If you think truffles are just a chocolate treat, think again.
The truffle is actually a type of mushroom that grows wild in the forests of Northern Italy and Croatia. And that’s where NBC Chicago's Food Guy Steve Dolinsky found himself a couple of weeks ago, on the hunt for truffles that would eventually make their way to Chicago.
There are black and white truffles, both impossible to grow, so they must be sniffed out by trained dogs in the wild. Italy’s Piedmont region is world famous, but lesser known is the Croatian region of Istria, a peninsula that juts out into the Adriatic Sea across from Venice.
The area is known for three things: wine, olive oil and truffles, which are not easy to find, as Dolinsky discovered one morning near the village of Šćulci.
The first sound you hear in the morning is not from a rooster, but rather, a dog. Truffle-hunting dogs, that is.
Lagotto Romagnolos and labradors, they were trained since they were three months old, to sniff out the alien-looking tubers known as black and white truffles.
Armin Hadžić, a truffle hunter, said this year has been dry, which means fewer truffles.
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“Now they want to give you a lot of money just to motivate hunters to go here to try and find something,” he said.
If he and his dogs do find something, they’ll be paid handsomely. About a thousand bucks a pound.
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After a 45-minute odyssey through a damp forest covered in autumn leaves…success.
The Romagnolo hits paydirt: a white truffle.
“You need to have a dog who can smell one meter deep,” said Hadžić.
Back at Karlić Tartufi, truffles are scrubbed, cleaned and air-dried, then packaged for shipment to the U.S., where they’ll be on tables in a day or two.
In Karlićs’ dining room for tourists, they demonstrate their applications. There are four types of blacks, retailing for more than $500 a pound, while the rarer whites will fetch six times that amount.
“Why they are expensive, because they’re rare. Very, very rare,” said Lidija Sirotić, one of the managers at Karlić Tartufi.
Shaved raw, they perfume anything they touch.
“…from cold dishes – salami, cheeses…” said Sirotić.
But their aroma and flavor also provide an earthy boost to warm dishes as well.
“Like pasta, like scrambled eggs,” she said.
In the West Loop, Monteverde focuses on regional Italian cooking, namely homemade pastas, so truffles wind up on the menu half the year; especially now.
“White truffles, you just want to shave on top of something, you never want to cook with white truffles. Black truffles are the opposite. They have the ability to go with more robust flavors,” said Sarah Grueneberg, the chef-owner of Monteverde.
She currently has a potato and Montasio cheese-filled žlikrofi pasta from the Friuli region - a rich dish for cooler weather.
“Brown butter, a little bit of chopped truffles, and garnished with honey and then shaved black truffles on top,” she said.
Tajarin - a hand-cut angel hair - is tossed with European butter, rolled into a pasta log, then drizzled with Parmesan fonduta and brought to the table, where it gets a healthy shaving of white truffles.
“It’s kinda fun for the chefs to come out, and shave and get to meet the diners,” said Grueneberg.
At Riccardo Trattoria in Lincoln Park, Riccardo Michi has been buying truffles for nearly 20 years. Normally they’ll shave about 5 grams of black truffles onto dishes like warm polenta with fried eggs – the blacks standing up to the heat.
“Black truffle has a longer season, is more common. White, it’s more prestigious, it’s more precious,” said Michi.
But whites are also shaved tableside - tagliolini is a neutral canvas. Michi says it’s nearly impossible to describe the eating experience.
“It’s difficult to explain it. You have to try for yourself,” he said.
Monteverde, by the way, is doing a truffle dinner Monday night; tickets are still available. Several other local restaurants are carrying truffles from Istria, and you can learn more about who has them from the local importer – Tartufo Prestige Chicago.
Featured spots:
1020 W. Madison St., 312-888-3041
2119 N. Clark St., 773-549-0038
Tartufo Prestige
@tartufoprestige.chicago (Instagram)
If you’re going to Croatia:
