If golf is a good walk ruined, then a truffle hunt is a good walk vastly improved. Louise East spent an autumnal weekend truffle hunting in Piedmont, Italy
It's fair day in the tiny Piedmont village of Moncalvo, and everywhere you look, there's an oddity to catch the eye. Whole pears baked into a pastry coffin. Fat chunks of pancetta sandwiched between slabs of birch wood. Loaves of bread shaped like totem poles. But oddest of all is the smell: woody, slightly fungal with top notes of leather, and possibly sweat, it can only be the scent of white truffle. If this was a top-notch restaurant, that smell would signal the arrival of a very, very expensive dinner. But here in the hills of the Langhe and Roero, white truffles grow on, or at least under, the trees.
Moncalvo's fair is to celebrate the start of the white truffle season, with stalls selling truffle salami, butter and cheese scented with truffle, truffled honey, truffle oil, and of course, the truffles themselves, each sitting like a little troll prince on a dais covered with a paper doily. Gnarled, warty, covered in clay and dust, it would be hard to imagine a luxury with less charisma, yet a truffle no bigger than the top of my thumb is priced at €50 and one prize specimen as big as an orange is marked €780.
Rarity is the key to the exorbitant price. Unlike black truffles, white cannot be farmed, but grow with a wilful contrariness deep beneath the ground, feeding off the sap of oak trees in very few regions of Italy. It takes a dog, or, more infrequently, a pig, to sniff them out. Truffle-hunters, or "trifflau", have a short window from September to early December in which to work.
In addition, a white truffle starts to decompose after about 10 days, as top London restaurant, Zafferano discovered last autumn. A syndicate of customers, reported to include Gwyneth Paltrow and Roman Abramovich, shelled out £28,000 (€44,000) in a charity auction for a 1.9lb truffle. Unfortunately, the head chef went away, taking the keys to the kitchen safe with him and on his return, the investment was a mouldy fungus.
Here, at the truffle fair of Moncalvo, such hubris seems worlds away. Unlike the fair at Alba, which is overrun with tourists, the fair at Moncalvo is a thronging local affair, with the focus firmly on the truffle. Men with faces as dusty and gnarled as their produce stand behind picnic tables holding just one or two truffles, plus a scales and a calculator. When a customer shows an interest, a nail brush is produced and the truffle is gently scrubbed up. A lot of deep, pious inhaling takes place and finally, with an imperceptible nod, a €50 note changes hands.
In my own pocket, a roll of euro notes is burning holes. I have been commissioned by a foodie friend to buy him a fresh truffle, but with every truffle looking equally unappealing, and smelling divine, I have no idea what to look for. Luckily, I'm not alone. Also on the hunt for a truffle bargain are Eddie Hart, owner of one of London's hottest new restaurants, Fino, and Emily Fitzroy of Bellini Travel, who is officially here to research the fair and unofficially to source a whopping truffle for a friend's party.
Fitzroy, who has endless contacts in the area, gets on the phone and that evening, we visit Daniela Cortass, an elegant woman from a centuries-old family of wine makers, who has recently opened up the family home, Cascina di Orsolina, as a guest house. Over a glass of Barbera d'Asti and some buttery toma di Mondovi cheese, Daniela tells us the Piedmontese are notorious throughout Italy for their secrecy. Trifflau go hunting before it gets light and keep a measly pea-sized truffle in one pocket to display, should they happen to meet another trifflau. As for buying our own nuggets of white gold, Daniela looks a little doubtful: "You could ask at the pharmacy, I suppose."
The next morning we take some time off from the truffle hunt and drive across hills patchworked with vines to the small village of Barolo. I'm particularly keen on this little outing, as the wines made in this small area are among my favourites, but remain a passion I can rarely afford to indulge. Like truffles, Barolos are the Manolos of Italian wine, prestigious and vertiginously expensive.
At the cantina of Marchesi di Barolo, cutting-edge technology mingles with centuries-old wine-making. Rubber tubing snakes across the floor of a cellar called "the birthplace of Barolo wine". Oval barrels, 150 years old, sit side-by-side with massive new barrels constructed of Slovenian oak. In another cellar, temperature-controlled and double-locked, there is a library of Barolo wines stretching back to the 19th century, the war years poignantly missing. While we settle in for our leisurely tour through the Marchesi di Barolo wines, Emily makes a few more calls and returns triumphant. That afternoon, a trifflau called Ezio has agreed to take us hunting in the oak woods behind his house in nearby Monchiero.
When we arrive, there's no sign of Ezio, but his wife Clelia is feeding thin, yellow strips of pasta through a small hand-propelled mangle to make tajarin, a thin tagliatelle. Clelia, the daughter of a trifflau, and now the wife of one, admits with a laugh, that she has only gone hunting, "once or twice".
Ezio ducks in through the back door, looking every inch the 21st century woodsman in his plaid shirt, many-pocketed waistcoat and baseball cap. He has been attending to what he mysteriously describes as a "truffle emergency" at a local restaurant. Outside, his dog Joly is bouncing and yelping, anxious to be off. A well-trained truffle dog can cost up to €3,000, and mongrels are preferred to pedigree dogs. Contrary to popular belief, pigs are rarely used as they have a tendency to scoff the truffles.
We set off through a forest of saplings, scuffing up yellow and pink oak leaves and crunching hazelnuts and acorns underfoot. If, as Mark Twain has it, golf is a good walk ruined, then a truffle hunt is a good walk immeasurably improved. With Joly high-stepping and sniffing, and Ezio keeping her focused with odd little cries of "Booja, booja, su, su", this has all the excitement and anticipation of a treasure hunt for adults.
All at once, Joly takes a great interest in a stand of young hazel, but Ezio is curiously unexcited and sure enough, the truffle unearthed is a black one. Ezio stuffs it in his pocket with a scornful, "che carbon", or "what coal". We walk on until all at once Joly halts, re-traces her steps and scrapes furiously at the leaves and clay. Quickly, Ezio rewards her with a chunk of dog biscuit, and taking an iron hoe, or sapin, from his jacket pocket, gestures us down to ground level.
Kneeling on a gaudy rug of red and yellow leaves, I stick my nose into the hollow and take a good, long sniff. Musty and autumnal, the strange smell of a white truffle makes perfect sense in its home surroundings. While he chips away the earth, Ezio explains how it is only when a truffle reaches maturity that it sends out the distinctive smell picked up by the dogs. "Another trifflau could have walked past here 30 minutes ago and not found this because it only at this moment started to smell."
The woods of Monchiero are not large, and competition among the small band of licensed trifflau is fierce. "We're friends all year," Ezio says. "Drinking, playing cards together, the lot. But come September, no more."
Over the course of our afternoon hunt, we excavate two more white truffles and another black; enough for Emily and I to bring back to London, and Eddie can buy a consignment for his restaurant from Ezio's stash. Back at the house, Clelia prepares a meal to celebrate; vitello tonnato, a classic local dish of wafer-thin cold veal with tuna,followed by bowls of the tajarin we saw her making, sluiced with hot butter and sage.
Ezio, master of ceremonies, holds a white truffle over each plate, and with the words, "Magic rain" releases a shower of shavings, which look not unlike nutmeg, or scraps of MDF. Oddly, if you pluck one out and eat it on its own, it tastes of very little, but the truffle's unique selling point is its Midas ability to transform everything it touches. When Ezio's magic rain hits the hot, buttery pasta, every mouthful is rich with the haunting, haughty taste of white truffle.
Like many of life's highly-priced and hard to come by foods - Beluga caviar, puffer fish, Kobe beef - there's certainly an element of emperor's new clothes to the white truffle. Is one piece of fungus worth €44,000, even before it rots? Almost definitely not. Is a restaurant dish of fresh truffle risotto worth €130? Again, probably not, unless you have the kind of deep pockets which encourage the eating of Beluga sandwiches in the bath.
But to tramp through the woods of northern Italy hoping for the white gleam of a truffle amidst the red and yellow of fallen leaves, gives a whole new meaning to the term highly-prized. Searching for truffles transforms you from a 21st century hunter-ditherer back to something approaching a hunter-gatherer, and the resulting pasta sauce is about as far removed as you can get from a ready-meal. Costly maybe; priceless certainly. u
Louise East was a guest of Bellini Travel (00-44-207-4378918, www.bellinitravel.com), who can tailor-make a truffle-hunting trip in Piedmont, with prices starting from £650. Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) operates daily flights from Stansted to Turin. BA (www.britishairways.com) flies from Gatwick to Turin.