Bon appetite for tycoon who paid £85k for white truffle

13 April 2012

It might resemble a pile of poop, but in fact it is worth is weight in gold several times over.

The world's expensive truffle, it commanded a record-breaking £85,000, making it ounce for ounce, five times as expensive as gold.

Snapped up by a Hong Kong tycoon bidding at a charity auction, the white truffle's monster price tag easily beat the previous record of £63,000.

Made up of three palm-sized sections and weighing 3.3 pounds in total, the pricey fungus was unearthed by trained dogs in the forests of Piedmont in north-western Italy.

Bidding by satellite on Sunday, property developer Gordon Wu beat off competition from food buffs in the UK, France and Italy, to win the highly-prized specimen.

Described as the "Queen of Truffles" by those with a taste for the finer things in life, and tasting like a cross between petrol, farmyards, musk, garlic and runny cheese by those who don't, it will be served up at a charity dinner hosted by Mr Wu at Hong Kong's Ritz-Carlton hotel on Friday.

Dishes likely to be spiced up with a sliver of truffle during the five-course banquet include pastas, salads and veal cutlets.

Gianpaolo La Greca (CORR), owner of Edinburgh-based truffle shop Sapori Truffles, said: "White truffles are extremely popular."

"The perfect match is a risotto or pasta, always with butter, never with oil."

"The raw truffle should be shaved over the food at the table and the residual heat in the dish will bring out the flavour."

A wild fungus that has resisted all attempts to cultivate it, the white truffle grows around a foot below the surface of the ground, on the roots of hazelnut and oak trees.

Traditionally hunted by pigs, the delicacy is now more likely to be sniffed out by dogs, simply because they are less likely to eat the prize.

Once unearthed, they have a shelf-life of just a few days - a fact top London chef Andy Needham discovered at his peril two years ago when a £28,000 white truffle rotted while he was on holiday.

Stashed in the safe of Zafferano restaurant, the fungus had been bought by a syndicate whose members were thought to include Gwyneth Paltrow and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.

More beige coloured than white, the white truffle is one of the most popular of the 70 or so different varieties of the fungus.

Liz Hurley admits to being "obsessed" with white truffles, Jerry Hall describes pasta flavoured with white truffles as her "perfect dish," while Gordon Ramsay says they are the "ultimate gift."

Long thought of as an aphrodisiac, Lord Byron kept a truffle on his desk in the belief the scent stimulated his creativity.

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