Experimenting with Truffles
Back in May 2022 Brittany vacationed in Italy! (Yes, it was amazing.)
During her time there she had some amazing truffle dishes like the Chicken Breast in Truffle Sauce from Trattoria Zà Zà in Florence, and some truly terrible dishes that featured truffles like the Panzanella from Torre Aurora in Monterosso al Mare.
Of course, Brittany came back with ingredients for Mediocre Chef. Months later (how is it December??), we’re finally getting around to writing about truffles. Go us!
What are Truffles?
Truffles are a type of fungus that can be found near the roots of trees such as beech, birch, hazel, hornbeam, oak, pine, poplar. Not to be confused with chocolate truffles (we wrote about those too).
Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash
Why are they so damn expensive?
Ever order a dish with truffles? Yea, it was probably expensive, wasn’t it? Or at least more expensive than everything else on the menu.
The reason why truffles cost $$$ is because there’s a short season for truffle harvesting and they’re hard to find. Usually they are found by a dog or pig that has been trained to sniff them out. Apparently dogs are more commonly used as truffle hunters nowadays, as pigs like to eat the truffles while dogs can be trained not to. 🐽
What do truffles taste like? Are they good?
It’s one of those flavours that is hard to explain. It’s unique. Complex. Earthy. Musky. Some people describe it as Garlicky. It’s a distinct flavour. Try it once to see if you like it!
What do we think? It’s very strong and overpowering. It’s not something we want to eat every day. Trevor thinks that white truffle oil tastes “garlicky without the fun part of garlic.”
Forms of Truffle (aka how to put it in your belly)
So you want to try truffles. Where do you start? We recommend trying truffle oil, powder, and whole truffles (shaved). There are other ways to try truffles (e.g. truffle butter, truffle honey). Brittany didn’t bring those back from Italy with her, but we’ll definitely have to try them out sometime!
Whole Truffles
There are two types of truffles:
Black Truffles: more common, rich deep flavour
White Truffles: rare and more difficult to harvest, softer flavour with a garlic tang
There are also winter truffles and summer truffles of both colours, as well as truffles from Asia and the Middle-East. Check out this website if you want to learn more about that.
Typically whole truffles will be shaved over dishes as a finishing touch. However, they can be hard to find depending on where you live. (Plus, expensive.)
Truffle Oil
Most professional chefs have a bit of a… rocky relationship with truffle oil. The late Anthony Bourdain once said of it, “Let it be stated here, unto forever and eternity, truffle oil is not food”. Yikes.
It would appear that the reason behind the animosity is the fact that almost all truffle oil, especially the mass manufactured stuff, contains very little actual truffle, instead relying on chemical compounds to mimic the flavour of a truffle.
During our truffle experiments, we tried two different types of truffle oil: white and black. (And we’re pretty sure they’re legit.)
So what were our thoughts? We found the white truffle oil to be overpowering, while the black truffle oil was a bit more subdued. We think that overall, if you really want to add truffle flavour to something, truffle oil is a good bet.
Truffle Powder
Truffle powder is a bit of a weird one. Your best bet is to sprinkle it as a finishing salt on dishes. Think Salt Bae but more expensive (but also maybe not).
A receipt from Salt Bae’s restaurant. 😬 big yikes
What can you do with Truffles?
Want to try truffles, but don’t know where to start? Here are some ideas:
Dip Bread in Truffle Oil (and also Balsamic Vinegar)
The first thing we did was to take some fresh Italian bread and dip it in the truffle oil. Doing this with white truffle oil is a 0 out of 10 experience. Black truffle oil? Actually not half bad.
The next thing we did was to pour some high quality balsamic vinegar onto the truffle oil and dip again. White truffle oil + balsamic vinegar = 💩. On the other hand, black truffle oil + balsamic vinegar f**king slaps. We have no idea why there was such a difference between the two. Was our black truffle oil of a higher quality? Or maybe it was a lower quality truffle oil that paired better with the balsamic? We don’t know. What we do know is that we found it to be one of the more enjoyable dishes of the day.
(Truffle oil should probably not be paired with balsamic vinegar, but we did it anyway. Please Italians, don’t get mad at us.)
Eat It With French Fries
You’ve probably seen truffle fries on the menu before. The price is also incredibly jacked up vs normal fries. Like with anything at a restaurant, you can make them cheaper at home.
We air fried a bunch of french fries and then put our different truffle ingredients to the test:
Truffle Oil: we tossed french fries with black truffle oil and another batch with white truffle oil, along with chopped parsley and grated parmesan
Truffle Powder: sprinkled this all over some plain french fries — no salt required, there was already salt included in the powder
Truffle Mayo: we made two different mayos, one with black and the other with white truffle oil for dipping plain french fries in
The verdict? Black truffle oil was the winner. As you can probably already tell, we aren’t huge fans of the white truffle oil. The truffle powder was good, but you definitely don’t want to use a heavy hand as it is very strong. The truffle mayos were eh — coating the fry in the oil with parsley and parmesan was a much better experience!
Pair It With Meat
We decided that we wanted to incorporate truffle into a main dish that wasn’t pasta, and that wasn’t just a hunk of meat with truffle shaved on top. So we opted to make truffle butter chicken breast. We made a quick compound butter with grated fresh truffle, garlic, and parsley. Then we slathered two chicken breasts in the butter, and baked them in the oven. Makes sense, right?
Turns out cooking truffles in an oven kind of kills the flavour of them. (And the internet confirms that this is true — avoid cooking them.) So our chicken breast kind of just tasted like baked chicken breast with the barest hint of truffle, with garlic and parsley.
If we were to do this again, we’d probably make the butter with truffle powder and then shave some fresh truffle over the finished chicken, or we would skip the truffle butter all together and just make a truffle cream sauce. Yum.
They tasted better than they looked.
🚫 Mediocre Tip: We were juggling a lot of things in the kitchen that day, so we didn’t pan fry our chicken to give it some colour before putting it in the oven. Don’t be lazy and skip out on that part like we did. Say no to white chicken.
According to the internet, truffles pair well with all types of meat: beef, fish, chicken, and pork. So you don’t have to try it with chicken like we did!
Season Your Popcorn
Listen, we’re going to level with you. By this point in the afternoon we had taste tested so many truffle based dishes that our palates were completely shot. Water wasn’t even doing an adequate job at resetting our taste buds.
So why we decided to pop a perfectly good bag of popcorn and season it with truffle powder is beyond us. Is truffle popcorn good? Maybe. But it’s unlikely to be something that we’re going to be making again any time soon. (We’re truffle’d out.)
Make a Pasta Sauce
Truffle pasta was the first thing we thought of when we were planning this post out. We had found a few recipes to choose from, and Trevor petitioned pretty hard to try this one from Gordon Ramsay Restaurants.
The recipe seemed like it would be tasty and fairly easy to make. But as the old saying goes: pride cometh before the fall. Despite following all the directions perfectly (except for not making our own vegetable stock and noodles, lol) the pasta sauce just failed.
Truffle noodle soup.
For the life of us we couldn’t get it to come together and thicken. So what we ended up with was truffle noodle soup. It was…interesting. The flavour was okay and you could sort of taste the truffle. But overall, it wasn’t a great experience. Here are the other truffle pasta recipes we were considering but never ended up making:
If you’re a foodie and haven’t tried truffles before, give it a try and let us know what you think. We’re glad that we tried it, but overall it’s not our favorite flavour on the planet. (We were whelmed.)
If you like feeling fancy and rich, eat it to your heart's content. Just know that this flavour is best enjoyed in moderation — it’s not something we recommend eating every day.
Love truffles and think this post is truffle slander? Sound off in the comments below.