The month of November is the prime of white truffle season. Never mind black truffles—the whites are where it’s really at. The most prized fungi in the world, they fetch up to fifteen hundred dollars a pound and look exactly like clods of dirt. Shaved thinly over a dish of hot pasta, their elusive flavor lies somewhere between wood smoke and brown butter, or roasted meat and overripe cheese. With a primal aroma that in its muskiness both seduces and repels us in the same instant, truffles hold a special, outlaw place in the collective taste. Unable to characterize the scent, gourmets throughout history were relieved to call it “aphrodisiac” and leave it at that.
To that point, scientists have since discovered that truffles produce a chemical identical to the one present in the saliva of wild boars, the very stuff to which the wild sow is attracted. The chemical likeness to boar pheromone would explain the attraction for wild pigs and their usefulness in finding truffles amid the tree roots.
Technically, they’re a kind of mushroom, species name Magnatum Pico. Most mushroom systems, or plants, reside beneath the humus layer of the forest, decomposing roots and such. At one point in this process, and in some cases in the space of an hour, they give birth to a fruiting body, which is the mushroom itself and the part we eat. Truffles never get that far. They remain below deck, compressing into something of such gastronomic value that it’s almost mineral. Like the first person to find the rust-colored ore so essential to making iron, the original truffle hunter must have had the same squinting ability to divine the hidden value inside a dirty chunk of earth.
Although people are taking to the woods and hunting them down in Oregon, the bulk of truffles used by restaurants in the U.S. still come from Europe, mostly from Italy’s Piedmont region, where they claim to produce a truffle with special, delicate flavor. Although the demand for truffles has grown in recent years, the supply hasn’t, and the precious harvest has become even more dear.
Just as a squirrel climbs to the tops of trees and gnaws off the freshest, tightest pinecones to add to his nest, it’s human nature to covet special, limited harvests. In New York, where everything is available for the right price, and where decadence never goes out of fashion, they clamor for the rare and hard-to-get. White truffles, trumping even foie gras, argan oil, and rare beef, are the bling of the food world. This explains why, though cost-prohibitive to most Americans, fresh truffles are so common in upscale Manhattan restaurants that cooks handle them with an offhand nonchalance which belies their price. A simple truffle sauce, from the French repertoire and common in four-star kitchens, begins with caramelized onions, garlic, a bottle of Madeira, veal sauce, and thick cream. It is finished with a generous grating of white truffle, costs hundreds of dollars to produce, and garnishes perhaps a mere two dozen plates.
As if the kitchens weren’t hectic enough in the fall, what with cooks hustling to make it through the busy season, insert a bunch of flashy truffle salesmen into the mix. Starting in mid-October and continuing until just past the New Year, these purveyors of the delicacy tromp through the dining rooms and into the kitchens, trailing small black leather valises. For the most part they’re slick dressers and partial to very expensive sunglasses that they tend to wear well past the hour when they need to do so. Speaking somewhat brusquely, with (usually Italian) accents, they locate the chef and lift their mysterious black leather valises onto the countertop. Ducks and fish are pushed aside. A very fancy scale, generally shiny with chrome, appears. It conducts the business of measuring the truffle weight, gram by gram, with an exactitude usually reserved for the weighing of other controlled, precious substances. The black-clad European unzips the case and releases an unmistakable and essential truffle odor so strong that it takes perhaps ten seconds for the aroma to reach every cook in kitchen. Like dogs, their noses lift in the air. Sous chefs set down their knives and move in closer, as if they were needed in the bargaining process. Ambitious cooks peer over the pile and have something to say. Managers stop by in passing to offer their own vacuous observations. Meanwhile, everyone in the room is dumbly thinking, Wow. Truffles.
The chef, however, is thinking about the sale and how to get the best price from the wily salesmen. He chooses the finest three of the bunch, the most firm and aromatic knobs, and signs an agreement to pay nearly two thousand dollars. Taking the stairs two at a time, he immediately begins to envision additional courses on the truffle prix fixe menu.
That seven-course menu, at $250 a pop, begins to make a dent in the seasonal truffle debt. (I don’t think they make all that much on the truffles: Providing them is more like a service, or for publicity.) For that kind of money there are truffles tucked between the milky slices of raw, live, sea scallop; truffles with potatoes and brin d’amour cheese; truffles shaved over fresh tortellini in capon broth; truffles balancing atop tender pink veal loin.
But it’s a telling irony that truffles are best with the plainest, most elemental ingredients: potatoes, eggs, bread. Any great chef will tell you this: If you have a great truffle, eat it with scrambled eggs. Shave it into potato salad. Or, to call up the image of Italian peasants in little stone houses, sit in front of the fire, alternately chipping at a chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano and a crumbling chunk of white truffle. Mop up the bits with a crust of bread thickly spread with good butter.
At the end of the night the chef stores what’s left of the gnarly globe in a small varnished cigar humidor, nestled into a bed of vialone nano rice alongside a half-dozen eggs. It doesn’t take more than a full day for the truffles to impart their fragrance to the eggs and the rice, which are then turned into “truffled risotto” and “truffled sabayon.” This truffling, now a verb, seems a wondrous trick of nature, but it really does work.
Maybe it’s this trickster quality of the truffle that we desire. Animal or vegetable? Right or wrong? Like or lust? We like it because the first taste of a dish with white truffles never fails to unsettle us. During those first seconds, before you have determined whether it tastes good or bad, the brain nonetheless craves more. And we will pay good money for that.—Amy Thielen
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