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 fall, 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 fall this year have made for a dramatically smaller harvest this season.
Fortunato Nicotra, executive chef at New York’s Felidia, came by “great truffles” at around $1,300 a pound in 2016, he told Bloomberg. This year, he is paying $2,800 to $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 oils and butters needn’t worry—“Prices in preserved products don’t fluctuate because they are made with frozen fresh truffles, harvested the season prior,” says Federico Balestra, CEO of importer Sabatino Tartufi. 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 $10; at the moment Felidia charges a $75 supplement for a dose of shavings.
Instead, to allow diners the pleasure of eating tuber magnatum (often translated as “noble tuber”) restaurants will be eating much of the cost increase, which will cut into already slim margins. On average, food makes up around 28 percent of the price of a dish, Nicotra says. When you’re dealing with truffles, the food cost rises to 33 percent—this year, more.
“You don’t make money with truffles—you are providing a service,"”says Michael White, chef and co-owner of the Altamarea Group, who is hosting a series of white truffle events this November. He says just three of his staffers are allowed to slice the tubers. “There’s no room for error—this year, especially.”
Beyond simply reducing the number of white truffle offerings, or cutting them entirely, some restaurants will respond by serving up recipes whose base ingredients not only cost less, but also allow for a lighter hand with the truffles.