A Day with Tartufi Bianconi: From the Woods to the Table

Black Truffle

There are days that arrange themselves neatly and days that sprawl and feel longer. A day with Tartufi Bianconi is firmly the latter. You head out early in the morning and come home late, with earth under your fingernails, the smell of truffle on your hands, and a very full stomach! It’s one of those days that takes a while to come down from.

Morning: Into the Woods

The day starts before the heat arrives with the birdsong still in the air. The Umbrian-Tuscan border country that Tartufi Bianconi calls home is at its best in the early hours, when the forest is cool and the light comes in low through the oaks. You go out with an experienced hunter and a dog that has been doing this since they were a few weeks old (they are trained very early on in the truffle smell!), and you follow them into the trees.

The dog works fast, nose close to the ground, moving in wide loops that look random but are not. Then something changes. The dog circles, slows, drops its nose to a particular patch of earth and begins to dig. The hunter kneels beside them, eases them aside, and lifts out a truffle with bare hands. The smell hits you immediately, warm and complex and unlike anything else.

You carry on for a while to see if you’re lucky to find more before carrying back your treasure to the car feeling a little like a pirate!

Late Morning: The Tasting

Back at the Bianconi farm, the tasting begins. White and black truffles from the Upper Tiber Valley are served across a series of dishes, each one built to let the truffle do the talking rather than compete with it. The flavours are distinct: the white truffle warm and honeyed, the black deeper and more earthy, both carrying something of the woods and the season they came from. A glass of local wine sits alongside.

This is not a quick sampling. It’s an unhurried hour of eating and tasting and understanding, course by course, why people travel long distances for something that grows underground.

Afternoon: The Cooking Class

After the tasting comes the kitchen. In Tartufi Bianconi's rustic kitchen, a chef walks you through the preparation of traditional local dishes built around truffles. The emphasis is on simplicity: pasta, eggs, butter, and the truffle itself, which needs very little beyond a sharp knife and restraint. You learn how to clean and store a truffle properly, how much heat it can take, and how a small amount shaved at the right moment transforms a dish entirely.

The atmosphere in the kitchen is relaxed, chatty and easy. There are no uniforms and no performance. People talk across the worktop, ask questions, make mistakes and fix them. By the time you sit down to eat what you have made, the afternoon has quietly slipped away.

The Drive Home

The road back to Cortona crosses some good country: wooded valleys, hilltop villages, the kind of landscape that makes you forget to look at your phone. You will be tired in the pleasant way that comes from a day spent mostly outside, and you will almost certainly be thinking about what to cook for dinner tomorrow and whether you can justify buying a small truffle to take home.

The answer is yes. You absolutely can.

Arrange Your Day

We can book a full Tartufi Bianconi day for guests staying at La Casa Cappellina, combining the truffle hunt, tasting, and cooking class into one unhurried morning and afternoon. The day runs year round, with different truffles in each season. Get in touch and we will put it together for you.

Contact us to arrange your Tartufi Bianconi day.