Italian restaurants are beginning to gear up for the white truffle season. Penelope Walsh meets the UAE’s self-proclaimed ‘truffle man’ Massimo Vidoni to learn more.
Truffles are a delicacy that have come to grace the finest of menus at the most premium of prices. The most sought after species is the white truffle, a seasonal fungus, found typically only between September
and December each year. As the white truffle season kicks off in Italy, Italian restaurants play testament to this each year.
The truffle man, aka Massimo Vidoni, has made a name for himself on the restaurant scene, selling fresh truffles directly to restaurants, as well as truffle products (oils, salts and even a variety of acacia honey with black truffle pieces and 23 carat gold flakes) from his company Italtouch.
‘Black truffle you find everywhere, also even in Spain and France, but the white truffle is the king. It is only found between September and December in a few areas of Italy – Piedmont, Tuscany, Lombardy, and also in a small region of Yugoslavia [bordering on Italian Trieste].’
The less expensive summer truffle, he explains, has a mushroomy flavour, and are black on the outside, but white inside. ‘When fresh, they are really white inside, paper white’. The black winter truffle, in contrast is entirely black (inside and out), with a more nutty, almost chocolatey flavour. There is also a cheaper imitation Massimo reveals, which has been the subject of previous restaurant scandals in the US; the Chinese black winter truffle. And while the flavour cannot compete with the European ingredient, with the eyes, it is ‘almost impossible’ to tell the difference.
Massimo’s life in truffles began in New York City, where he was studying sales and marketing in the early ’90s, while working as a bus boy in an Italian restaurant. ‘Back then,’ he jokes, ‘all the Italians in restaurants were Italian Americans, you know, with no neck like you see on the Sopranos.’
But there was, he adds, a distinction beginning to be made between North and Southern Italian cooking in restaurants, although still not much of a fine dining Italian scene: ‘If you wanted to take your wife out for dinner, you’d take her to a French restaurant, or a trattoria.’
Massimo returned to Italy during a Christmas holiday, and in this time, picked up a kilo of white truffle (‘it was cheaper, because it was the end of the white truffle season’) as a present for his boss. ‘They said, he can get truffle! Even the white one? At the time there was only one person getting it for everyone in New York.’ The restaurant began entrusting Massimo to source truffles from Italy and, in time, Massimo was selling to restaurants throughout New York. The chefs were primarily Italian and Massimo was able to build strong relationships with them. Massimo’s own business later grew to include restaurants across America, in Chicago, Las Vegas, as well as further afield in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires.
Moves that took Massimo towards the UAE market included a increase in the customs levy placed on truffles imported into the US, at 100 percent of the truffle’s worth, although he does still work with the US market.
‘People go crazy for it in America – I buy a kilo of truffle, it costs me a thousand dollars, and they pay me three thousand’ he says, joking that even sought-after illegal items do not get that kind of return.
Truffle hunting, Massimo explains is a family trade that is passed through generations and the location of truffles is a closely guarded secret. ‘They have maps from their fathers and so on – saying this is the place to go to hunt.’ And the act of buying from the hunters, he reveals, is not quite in keeping with the glamour of this highly priced ingredient. ‘You have to go around with 40,000 euros in your pocket at three o’clock in the morning and meet people under bridges and so on. If the truffle is broken it’s worth less, like a diamond, so they might get a tooth pick and glue and cover it in some dirt to hide that.’ It may sound more like dealings with the underworld, than the makings of a Michelin-star menu, but then highly prized items always inspire high passion.
www.italtouch.com
Get your truffles
Truffles and truffle oil are available at Jones the Grocer outlets.
Various locations including Al Mamoura Building, Muroor Rd, Al Muroor (02 443 8762).
For a great truffle fix peruse the menu at Bord Eau, the TOAD restaurant of the year.
Shangri-La Hotel Qaryat Al Beri, Bain Al Jessrain (02 616 9999).
