Wanda Srdoc, better known as the Truffle Lady to Toronto’s top chefs, begins her work day as most people are heading home. On Tuesday evenings throughout the fall, she drives out to Pearson to pick up her weekly shipment of white truffles arriving from Istria, Croatia. She spends the rest of the night visiting chefs and dealing out orders as quickly as she can. Truffles lose their moisture by the minute, so they diminish in weight—and value—as the night progresses.

One Tuesday last November, I joined her halfway through her deliveries, at C5. Chef Ted Corrado played nervously with a fat envelope of cash, like a teenager about to score his first bag of weed. Srdoc, a svelte brunette in her 30s, placed a pink digital scale and a calculator on the table before prying open a Styrofoam box with her long, manicured nails. The air filled with a pungent odour. To tempt Corrado, she smiled coyly and pulled out a ball of paper towel, unwrapping a 94-gram white truffle. It looked more like a gnarled, dirty potato than a fantastically expensive mushroom.

This is it? This is the storied ingredient that provokes breathless, lyrical odes from food writers each fall? That prompts chefs to lie and steal? That had Marc Thuet escorted out of the Fifth during dinner for allegedly pocketing a few choice specimens?

Corrado looked at the truffle longingly, inhaling its heady scent. To me, it smelled like the brown bear that once ransacked my pack at the end of a portage north of Yellowknife—not unpleasant, but definitely glandular. At $752, the sandy lump was half the price of Srdoc’s last sale: a $1,400 truffle bought by Drew Ellerby at One restaurant in Hazelton Lanes. Corrado shook his head—too steep—and settled on five smaller ones (about 70 grams) for $560. Srdoc packed up her box, threw a pash­mina around her shoulders and climbed into her BMW. Next stop: Splendido.

Tuber magnatum, one of the world’s most expensive foods, went for about $8 per gram whole­sale last season (roughly double what it cost in 2000). Unlike every other luxury food—black truffles, saffron, foie gras, caviar—the white truffle is also excruciatingly hard to source. It defies cultivation, growing mysteriously underground in symbiosis with the roots of oak, hazel and linden trees of northern Italy and Croatia. Truffles attract animals (in order to spread their spores) by emitting a musky odour with small amounts of androstenone, the same steroid component found in men’s armpits and secreted in the saliva of male pigs.

Some trufflers track them down by looking for the “truffle flies” that lay their eggs on the ground so their larvae can burrow to feed on the fungi, but most use pigs or trained dogs to sniff them out. Srdoc’s family, based in the medieval town of Motovun, has five dogs for the task, each named after an American president. It’s the training that’s important, not the breed; Clinton, a golden retriever, is their best hunter. “And you know what?” says Srdoc conspira­torially, her green eyes crinkling, “Bush is the worst.”

Never has the white truffle been so scarce: de­forestation and hot, dry summers have taken a bite out of Italy’s famed harvest, which for centuries has been centred in Piedmont’s small town of Alba; last year’s yield was down 75 per cent. A poor harvest makes for high prices. The world record for most expensive truffle came from last fall’s crop. Weighing one and a half kilograms, the single specimen was sold to Stanley Ho, a Macau gambling king, for $330,000, and was served at a banquet a few days later. Ho didn’t even attend.

You’d think skyrocketing prices might staunch our appetite for the fungus, especially in these financially uncertain times. But truffles defy the laws of supply and demand: the pricier they get, the more we clamour for them. Fausto Di Berardino, the owner of Coppi restaurant in north Toronto, is the man credited with introducing the city to the pleasures of the white truffle. He still remembers the fall of 1994, when he imported a few hundred dollars’ worth and couldn’t sell a single truffle dish. Last year, he spent $50,000 on truffles. Pusateri’s estimates sales have increased 20-fold since the millennium. “It’s mind-boggling,” says John Mastroianni, Pusateri’s general manager. “People will spend $250 just to flavour a dish.” Can a few shavings over pasta or polenta really be worth all this fuss?