Fabio Luca Franzosi and Luciano Gobino with their $16,000 truffle

Every restaurant I went to in the wine country of Italy’s Piemonte region this month was serving truffles, because it was high season for the famous white truffles, or tartufi, of Alba. The season begins in early October and lasts through December, but people kept telling me that the truffle hunting gets better as the weather turns colder, so early November through mid December is apparently prime time.

While black truffles grow in various places in Italy and France and white truffles also grow in eastern Europe, only here do white truffles really show the, shall we say, assertive aroma that makes them precious. You probably have an idea of what they smell like even if we’ve never been to Piemonte (AKA Piedmont), because of white truffle oil. It smells very similar, but it’s muted compared to the real thing, which is as powerful and funky as a well-aged Roquefort, but with a more earthy character.

I say powerful, because you can smell it from across a dining room when the waiter, or often the owner of a restaurant, shaves it paper thin on a dish of carne cruda (raw diced beef) or simple taglierini, an egg pasta which they call tajarin in the Piemontese dialect. Some people need prior exposure to great primal food ingredients to appreciate white truffles. They’re pretty far out there on the frontier of strange things that people eat, along with raw oysters and squid in its own ink.

Chef Elide Margherita Mollo of Il Centro in Priocca, Italy, makes her own taglierini by hand with eggs and flour, then cuts it by hand with a knife into thin strips that she then dries

But with a little imagination and a sense of discovery, it doesn’t take long to appreciate the exotic richness that these tartufi add to food. Chefs don’t really cook with them, but just add them at the end like Parmigiana. Maybe the best preparation I tasted was a large ravioli that held a soft-cooked egg inside, and when you cut it with your fork the yolk oozed out. White truffle shaved on that was sublime.

This year the truffles were harder to find than usual, raising the prices. That famous 750-gram truffle which sold in a charity auction to a buyer from Hong Kong for about $210,000 brought attention to the high prices. That was about $275 a gram, but you really don’t have to pay that much.

At the Ristorante Belvedere in the town of La Morra, the sommelier, Luciano Gobino, doubles as the truffle master during this season. He brought out a beautiful 350-gram truffle nestled in a humidor-like box that one of the restaurant’s owners, Fabio Luca Franzosi, had bought at the same auction for a mere 11,000 Euros, or about $16,000, the equivalent of $46 per gram.

Alessandro Bonino of Tartufi Morra in Alba, Italy, with some inventory

When I spoke with Alessandro Bonino, whose family owns and runs a truffle brokering business and retail shop in Alba called Tartufi Morra, he said the going wholesale price was $6 to $8 per gram. This was the amount he was charging restaurants for truffles his brother bought directly from the truffle hunters whose dogs sniff them out around the roots of trees. This was still very high, he said, because of a shortage of truffles this season. When you consider that chefs here recommend about 10 grams per person per meal for a real truffle extravaganza, then the price is quite expensive.

Truffle hunter Giuseppe Giamesio and his trained dog

Thanks to the generosity of the chefs and winemakers I visited, I ate more truffles in a weekend than I’d eaten in my life. Despite their rarity and high price, however, the truffles are free in a sense. No one pays to cultivate them. All you need is a well-trained dog and the ability to rise at 3 or 4 a.m. to hunt them. That, and knowing the best spots to hunt. People say that any property that is not fenced is open to truffle hunters, and I saw very few fences.

So you run into people who have truffles in their pockets and in mayonnaise jars, seemingly no more precious than apples you’d pull from a neighbor’s tree. One of these lucky truffle hunters was Mario Roagna, whose family owns the biodynamically farmed wine estate Cascina Val del Prete and who makes a very tasty, international style Barbera d’Alba that sells for about $20 in the U.S. When I showed up at the family’s rustic homestead with his consulting enologist, Gianfranco Cordero, Mario was just returning from a short afternoon truffle hunt. He said he had had about an hour free so he went to check his favorite spot nearby and his dog quickly sniffed out a 50-gram nugget.

When he showed it to us I asked him how much it was worth, meaning theoretically. He thought I meant I wanted to buy it. He said “I give it to you.” I said, “Oh, no. That’s too generous, but thank you.” He insisted, though, and the Italians translating for me said it would not be polite to turn it down. So I got over my reluctance and accepted. I said we would take it along to our group dinner that night to share, which we did, devouring the whole thing.

When I came home I did a Google search for white truffles for sale in the U.S., and found that a number of companies sell them. Dean & DeLuca lists a price of $454 an ounce (28 grams), which translates to $16 a gram. You could say, then, that we ate the equivalent of $800 worth of truffle that night, split among a large table. Or at local wholesale prices, about $400. Either way you look at it, it was good. Oh, yes, it was good.

Do you have a white truffle story, or have you visited Piemonte and want to share a favorite restaurant or vineyard to visit?

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