A 1.5-kg white truffle found in the Italian countryside will be sold at a charity auction in Macau where it is expected to fetch 150,000 euros ($216,000).

Truffle hunter Cristiano Savini's dog, Rocco, sniffed out the truffle, one of the biggest unearthed in the past 50 years, by an oak tree near Pisa last weekend, in an area of Tuscany where Cristiano and his father scout for truffles every year.

The truffle was 75 centimetres (2.5 feet) underground. It took Savini and his father more than an hour to get the truffle out.

According to media reports, the 1.5-kg truffles were the biggest since a 2.5-kg truffle was found in 1954 and presented to former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.

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Truffle lovers worldwide put in bids for a 750-gram white truffle from Alba in Italy.

Bids came in from New York and Berlin but it was a $210,000 bid from Hong Kong that won the auction.

The Italian truffle market has been more expensive lately after having a dry summer.

Sunday’s truffle auction raised a total of $535,000.

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A New York chef has come up with a luxury version of one of the city's staple foods -- the $1,000 bagel.

The pricey bagel, that is topped with white truffle cream cheese and goji berry infused Riesling jelly with golden leaves, joins a list of $1,000 delicacies in Manhattan that includes an ice-cream sundae topped with a 23-karat edible gold leaf and a pizza topped with six kinds of caviar and lobster.

The bagel is the creation of chef Frank Tujague of The Westin New York hotel at Times Square and was designed in part to help raise funds for Les Amis d'Escoffier Scholarship which provides scholarships to students of the culinary arts.

Like mushrooms, truffles are the fruiting bodies of fungi, except that they grow underground instead of popping up on the surface. They grow in a symbiotic relationship with trees, taking sugar from the roots and giving back minerals.

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