Italian white truffle prices mushroom after a dry start to season

During a bumper year for Italian white truffles, one of fine dining’s most precious (read: expensive) ingredients, San Francisco chef Michael Tusk can get practically profligate with the aromatic mushrooms. He’ll even use them to top pizza.

“This is probably not a year for that,” says the chef and co-owner of Cotogna and the three-Michelin-starred Quince.

“Prices have doubled,” says Vittorio Giordano, vice-president of Urbani Truffles, a major importer.

Each autumn, truffle aficionados around the globe pay dearly to have the lumpen tubers shaved atop risotto, scattered on pasta, and draped onto sushi. But white truffles are finicky. Resistant to farming and highly perishable, they grow wild in forests, are hand-hunted by men with trained dogs or pigs, and are available fresh only from September into December. In 2016, there was an abundance of truffles, and prices plunged, but a hot summer followed by a dry autumn this year has made for a dramatically smaller harvest this season.

Fortunato Nicotra, executive chef at New York’s Felidia, came by “great truffles” at around US$1,300 a pound in 2016. This year, he is paying US$2,800 to US$3,200 a pound for golf ball-sized tubers. (“I can’t go with a little chickpea to shave in the dining room,” he says of the smaller, less expensive pickings.) Larger sizes are rarer, and anything weightier than 40 grams can cost several hundred dollars more per pound, he says.

“Let’s say it is a big problem,” Nicotra says. “I cannot double my prices. But I cannot be without truffles.”

Foodies who like to dose their dishes with truffle products needn’t worry – Giordano says the shortage hasn’t yet hit flavoured oils and butters. But diners may see slightly higher prices for the fresh, musky shavings on menus. Nicotra says he may have to increase the price of truffle dishes by US$10; at the moment Felidia charges a US$75 supplement for a dose of shavings.