Alba, Italy
Gastronomes and chefs have flocked to this remote corner of northwest Italy for 79 consecutive Octobers, in search of fall’s premiere food, the highly prized white truffle. Hallelujah and pass the truffle slicer!
Alba is the home of the world’s only International White Truffle Fair, attracting anyone who cares about the world’s most-prized fungus.
Called “the grey diamond,” because of it’s rarity,
astronomical price, and difficulty to find, the tuber magnatum pico is one of ten different varieties of truffle found
in Italy – but the white truffle is the one considered “king” by connoisseurs.
Truffles grow at the base of certain trees, chief among them oak, black and white poplar, willow, hop hornbeam, linden and hazelnut.
Hunters train dogs to sniff out white truffles (the dogs can be any breed – not any one has a particularly better sniffer for truffles, which grow underground on the roots of host trees at a depth of between one- and 24-inches below the top soil).
This young woman and her family actually were out in the wee
hours of this very day, digging up a dozen truffles, of which this was the
largest.
Trifulau, or truffle-hunters, as they are known, take their tabui, or truffle-trained dogs, and head to the forests in the early morning when the air is brisk and there are few other scents to compete for the dog’s nose.
Why anyone would pay $2,000 wholesale to a trifulau for a nodule of brownish-grey fungus that is 82 percent water and 15 percent mineral salts, is not immediately evident if you go by sight alone. These things don’t sparkle like diamonds, and you sure as hell can’t hoard them like gold. But buyers are lined two-deep at the truffle fair, engaging hunters to negotiate a good price for their gems.
What drives diners crazy about the greyish, brownish, tuberous nodule, which we inappropriately call a “white truffle,” is that it is like catnip for humans; there is something wonderful, exotic, original and peculiar about the scent that drives people – well, nuts.
I have read dozens of stories and articles, even a book, about white truffles and they all tell you where truffles grow, how they grow, how they’re dug up and how they’re to be used (raw, never cooked), but I have yet to see a full paragraph anywhere explain, in detail, what truffles smell like.
Why hasn’t a Robert Parker of white truffles come along to wow us with colorful descriptors in the fashion of how wine writers describe wines they experience? You know, they may describe a wine as having “a nose of strawberries, or blackberries,” or of finding a wine with “a forward expression of ripe red fruit,” or they may detect “notes of leather, tar, and pitch.”
With this in mind, I will make an attempt to describe the scent of a white truffle:
A fresh white truffle, not more than several days old, has an intense perfume of garlic, fresh hay, and mushroom, mixed with a delicate amount of the scent of slightly soiled undergarments. There are nuances of sweat in the middle whiff, and end scents resemble those of the underside of a man’s scrotum after a long bike ride. In a really fresh white truffle, there may even be a hint of musk, of tar or of exotic wood.
There! Now do you understand what makes a grown man weep when he comes within the proximity of a fresh white truffle?
More to the point, do you now understand why someone would happily fork over $250 an ounce (at retail, or in a restaurant) for this experience? (It’s cheaper to go to the gym, steal someone’s jockstrap after their workout and sniff it on the bus ride home... but somehow, that’s just not part of the Slow Food culture… )
The International White Truffle Fair has been held in late October every year since 1929 in the town square of Alba. What is so spectacular about the event is that, even before entering the fair’s covered tent, you can smell white truffles a block away.
Entering the structure is like swinging open the doors beside the perfume department at Neiman-Marcus – your nose is thwacked by a succession of heavy scents.
In addition to white truffles, vendors at the fair hawk fresh, canned, preserved and dried porcini, fresh hazelnuts and everything you can do with them, fresh regional cheeses and hundreds of local wines, meant to wash down aromatic white truffles.
The scent of the aromatic truffles on display (this must be the largest collection of white truffles under one roof anywhere on earth), waft through the tented hall, scenting your clothes.
In the car, on my way out of Alba, I found I had a desire to lick my hat, and tear off a piece of my puffy down vest to eat it. (If you forgot the part about “white truffles make you nuts,” go back to paragraph eight and start reading over….)
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