‘Our taste buds have been corrupted by truffle oil’: Chasing the real deal in Italy

First, we take a coffee,” says Alessandro, striding to meet us when we pull up at the church in Pettino. We’re late, having got lost coming over the hills that surround this tiny village, but there’s always time for coffee.

Alessandro, whose family bought the land in 1496, hunts for truffles with the help of his dogs.Credit: Michael Gebicki

Scott and Nicole, an American couple in Italy for the first time, are already there and they’re excited about our expedition with Wild Foods Truffle Hunt. We’re ushered into the kitchen of a stone farmhouse, where Francesca pushes back a strand of fugitive hair with a floured hand and waves at us from behind a table that might have been carved with an axe.

Pettino sits deep in a wooded valley surrounded by Umbria’s Apennine Mountains, about a two-hour drive north of Rome. Everyone in the village is related. Alessandro is Francesca’s cousin. Her family bought the land here in 1496, although they might have been grazing their animals here long before that.

We’re just finishing our coffee when a tall, bearded man comes down the stairs. “I’m Mac,” he says. “From New Zealand.” We’re all so dumbstruck by this we forget to ask the obvious question, but Mac lays it out for us.

He was living in Rome and passing through the region when he saw a bloke with a big flock of sheep. They fell into conversation and when the shepherd said he’d be driving the sheep into new pastures the next day, Mac asked if he could come along. Before dawn the next morning he knocked at the door as arranged, Francesca opened it, and the rest is history.

Luca, another villager and the local dog wrangler, comes with us for the truffle hunt. There are half-a-dozen cross-breed English setter and springer spaniels waiting in the back of a pair of battered Ford pick-ups, and we pile in and head into the hills.

The dogs eagerly await a treat of cheese.Credit: Michael Gebicki

We stop on a high ridge and set off on foot along a narrow track snaking between hornbeam and oak trees, following wagging tails. It has rained in the night and that makes it harder for the dogs to locate the scent, Mac warns us, but within 50 metres the dogs huddle and paw the earth.

Luca scrapes the ground gingerly with a mattock, then fingers, and comes back with a golf-ball-sized truffle. At this time of the year, there are winter black truffles but also the first of the summer whites. “Whites are a more delicate flavour,” Mac tells us, “and they’re more expensive, but they’re smaller and don’t last as well.”

Black truffles.Credit: Michael Gebicki

Over the next half hour, the dogs find a dozen black truffles, plus a couple of marble-sized whites. They’re unimpressive, clotted with earth, and they barely smell. The scales show 150g, worth about €20 ($31), Mac tells us.

Luca, meanwhile, is cutting up cheese and tossing it to the dogs. We drink prosecco while Alessandro cooks eggs the colour of raw sunlight in a pan, then shaves a delicate topping of truffle on each one. The flavour is mild, with just a hint of the powerful, earthy taste I’m expecting.

“We’ve all had our taste buds corrupted by truffle oil,” says Mac, “but the truth is there’s not even a gram of truffle in most truffle oils. It’s all chemistry and it’s overpowering, much stronger than the flavour of a real truffle. If we walk into a restaurant that sells truffle dishes and we smell truffle oil, we walk out again.”

Back at the farm, in a room hung with prosciutto and salami, we have toasted bread spread with truffle sauce, olive oil, garlic and salt. It’s more assertive than the truffle shavings on the eggs but still a long way short of the potent taste I’m used to.

In the kitchen, Francesca is making tagliatelle. We’re served a bowl of steaming pasta with truffle sauce and olive oil, the latter made by crushing the olives using grindstones in the nearby village of Campello. That’s followed by a slow-roasted pigeon dish.

Alessandro prepares a simple dish of eggs with freshly-shaved truffles.Credit: Michael Gebicki

Apart from the wine, potatoes, olive oil and the semola used to make the pasta, everything has come from within walking distance of our plates. Dessert is honey flavoured with cinnamon and amaretti biscuits crumbled over sheep’s milk ricotta that’s been whipped with milk to the consistency of cream.

Rain splatters against the windscreen as we leave, ragged mist shrouding the forest when we rise into the hills south of Pettino. It’s been a day of revelation and I’m thinking about the bottle of truffle oil in the home pantry, now unmasked and destined for the bin.

More information on Wild Foods Truffle Hunt here.

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