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"  It&amp;#039;s not about the price, which is outrageous. One ounce can sell for $200 to $500 retail, and that&amp;#039;s about enough for shaving a few slices over two or three plates of pasta or risotto. Of course, in restaurants, you can easily pay $75 to $100 for a plate of noodles with white truffles. At Thomas Keller&amp;#039;s Per Se in New York, a risotto &amp;quot;spiked&amp;quot; with white truffles is a $250 supplement on the nine-course, $275 fixed-price menu. Mario Batali is charging a mere $300 for a white-truffle tasting menu. And most restaurateurs will insist, probably correctly, that they don&amp;#039;t make any money off such dishes. At such prices, money need be no object for the consumer who can afford anything. But even the very rich must ask themselves now and then, Just what am I getting for that kind of money? The simple answer is that you&amp;#039;re getting a fungus named Tuber magnatum, whose best examples come from the Langhe region of Italy&amp;#039;s Piedmont. They grow symbiotically beneath various trees, mainly oak and hazel, and are found by trained dogs who sniff them out for gatherers who guard their sources \u2014 and dogs \u2014 like secret agents their microdots. The Piedmont variety is sold each autumn \u2014 mostly in October and November \u2014 then the season is over, so any chef who offers you a white truffle dish after December is either lying or serving you old truffles or truffle bits. There are some white truffles found in Croatia, and recently I had some that were said to have come from Tuscany, where the species is different, Tuber borchii. And the record price paid for truffles was in December 2007 when a Macao casino owner paid $330,000 for a Tuscan example weighing in at 3.3 pounds. I&amp;#039;ve also had so-called Chinese truffles (Tuber sinensis), which are truly blah. No, the reason I advise people to avoid white truffles is because their success as a seasonal extravagance over the last twenty years has poured such inferior product into a market that demands them. Few upscale Italian restaurants anywhere would dare not to offer them, and that has created a scramble to obtain them, at any price and any quality. The fact is, a great white truffle is becoming a rare thing. I recall that a decade ago, at a restaurant like Le Cirque in New York or Valentino in Santa Monica, you could smell the truffles being carried across the room. (Chefs who slice their truffles onto a dish back in the kitchen should be shot.) And when the waiter shaved them onto fettuccine or risotto, the aroma came up full blast and the flavor of them was quite literally like nothing else on earth. Since then I&amp;#039;ve had so many inferior white truffles and many thoroughly odorless, tasteless examples that I have become wholly wary of ordering them. In some cases, especially with the Chinese imports, the truffles have been sprayed with truffle oil to give them any aroma at all. In others, even if they smelled pretty good, the flavor simply wasn&amp;#039;t there. And this might differ from truffle to truffle, delivery to delivery. If I&amp;#039;m paying a $100 for a dish, I want every element to be the best obtainable. Once, this was a distinct possibility with white truffles, when fewer restaurants and gourmet stores served them. These days, I&amp;#039;m not going to take a chance. (Unless I&amp;#039;m at one of Keller&amp;#039;s or Batali&amp;#039;s places, or the like.) Neither should you. If you do, and they have no flavor, send them back to the kitchen and get it taken off your bill.  A Footnote /// Here&amp;#039;s the DYI version: Order your own from Mike&amp;#039;s Deli on Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx. They&amp;#039;re the best I&amp;#039;ve come across, and they&amp;#039;re about $100 an ounce. PLUS: More John Mariani on Esquire&amp;#039;s Eat Like a Man Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a9009/white-truffles-112910/>