We went on our nighttime truffle looking adventure with Marco Varaldo, a 3rd-generation truffle hunter. At 15 East @ Tocqueville, chef and proprietor Marco Moreira upped his eggs with five grams of white truffles from $175 to $275. "Right now, white truffle costs are round $4,500 a pound," Vittorio Giordano, vice president of Urbani Truffles USA, instructed the publication. Essentially the most probable explanation is that Italian settlers in the United States called the plant girasole, the Italian phrase for sunflower, due to its familial relationship to the garden sunflower (each plants are members of the genus Helianthus).