Truffles - summer or winter?
How many people are willing to admit they don't get it?
Myffy Rigby - The Guardian
Coincidence again. My Kuala Lumpur friend sent me an article from a Malaysian English language newspaper about awful Chinese truffles and at the moment Aldi has Burgundy Truffles on sale. I still have some from their last round of selling them, and I really ought to use them. In fact they are probably worthless by now as the smell fades over time I believe. Stephanie Alexander talked about a fresh one she had bought in Perigord barely lasting a three day trip back to England.
I'll come back to the Chinese, but before I go into a minor rant I will explain a little bit about truffles. There are apparently several different kinds but the ones I am talking about here are Tuber Melanosporum - the expensive black ones grown in Périgord and now here in Australia, Tuber Magnatum - white truffles (well grey really) from Piedmont in Italy and even more expensive and odiferous than the black, Tuber Aestivum - the summer truffles from Aldi which apparently grow all over Europe and the Chinese Tuber Indicum - which the Chinese feed to their pigs.
A little bit about price - the Aldi ones are $7.00 for that 25g jar - around $30.00 for 100g - i.e $300.00 a kg. My jar has two small strawberry sized truffles. Sounds expensive? Try around $3,000 a kg for the 'real' black and the white - or good specimens of them anyway. The expensive cans on the right at the top of the page are from Simon Johnson and supposedly the real deal - the large can costs about $275.00! And I don't think it's that large. The expensive looking implement on the right is to shave the truffle over your scrambled eggs, risotto or noodles. In Saveur Magazine a young chef recalls her first experience of truffle - a present from a friend who had stolen it from the restaurant in which he worked:
"That night, after work, my friend the thief and I ate that heady truffle, sliced and warmed in French butter, over egg noodles, and drank champagne and celebrated. It was a rite of passage for me as a young cook, my first experience of the remarkable feeling that truffles seem to kindle, at once ecstatic and peaceful, earthy and sublime." Sally Schneider - Saveur
The Chinese version costs a mere 40-50 euros per kg. They are apparently exported in vast quantities to Europe because they look like the black ones and if you package them as 'Made in France' all that means is that they have been packaged in France. According to the Malaysian newspaper they taste like sawdust and are unfit for human consumption. And the Trufamania website basically agrees.
Which made me worry about my Aldi ones. But I think I'm OK. They are a Product of Italy - not Made in Italy so I'm assuming that they are actually Italian, just an inferior type to the black and white truffles. Mine were labelled as black summer truffles, the current lot are labelled as Burgundy truffles - both ways of referring to Tuber Aestivum apparently. They don't have such a strong taste. The picture shows what they look like.
Slight digression here though. A few years ago we holidayed in Umbria which is famous for black truffles - both the Malanosporum and the Aestivum. And apparently the area in which we were living - near Todi - is famous for the really expensive Melanosporum. In 'our' tiny village was a restaurant with lots of truffled things on the menu. I can still remember my choice- Gnocchi verdi di rucola in salsa rosa e tartufo. (I looked it up today - it's still on the menu.) (Green rocket gnocchi in a pink sauce with truffles.) Now I have no way of knowing which kind of truffle they were but I have to say that this is the only time I have had truffles when I have really thought that there might be something to the truffle mania. Normally I just haven't tasted anything at all - a bit like saffron. But that's another story. And I have had it in expensive restaurants. My gnocchi were only 12 euros - well that's what the restaurant menu says now - so it was probably the cheaper Aestivum. But it was a quite distinctive and different taste. People wax lyrical about the smell and taste of truffles, which makes me thing that when I haven't been able to taste it there either wasn't enough or they weren't good truffles.
"[They] seemed to me like earth and sky and sea. I felt at one with nature, that my mouth was filled with the taste of the earth. There was a ripeness, a naughtiness, something beyond description … it was utter luxury and earthiness combined." Paula Wolfert
That's what they are supposed to taste like. I couldn't say really what the taste was like - but yes, earthy might have been one component of it. In a good way. Like Pinot Noir.
Stephanie Alexander has a whole chapter dedicated to the truffle in her book Cooking and Travelling in South-West France. She visited the markets and the farmers - if you can call them that - a couple of times. She discovered that they are now working on ways of actually cultivating them. For they only grow near certain types of trees - oaks and hazel mostly, and it takes at least 10 years for you to get your first crop. Then the tree will only produce for around 30 years. After that - nothing. But they have worked out how to 'seed' the trees they plant, although not with 100% success. And here in Australia - where it seems to me that farmers are pretty enterprising - they are beginning to produce truffles in commercial quantities - Tasmania and Canberra seem to be the main places so far. You need cold I think. Indeed it is thought that Australia may eventually be a major player in truffles world-wide. New Zealand too of course.
Most of the articles I found seemed to think that you should keep it simple when using truffles - the aforesaid, eggs, pasta and risotto being the top choices. Stephanie had a recipe for a rather tempting looking pork roast in her book and some yummy looking potatoes too. I doubt I'll make the pork - it looks a bit long and complicated.
And yet, I'm back to my gut feeling that there is a lot of hype about truffles that isn't deserved. Because it's expensive you think it's great or don't dare to say that it isn't.
"In restaurants (in Australia, at least) the spectrum of sensual reward ranges from the scent of decidedly more secular feet to the scent of bugger-all." Myffy Rigby - The Guardian
The referee to feet is because they are often said to smell of 'the feet of God', which is not all that tempting in itself. I will try my little Aldi jar though - and maybe buy another one - but I suspect it's too old and won't taste of anything. Then I'll never know will I? Oh - and don't get sucked in by truffle flavoured olive oil. According to most writers I saw such things rarely have any flavour of truffle at all. I do have some - and it does seem to have some shavings of something in there, so maybe mine is real. I have to say though, that although I cannot taste or smell them generally I do think that they are very aesthetically pleasing to look at. In a weird kind of way.
