The White Truffle and the Dog Who Knows

A morning in Alba

Lead Long-Form Editorial · Releone Almanac · Issue One · Essay 05 Brandon Sellam, with notes from a hunter who asked not to be named.

The most expensive food on Earth, by weight, is not what you think. It is not the apex caviar from Iran. It is not bluefin otoro at the Tsukiji Tokyo market. It is a fungus that grows underground in the oak and hazel forests of the Italian Piedmont, that cannot be cultivated by any technique anyone has ever published, and that is found only by dogs who have been trained for years by hunters who do not, as a class, advertise their existence.

The fungus is Tuber magnatum — the white truffle of Alba. In a good harvest year it sells, wholesale, for between four thousand and seven thousand euros per kilogram. In a bad harvest year it can double. The catch lasts about three months, October through late December. The hunters work largely at night because they prefer the dogs not be seen by other hunters and because the cooler ground holds the spore-aroma the dogs are reading for longer.

I went out with one of these hunters in October of 2026. He had been recommended to me through a chain of three Italian friends, the last of whom called me from a kitchen in Bologna and said, Don't ask his name. Just say the word amico when you arrive. I drove from Turin to a small town in the Langhe at three in the morning. The town was a single bar that was somehow open, a single intersection of two narrow roads, and a small unmarked stone garage where my hunter was waiting in a faded Fiat with a small dog in the passenger seat.

He looked at me. He said, Sellam? I said yes. He said, amico. We shook hands. He nodded toward the dog. Cassia. Cassia did not look at me. Cassia was watching the door.

We drove ten minutes in silence. He did not ask what I wanted to know. I did not tell him. We parked at the edge of a forest that had no name on any map I had looked at. He opened the door. Cassia went out first, immediately, low to the ground, no leash. He followed. I followed.

The dog as the apex instrument

The Lagotto Romagnolo is a small curly water-dog that has been bred for truffle work in the Italian Piedmont since at least the sixteenth century, possibly earlier. Modern Lagotti weigh fifteen to twenty kilograms, have hypoallergenic curly coats, and are temperamentally calm. The temperament matters. A nervous truffle dog is a useless truffle dog because the work requires sustained attention to micro-cues over hours of walking on uneven ground in the dark.

Truffles release a complex of volatile organic compounds — primarily bis(methylthio)methane and 2-methyl-4,5-dihydrothiophene, plus dozens of secondary aromatics — that drift up through the soil in a column above the truffle's actual location. A dog whose nose has been trained to identify these compounds can pinpoint a truffle's location to within five centimeters from a meter away. A human cannot do this. No machine has been built that can do this at the dog's reliability and price.

Cassia found three truffles in two hours that morning. The largest was the size of a walnut. The smallest was the size of a hazelnut. The middle one was the most aromatic of the three. The hunter pulled out a small brass scale that was older than I am. He weighed each truffle to the gram. He recorded the weight, the location code, the date, and the dog's identifier in a leather-bound notebook he produced from his jacket pocket. The notebook had been kept by his grandfather's grandfather. It was in its eleventh volume.

I looked at the notebook. I asked, in Italian, how many generations had used it. He said, Sei. Six.

What you are paying for, when you pay for white truffle

You are paying for a forest where the soil chemistry produces the right symbiosis between specific oak and hazel root systems and the Tuber magnatum mycelium. You are paying for the absence of the soil treatments that would suppress this symbiosis — no nitrogen fertilizer, no herbicide, no aggressive forestry. You are paying for the dogs that took eighteen months to train and have been working for five to nine years before they retire. You are paying for the hunter who walks twenty kilometers a night, three nights a week, October through December, in cold rain, on uneven Piedmontese hillsides, year after year, because the work cannot be replaced by anything more efficient.

You are paying, finally, for the small notebook. The notebook is the operational record of where the truffles were found, in which years, with which dogs. It is the asset on the family's balance sheet that is more valuable than the Fiat or the small garage. The location of a productive truffle ground stays in a hunter's family. It does not appear in any database. It does not show up on Google Maps. The first time I asked my hunter where exactly we had been that morning, he smiled, shook his head, and said, Brandon. No.

I respected this. I asked him what he charged. He named a price. The price was not low. I paid in cash. He counted it twice. Then he handed Cassia a small piece of dried sausage, scratched her behind the ear, and said, Brava ragazza. Cassia wagged her tail for the first time that morning.

The relationship between Releone and a hunter

I am going to be deliberate here, because the relationship I am describing is the kind that brand storytelling has historically corrupted.

Releone uses white truffle from this hunter — and from one other hunter in a different Piedmontese valley, for redundancy and because the hunters do not always have product to sell — in exactly one Releone product. That product is the Bluefin × Tartufo flagship, which retails for fifty-eight dollars and ships in a one-hundred-fifty-gram glass jar with the truffle shaved over Sicilian bluefin tuna preserved in extra-virgin Italian olive oil.

We sell four hundred to six hundred bottles of the Bluefin × Tartufo flagship in a launch year. We do not sell more. We could not sell more. We could not source more truffle than this hunter and his counterpart can supply us with at the quality we have agreed to. There is no Year-Three plan that produces ten thousand bottles of the Bluefin × Tartufo. There is a Year-Ten plan that produces eight hundred to twelve hundred bottles, and that is the ceiling honest scaling permits.

This is the food that cannot scale. This is the food whose entire premium thesis depends on the fact that it cannot scale. The premium-food industry's deepest lie is that everything can scale. The white truffle is the proof that the apex of the category is, by physical law, small.

The customer who buys a Bluefin × Tartufo for fifty-eight dollars is buying a small share of a four-hundred-year-old continuous tradition that exists in fewer than a thousand households across northern Italy. The hunter wakes up at two in the morning so that the customer has the privilege of opening that jar in February in a New York kitchen. The dog walks twenty kilometers in the cold so that the truffle survives intact. The grandfather of the hunter's grandfather wrote down the location in a notebook so that the great-great-grandson would know where to walk on the night of October seventeenth, 2026, when I walked alongside him.

Every part of this chain is fragile. Every part of this chain is honest. Every part of this chain is reflected, with discipline, in the price.

How to actually use it

When you open a Bluefin × Tartufo jar at home, the first thing you should do is look. The bluefin is whole — not a paste, not a flake. The truffle slices are thin, recognizable, varying in shade from cream to amber. The oil is golden. The aroma rising from the jar is what the hunter and I smelled when Cassia found the first truffle that morning.

Take a clean fork. Lift one slice of bluefin with one shaving of truffle attached. Place it on a piece of warm sourdough that has been spread with cold European butter. Add a single grain of fleur de sel. Eat it before it cools.

You do not need wine with this preparation, but if you want wine, an aged Barolo or a top-tier Burgundy white (Meursault, Chassagne-Montrachet) will not embarrass the dish. Champagne is also acceptable. Anything more emphatic than these and you are asking the wine to compete with the truffle, which is a fight the wine cannot win.

If you are hosting, two of these on toast plus a small green salad is dinner for one. Four of these on toast plus a salad is a tasting plate for two. Releone Society Maison-tier members will receive a small printed instruction card with each jar; what is written above is the instruction.

A note on cultivation, which has not yet been solved

For four hundred years, Italian researchers have tried to cultivate Tuber magnatum in a controlled environment. Black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) is partially cultivable today through inoculated tree plantations in Spain, France, and Australia. Black truffle has therefore become abundant and cheap. White truffle has resisted every cultivation attempt at scale.

This may change. There is research at the University of Turin and at the CNRS in France that is making progress on the white-truffle symbiosis. Within a decade, controlled white-truffle production may begin to enter the market.

When that happens, the price of cultivated white truffle will fall. The price of wild white truffle from the Piedmont, found by Lagotti in oak forests in October at three in the morning by a hunter whose grandfather's grandfather kept the notebook — that price will not fall. That price is the price of the relationship and the discipline and the place. It is not the price of the molecule.

Releone uses the wild kind. Releone will continue to use the wild kind. When the cultivated kind enters the market and a competitor brand offers a $24 truffle-and-tuna jar in fifteen-thousand-unit allocation, Releone's customer will know what they are paying for and why. And we will keep selling four hundred to six hundred bottles a year of the apex, at the apex price, with the apex relationship, for as long as the hunter is willing to walk and the dog is willing to find.

This is the fifth piece in the Releone Almanac launch corpus. The Bluefin × Tartufo provenance dossier is at /collection/bluefin-tartufo. The Lagotto Romagnolo breed history is documented at /almanac/lagotto. Subscribe to receive future Almanac pieces in print: /almanac/subscribe.

— Brandon J. Sellam Paris · Livorno · New York Depuis MCMXCV