The Langhe Hills around Alba, Italy, produce wine and the famous white truffles. Giovanni Monchiero digs for a truffle his dog Erculo has just sniffed out.
(Stillman Rogers Photography)
Italy’s ‘white diamonds’ as precious as the gem
The Langhe Hills around Alba, Italy, produce wine and the famous white truffles. Giovanni Monchiero digs for a truffle his dog Erculo has just sniffed out.
(Stillman Rogers Photography)
ALBA, Italy - Dry oak leaves rustle underfoot as Giovanni Monchiero and I, accompanied by a brown-and-white mongrel named Erculo, enter the forest deep in the Langhe Hills, in Italy’s southern Piemonte region. Although Erculo looks pretty ordinary, he’s an experienced hunting dog, a far more valuable credential here than a pedigree.
This is the kind of hunting I like: no one warning me to walk more quietly, nothing to carry but a little cloth bag. I don’t even need to keep a sharp lookout. Erculo will do that. I can just enjoy the forest and the brisk October day, and hope to return in time for dinner with my quarry - gnarled little knobs that I will eat only in tiny slivers.
I’m hunting truffles. White truffles, to be exact. From October through December, in the area around Alba, life revolves around these precious fungi, known as “white diamonds.’’ Michelin-starred chefs pay hundreds of dollars just to add a few parchment-thin shavings of Alba white truffles to a signature dish.
While the chefs gather for the annual truffle auction, “trifolai,’’ the truffle hunters, take their dogs into the misty woods by dark of night to find their treasure. They go at night to make it harder for competitors to follow them to their most prized collecting spots. I’m going by day because this is Monchiero’s land, close to his University of Truffle Hunting Dogs in Roddi, south of Alba.
Erculo puts his pointy little nose to the ground and begins to dig furiously. Monchiero lets him dig only long enough to get close, then pulls him back and carefully finishes the excavations himself, turning up a truffle about half the size of a walnut. Erculo gets his reward, a piece of bread that has been rubbed with truffle.
I get a more generous taste the next morning at breakfast in the huge tent of the Alba White Truffle Fair. As I step inside, the air is so full of the heady fragrance of truffles, which sell for $2,000 a pound, that I suspect my entrance fee is just for inhaling.
Under the tent rows of regional food producers display the Piemonte’s best, which many think are also the best of Italy. Cheesemakers offer samples of gorgonzola, vying with butchers coaxing passersby to take thin slivers of salami and even thinner of prosciutto, both from nearby Bra, famous for its cured meats.
A rosy-cheeked farmer proffers generous chunks of tangy Cheverin and of Toma, one of the Piemonte’s best-known mountain cheeses. Tempting me in the neighboring booth are samples of hazelnut cake from Cortemilia and fat Piemonte hazelnuts, roasted and offered in rich, dark chocolate. The trifolai with their little stacks of truffles make deals with the chefs and traders.
At the back of the tent, people stand around tables, savoring dishes of fried eggs. I join a short line and wait for my own, watching the black-coated truffle slicer, his hands in a blur of motion above each plate as he shaves precious white truffles over the still-sizzling eggs. The eggs are accompanied by a glass of Barolo, the Piemonte’s signature wine. This is no ordinary breakfast.
Travelers to the
The fair gives me ample information to plan my food tour of the Langhe and Roero area. All I need is a stop at the regional tourist office beside the Duomo, the cathedral church, for maps and a few brochures. I detour across the piazza for lunch at the Michelin-starred restaurant Piazza Duomo, whose street-level bistro, La Piola, serves a less rarified but superb menu of regional specialties, including agnolotti, the local ravioli.
Before leaving town, I stock up on guilt-free hazelnut cookies at Golosi di Salute, a bake shop cafe on Piazza Rossetti, behind the Duomo. Chef Luca Montersino specializes in healthy treats for people with food allergies and intolerances; his low-cholesterol cookies contain no eggs or hydrogenated fats, but you’d never guess from the flavor. Even the sinfully delicious sachertorte is made without dairy products, gluten, or sugar.
To learn how to cook the local dishes or taste wines with a more educated palate, I could have chosen a full- or half-day class or wine-tasting lesson in a historic villa, or seen boomerang-shaped Krumiri Rossi baked by the cookie-maker in Casale Monferrato, where they have been produced since 1878. A honey trail (the tourist office has brochures of the route) leads to samples of chestnut blossom honey, so rich and dark that it’s often served to accompany the region’s assertive mountain cheeses.
At Cascina del Cornale, a farmers’ cooperative in Magliano Alfieri, I learn about the giant Madernassa pear trees and taste their rare fruit, as well as a staggering assortment of artisanal cheeses at the farm shop and in the restaurant.
Recalling the hunt with Monchiero, as we climbed back up the hillside that afternoon, I asked whether Erculo ever reached the truffle before he could pull him off. “It is a sad thing,’’ Monchiero sighed in his thick Piemonte accent, “to watch a dog down 300 euros in a single gulp.’’
Barbara Radcliffe Rogers can be reached at rogerswriters@ne.rr .com. 
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