Here we have a shot of the giant white truffle that is now in the possession of Oliveto in Oakland. As he’s done for the past 14 years, owner Bob Klein made the pilgrimage to Piedmont, Umbria and Tuscany this fall, and this year, he found a whopper: a 604-gram white truffle. Found in southern Tuscany in Chiusi, it took an hour to exhume from the ground.

“For a truffle hunter, it’s a truffle of a lifetime,” says Klein, adding that in stroke of fairy tale sensibility, it was found by the daughter of the dog that his Italian truffle guide named after him. Aw.

Anyway, in those aforementioned 14 years of truffle travels, Klein says this is the best year for truffles yet and he’s never seen anything like it.

The truffles got in yesterday with Klein and will go live at Oliveto on Wednesday, with the special truffle dinners lasting from Wednesday through Saturday (see sample menus here). The giant 600-gram number will be on display throughout the dinners, and then it will get sliced up.

Downstairs, the Oliveto Cafe truffle pizzas — made with Oliveto’s whole grain crust — will debut on Wednesday evening (Nov. 17) as well, and includes both black ($20) and white truffle ($30) pizzas. The white truffle pizzas will last until Saturday; the black truffle pizzas will continue to be served through Saturday, Dec. 4th.

And for those that can’t make the Oliveto meals, the Pasta Shop will be selling the truffles by the ounce at lower-than-normal rates, since the product was so plentiful and high-quality this year: $25/oz for black, $175/oz for white.

Oliveto: 5655 College Avenue, Oakland; (510) 547-5356 or oliveto.com