Watch: "Truffles" The Most Expensive Food in the World

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A truffle is the fruiting body of a subterranean Ascomycete fungus, predominantly one of the many species of the genus Tuber. Some of the truffle species are very prized as food. French gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called truffles "the diamond of the kitchen".  Edible truffles are held in high lionize in French, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Middle Eastern and Spanish cooking, as accurately as in international haute cuisine. Truffles are ectomycorrhizal fungi and are therefore usually found in close association once the roots of trees. Spore dispersal is adept through fungivores, animals that eat fungi.

The "white truffle" or "trifola d'Alba Madonna" (Tuber magnatum) is found mainly in the Langhe and Montferrat areas of thePiedmont region in northern Italy and, most famously, in the countryside a propos the cities of Alba and Asti,  in Italy it can with be found in Molise, Abruzzo, and in the hills concerning San Miniato, in Tuscany. It is as well as found a propos speaking the Istria peninsula, in Croatia in theMotovun forest along the Mirna river,  and in Slovenia along the Dragonja and Rizana river, as nimbly as in the Drome place inFrance. Growing symbiotically gone oak, hazel, poplar and beech and fruiting in autumn, they can taking again 12 cm (5 in) diameter and 500 g, even if are usually much smaller. The flesh is unexciting cream or brown taking into account white marbling. Italian white truffles are utterly intensely esteemed and are the most choking going a propos for the subject of the look: The white truffle have the funds for in Alba is busiest in the months of October and November amid the Fiera del Tartufo (truffle fair) takes place. In 2001, the Tuber magnatum truffles sold for together in the midst of $1000 - $2200 per pound ($2000$4500 per kg), as of December 2009 they were creature sold at $14,203.50 per kilogram.