London gripped by truffle fever

10 April 2012

'Pound for pound it's worth more than gold/The longer you stay the more you pay/My white truffles go a long way.' My apologies to Grand Master Flash, Eighties rap supremo, but his thoughts on cocaine are equally true of the mania that has gripped foodies this winter.

The difference is that while you can find cocaine on every other banknote you handle, as well as in the lavatories of most self-respecting restaurants and parliament buildings, white truffles are not quite so readily available.

Cast your mind back to the mid-Eighties when cocaine was not so streety, when it was desirable, chic and not a little bit flash; well, that is what truffles are like now. If Miami Vice were being made today it would be set in Northern Italy, with Crocketto and Tubbsiano chasing truffle smugglers around the hills of Alba and through the vias and piazzas of Milan.

A combination of increased interest from Tokyo in the East and Los Angeles in the West has pushed the price of the white truffle - a subterranean fungus shaved over food to impart a unique pungent flavour - higher than such humdrum underground commodities as, well, gold.

Last month, restaurateurs, hoteliers and elite international gastrocrats gathered at a castle near Alba in Italy. They were attending the auction of something that at its most impressive is the size of a spud, and is found by a mongrel pooch under an oak tree in a Piedmontese forest. TV crews gathered. Exits bristled with security personnel. Far Eastern bidders were hooked up via satellite. And the contest began.

The biggest truffle - three grams short of a miraculous half kilo - went for almost £5,000. Rather more of a bargain was the two-and-a-half grand shelled out by a wine producer for a 436g truffle but the real steal was the measly £1,500 that one Japanese buyer paid for a 300g example.

Truffle valuation is a mixture of the carat-counting logic of diamond trading (the bigger it is, the more it is worth); and the geographic specificity of Classed Growth Claret (the white truffle of Alba is the P?trus of edible fungus). Then there are such imponderables as the weather, which in recent weeks has been atrocious in Northern Italy. Patrick Lynch, Harvey Nichols' vegetable buyer, agrees, 'Recent poor weather and landslides have meant that truffles are scarcer this year and, as a result, market prices have doubled.'

Mix in the mania that seized the Klondike in the days of the 19th-century gold rush and you have truffles becoming one of the most valuable commodities on the planet. And every year, as more of the wild woodland where they are found gets eaten up by organised agriculture, and new markets, such as California and Korea, clamour for the feral-flavoured fungus, they become more sought after.

'The truffles this season are very, very good but we have not got the quantity,' explains Alberico Penati, chef of Harry's Bar in Mayfair, which in the autumn becomes London's truffle central. 'I pay more, especially for the big ones. We now pay £2,700 a kilo, to be precise.' At some specialist gourmet retailers in Northern Italy the price is near to £4,000 a kilo. It makes one nostalgic for the good old days around the Gulf War when prices were as low as £1,700 a kilo.

'The Tartufo d'Alba is the aristocrat of truffles, the truffle of truffles,' says Andrea Riva who recently prepared a truffle menu for one customer at a cost of £300 a head. 'He had cheese fonduta with polenta chips and truffle shavings; pecorino with truffles; burrata with truffles; tagliolini with white truffles and sturgeon with white truffles and chanterelles.'

Where there are such huge sums of money, there are unscrupulous operators. In Tuscany, the poisoning of truffle hounds by rival gangs of fungus finders spilled over into the international arena, when dogs belonging to author Dame Muriel Spark died after eating poison intended for highly trained truffle hounds.

'And then there are merchants who try and pass off truffles from other areas as Tartufi di Alba,' says Riva. As well as truffles from other parts of Italy and the former Yugoslavia, Riva has recently heard more talk of truffles from Spain and even Morocco.

The problem is that with the increasing popularity of truffles, all manner of rubbish makes it on to the menu with the word 'truffle' or 'truffled' or 'truffle oil' appended; much as the word 'executive' or 'deluxe' is used to enhance everything from mediocre hotel accommodation to the kind of luggage that boasts combination locks.

There are chefs who just splash on the truffle oil, much as a famous pugilist used to apply Brut eau de cologne, seemingly without thought for whatever else may be on the plate.

When used to excess, truffle oil can impart an aroma that will make you feel as though you are eating right next to a major gas leak. As Jonathan Meades wrote recently of a dish of hare rillettes he consumed on a visit to L'Anis, it was so swamped in truffle oil that it might have been made of anything.

The solution is simple: if you don't want to shell out the £30 or £40 necessary to purchase a plate of pasta over which you will watch the waiter shave a white truffle from Alba, don't bother going for substitutes. A plate of risotto con porcini will cost you less than half and be a proper delicacy in its own right.

Besides, the white truffle season is nearing its end and foodies are already gearing up for January. 'In January radicchio di Treviso come into season,' says Riva of the bitter Northern Italian leaf that in the Veneto region has the cult following of truffles in Piedmont.

'You can have the radicchio plain with olive oil, lightly grilled with a touch of aged vinegar, made into risotto using Amarone wine from the area, you can steam it, boil it and you can even get radicchio-flavoured grappa,' he says, adding, enigmatically, 'but there is radicchio and radicchio.'

However, Riva says, 'Obviously the price of radicchio is nothing like as high as the cost of white truffles.' At least, not yet.

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London gripped by truffle fever

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