An Antidote for Anxiety: Tartufi bianchi

with a few suggestions and a glorious recipe

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This is my friend Ladleah at the exact moment she smelled a white truffle for the first time. We were in Torino, in a very humble trattoria, when the local tartufaio arrived with his treasure. Her life has not been the same since.

November 4--My daughter is back today (in time to vote tomorrow) from harvesting olives at our hilltop farm on the border between Tuscany and Umbria. It was a good crop this year, not as bountiful as 2023 (olives, like many fruits, tend to produce more in alternating years), but deliciously sweet, probably because of the extraordinary amount of rain in September, says our Mr. Landi at the frantoio (the olive mill).

Late October/early November is also the season for white truffles. You might associate this phenomenally seductive fruit of the earth with Piemonte, in Italy’s extreme northwest, where the great truffle fair is currently underway in Alba. You can find out what’s going on, day by day, right here. Warning: Each year the hordes attending the Alba fair increase geometrically over previous years; it is no longer a simple village fête but rather a mass international celebration but it’s still loads of fun and interest, with lots of good things to eat and drink.

Fresh harvest in Torino, the tartufaio presenting his finds

But truffles are also found in Tuscany, the Marche, and Umbria as well. If you’re traveling in the regions of Central Italy at this time of year (and you should), you may come across a country restaurant with a good reputation and a friendly tartufaio (that’s the man with the dog who together seek out these treasures in the damp undergrowth of nearby forests), and there you’ll be introduced to the real thing. And you will understand why those of us insiders with long experience turn up our collective noses at anything that exudes the chemical odors of the dreaded white truffle oil. As a dealer once proclaimed to me: “It’s not made with truffles and it’s not made with oil, at least not with high-quality extra-virgin.” Instead, she said, it’s made with some kind of refined oil and a fragrance created from petroleum products.

That’s enough to cure most of us of any lingering desire for olio di tartufo bianco—a mere suspicion of the fragrance drives us away.

This is Teddy, a genuine truffle hound of the Lagotto Romagnolo breed. Why the typewriter? Teddy, explains his friend Marjorie Shaw, although trained as a truffle hunter, gave it up to work on his memoirs.

You can buy white truffles on line although I have never done so and have no experience to offer. The Urbani family is one of the most highly reputed truffle dealers, internationally noted for decades but firmly headquartered in their home town, truffle-centric Sant’Anatolia di Narco in the green hills of the Val di Nera, east of Spoleto in Umbria. On Urbani’s US web site, a small, half-ounce white truffle costs $160. That’s just about enough to satisfy me, freshly grated over a warm, buttery bowl of rich egg pasta, but not enough for second helpings.

A trip to Italy, going straight to the source, might be cheaper in the end, resulting in many more truffle experiences as well as a good deal more fun too. If you go, don’t look for fancy restaurants, above all, don’t look for Michelin stars (the Michelin guides long ago displayed an apparently unmitigated ignorance of what makes Italian food great), instead seek out those humble trattorias in smallish towns (Sant’Anatolia, Spello, Bevagna in Umbria, or San Giovanni d’Asso, San Miniato, Montepulciano in Tuscany, just for example) where the local truffles are offered only in season and simply sliced over fresh egg pasta or buried in a savory risotto or, possibly best of all, blended into a humble plate of uova strappazate, scrambled eggs. This is when you taste the sublimely transcendent flavor of tartufi bianchi and quite literally think you’ve died and gone to heaven.

Uova strapazzate, scrambled eggs, with white and black truffles, at Antiche Sere, aka da Luciano, in Bevagna

Can I describe that flavor? No, I cannot, although it calls to mind one writer’s description of the haunting fragrance of a very great Époisses de Bourgogne: “It smells like the feet of God himself.” So too a tartufo bianco is redolent of the earth, of mossy caves, of good sex, of fresh grass, and then something ephemeral that ties it all together and transports you.

However, if you don’t have time or treasure for a trip to Italy right now, save your pennies and when you can afford one (or more!) of Urbani’s genuine white truffles from an Italian hillside, harvested by hand with the help of a truffle hound, try the recipe below.

I will now turn the account over to my daughter Sara, with apologies to those of you who are not paid subscribers. Below the paywall is her story of an encounter with tartufi bianchi and a recipe for what to do with them; it comes from our jointly authored book, The Four Seasons of Pasta.

Tajarin ai tartufi bianchi