with homemade chicken stock, using the perfumed rice for a carefully stirred risotto. Just before spooning the creamy risotto onto warmed plates, I shaved the truffles over them with the gleaming bass-violin–shaped cutter I had bought with future article earnings.
I did not experience the epiphany I’d hoped for. The truffle-strewn dishes I had just been served in Piedmont showed me that fresh truffles were a subtler, more muted matter than the transfixing Procacci panini, though still strongly suggesting those exciting anatomical locales. The echo in my kitchen of this adult experience was far fainter than I had hoped.
I’ve had other truffle disappointments since then—not just in my own kitchen but in the kitchens and dining rooms of the expert buyers for whom those grunting Alba vendors were so obviously waiting.
“These truffles, they taste like nothing!” Tony May cries in the elegant bar of San Domenico, his New York City restaurant. San Domenico is the head station of the Italian-American underground railroad, the first stop for both Italian cognoscenti and newcomers who want to get themselves or their olive oil noticed in America. May is willing to spend good money on good ingredients like truffles, especially given his customers’ expectations. Italian food lovers count the days until the first white truffle appears—a wait that, unlike the staged anticipation of Beaujolais Nouveau, has not lost its cachet, at least not yet.
Once the season begins, friends will hear May complain aria-like (he talks in arias): “Look at that basket of truffles. I don’t want to tell you what Mimmo paid for it.” (His brother Mimmo imports luxury Italian ingredients.) “You walk in the room and you can’t tell there are truffles in the house. It used to be that if I had half this many truffles, I could tell from outside the door. It’s the same thing in Italy. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to sell some of the truffles I buy. They’re expensive. But no one says a goddamn thing, they just pay. Somebody has got to sound the alarm bell.”
If Tony May can’t get a decent truffle, something’s wrong. And so I recently went on a truffle-season tour of northern Italy to find out what’s changed—the market, people’s expectations, or the truffles themselves. I wanted to know why truffles seem so namby-pamby these days.
“How do I find good truffles? There aren’t any!” The speaker is Ugo Alciati, one of the three sons of the mom and pop who started Da Guido, Piedmont’s premier restaurant and, in the opinion of many, Italy’s best. A number of gourmands make annual pilgrimages to Da Guido to taste the year’s white truffle vintage, refusing even to sample what any other restaurants near Alba have been able to find—let alone those in Milanese or Roman restaurants, and certainly not Parisian or Californian ones. “Oh, there are truffles, of course,” Alciati says. “But really good ones are very, very rare. There are almost none.”
The whole idea of competing with restaurants in Hong Kong and Bogotá and Los Angeles baffles Alciati. “Truffles are the most perishable item in the world,” he tells me. “Who says you should be able to eat them thousands of miles from where they were born? I would never go to New York to eat a piece of truffle.”
Truffles are one big headache for the Alciati brothers. Rising worldwide demand raises the prices they have to pay the trusted hunters “di fiducia,” who come to the restaurant’s back door only if they have “belli” truffles that will please the brothers. In this context, “belli” means “smelly,” no matter how gnarled and unattractive the truffles are. Only four years ago, Alciati says, the price for the kind of white truffles his customers expect had gone up to $90 or $100 an etto, or one tenth of a kilogram (about 3.5 ounces). “We thought, mamma mia!” he says. “Now the price is never less than 300,000 lire [about $135], and last year we were paying 420,000 [about $200].” That’s not counting the dirt they pay for, from none-too-scrupulous hunters who don’t bother to brush the truffles very carefully. (Particularly unscrupulous hunters rub dirt into the holes, to add to the weight of the truffles and make them look less uneven.) Nor is it counting the natural water loss, which can amount to 5 percent shrinkage in just two or three days—or the truffles that simply go dead after a day and have to be thrown out.
That works out to a $25 surcharge, given Da Guido’s house standard of 10 grams of truffle shavings per portion of silken homemade tajarin (the egg-rich local tagliolini), say, or delicate tiny meat-filled agnolotti, or polenta with a very soft poached egg on top, or carpaccio of veal, or baccalà with boiled potatoes and anchovy sauce. The brothers feel bad asking that much, but they have no intention of cutting down on the shavings. Sorting through truffles one by one every day for the restaurant until they can find decent ones amounts to a public service for their customers. “We invest a ton of money in truffles every year,” Alciati told me with a sigh. “Often we wish they would disappear from the face of the earth.”
Some people are afraid they might—at least white truffles that announce themselves right away, which is to say good ones. Like Tony May, Alciati complains that he can’t smell the truffles when he walks through the door of his own restaurant—a huge change from his childhood. Truth be told, the truffles I ate in Da Guido’s downstairs kitchen, shaved over the crumbly local mountain cheese Castelmagno (another legendary local product Alciati gets the best of and thinks shouldn’t travel), were very pretty, with their healthy suede color and pink veining. But these—the best truffles Italy has to offer, according to Alba partisans—weren’t much more strongly flavored than the ones I’d had in New York at San Domenico the week before.
Finding truffles has always required as much patience as skill. Most hunters are over 40, in many instances already retired from other careers (the Italian pension system allows very early official retirement) and able to take the time to train dogs. Their foraging walks are guided mostly by the dogs, who literally follow their noses. The dogs must be encouraged to dig but not molest the truffle and are quickly fed a treat before they devour it.
Lately, the dogs have been as discouraged as their masters. Hunters in Piedmont are profiting nicely from the rise in worldwide demand, but not as nicely as they would like. Dario Rinaldi, a hunter in his early seventies who spent his life working in the local Ceretto winery, took me out looking on a favored hillside at one of the Ceretto properties. His movements were slow and spare; he made eloquent use of his cane to guide and follow the dog and to start digging where the dog paused. Sometimes, Rinaldi told me as he brushed the dirt off a “false truffle” his dog had found, he has to bury a real truffle in his backyard to keep the dog in training after too many days without finding one.
Part of the reason for the decline is dry weather—a blessing for vintners but not for hunters, who hope for the damp, cool weather truffles need in order to form. “Buon vino tartufo cattivo,” goes the saying: “Good wine, bad truffles.” There have been fine harvests in Piedmont for the past three years.
More menacing environmental explanations are also put forward. Acid rain comes first, and then fertilizers and weed-killers—hunters say they find no truffles near treated ground. Blaming pollution is intuitive, especially for Greens. But backing up these accusations is very hard, according to Paola Bonfante, a researcher in mycology at the University of Turin. Any data on annual fluctuation is guesswork: Hunters often sell white truffles on the black market to avoid taxes, which makes it impossible to correlate increases in acid rain or the use of herbicides and pesticides to declines in white truffle harvests.
The impact of other man-made environmental changes is indisputable. Truffles grow only under cleared ground, and many property owners—more and more of them absentee, as Piedmont acquires Tuscany-like status for weekend retreats—have no incentive to keep their woods well raked. The Piedmontese government has just stepped in, offering landowners a subsidy to keep their land clean during truffle season as a way of increasing truffle territory. And the widespread planting of fast-growing poplar trees, as a cash crop for making paper, in recent decades has meant widespread loss of truffle habitat. (Certain poplars encourage truffle growth; industrially raised ones do not.) The best truffle trees are oaks and willows, which produce compact, sound truffle flesh and the most perfumed specimens.
All truffles are the flowering bodies, or fungi, of great symbiotic underground networks formed by spores attracted to the root systems of certain trees. Many fungi can be cultivated by inseminating sympathetic tree roots with the right spores, planting the trees in suitable territory, and waiting. Black truffles have been successfully raised this way in France and other parts of the world. But white truffles are altogether more mysterious and delicate than black ones. Attempts to cultivate white truffles have so far failed, even after decades of waiting—and even after a 1980s tulip-craze–like bubble in which Piedmontese landowners invested lifetime savings in planting inseminated trees “guaranteed” to produce truffles.
This stubborn resistance to cultivation keeps Bonfante’s university department busy, and also keeps hunters working. Typical of association-loving Italy, each zone of Piedmont has its own organized union of truffle hunters. It’s hard to get hunters to take time out during truffle season, but I managed to convene a meeting of union spokesmen with the help of the Ceretto winery, which has strong interests in all things Piedmontese (Bruno Ceretto is an active member of the Alba City Council).
The men arrived wearing outdoor regalia at the modern offices of the chamber of commerce—just across the street from the vast Ferrero factory, producer of Nutella, which wafts the fragrance of chocolate and hazelnuts throughout Alba. With their gnarled hands and weatherbeaten faces and old cardigans, they seemed more like French campagnards than the usual Italian man, who is beautifully turned out regardless of social rank.
The hunters naturally want Alba truffles to fetch Alba prices. And they want to block competition from non-Alba truffle merchants who sneak into predawn markets from southern regions and from Slovenia and Istria, across Italy’s northeastern border. I heard again and again that a minimum of 50 percent of “Alba” truffles come from elsewhere, and some people say the total is closer to 70 percent. (The secretive nature of the business makes hard figures impossible to come by.)
Then there is the common method of mixing Alba truffles with pretty but dull truffles from other regions, which absorb some of their perfume. (Truffa, Italian slang for a cheat or imbroglio, derives from a Provençal word for truffle.) Tony May’s irrefutable complaint—his chief aria—is that mixing cheaper truffles with better ones levels out the quality of them all.
The unions have petitioned the government to protect Alba truffles with a “controlled origin” DOC (denominazione di origine controllata) tag. There’s a big catch to this plan: It would mean declaring sales and paying taxes. “We’re not selling drugs,” one hunter told me. “There’s no reason we should be hiding at 4 a.m. at highway exits.” But hiding is part of the whole truffle mystique. A regional exception to a national law permits Piedmontese truffle hunters to work at night—both hunting and selling traditionally have been done under cover of darkness—so as to avoid exposing special spots to rivals. The question is whether hunters would be willing to come out into the light to sell their wares.
These union spokesmen, at least, declare themselves willing to pay taxes in exchange for protection from rival regions that infiltrate the Alba market. Whether the drop in per-person annual truffle findings translates into overall declines in white truffles, they couldn’t say: They don’t keep figures. But they do know that more truffle-hunting permits are issued every year, as weekend hunters look to profit from increased international demand.
The hunters sidestepped my questions of whether overall quality has declined along with individual yield. Quantity and price are their focus. As for quality—well, they had given up potential hunting time to make me understand that their truffles are better than anyone else’s. “It’s always been easy to tell which ones are best,” one said to me. “The ones that stink the most. Compared to our truffles, everyone else’s are potatoes.”
To taste some “potatoes” for myself, I went to Acqualagna, in the region of the Marches, east of Tuscany along the Adriatic. People from Alba consider Acqualagna the realm of the devil—a gigantic producer of pretty, bland truffles that dilute Alba quality when Acqualagna smugglers drive the six hours it takes to get to Piedmont and palm off their goods as the real thing.
It hardly looks evil. Everything is more relaxed in this mountainous area, which, unlike Piedmont, produces all kinds of truffles in many seasons—particularly black ones, which many local landowners have successfully cultivated. Another difference from Piedmont is that hunters go out when they feel like it and when they think they’ll find the most truffles, usually in the early morning and late afternoon. They’re not afraid of the daylight.
The whole town’s economy revolves around truffles. The mayor, Giorgio Remedia, told me that he is trying to get more hotels built to attract tourists who can enjoy the salubrious air and go on guided truffle walks—something inconceivable in secretive Piedmont. “I want people to consume our own truffles right here,” he said. “Then they’ll see that they’re just as good as anything from Alba.” The only advantage Piedmont has, he claims, is being closer to the big cities of Turin and Milan, so that diners can have fresher truffles.
The mayor was extremely defensive of his truffles. “Plenty of Slovenian and Istrian truffles are sold as Acqualagna truffles too, you know,” he said, making it clear that some people are eager to exploit his region’s good name. And to drag it down: Eastern European hunters, unbounded by Italian seasonal limits, start searching before mid-September, which weakens the quality of later truffles and means the entry of lesser truffles at the height of the season. (The best time for white truffles is mid-November to early January—not October, when people start going mad to find them.)
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.