There comes a time in the life of every aspiring food aficionado that the word Truffle ceases to be a term reserved for pyramid shaped piles of chocolate balls, filled with ganache and dusted in cocoa.My time came the day my best friend brought home a bottle of Truffle salt and a mysterious dark lump in a small sealed plastic bag.
Overnight I went from a unworldly noob whose definition of a Truffle was once limited to chocolate balls laced with Armagnac to a fanatic devotee armed with the unflinching enthusiasm found among the newly converted. Truffle salt on eggs. On toast. In soup. Over cauliflower. Nothing was too good for a sprinkle of the stuff and everything seemed to need it.
I am naturally cynical of food that comes seasoned with Bourgeoise tendencies but my taste buds made an exception for the Truffle. Tempt me with a few small black specimens now and I might just guillotine the peasants myself without so much as a hint of dramatic irony.
It’s the smell. Or rather, it’s the shape and the color of the smell that gets under my skin. Some say they have a musky odor, others claim they smell earthy, garlicky, mushroomy, salty. These are poor unsatisfying descriptions equal to describing the perfect rose as a “nice red flower”.
Truffles smell like the gills of mushroom. They make me think of a deep dark emerald green marbled with ebony that is more blue than black. They smell like bits of wood that have decayed against the forest floor. Their smell has the texture of crushed velvet. That same smell has a shape that is broad and expanding at the bottom. It rises up like a small mountain of wet black wood and then circles back on itself creating a bubble of aroma around whatever food it is served with.
THAT is what a truffle smells like.
Garlicky? Impossible. Garlick smells like pale violet.
Though I hate to band-wagon, and foodie out on things that are trendy, I am a willing sheep on the hillside of Trufflemania.
While in Italy this year I bought a small jar of Black Summer Truffles that I sadly, (very sadly) had to throw out yesterday. It was the first time I had ever bought any truffles myself and so there was a degree of tragedy... The sort of semi trivial somewhat melodramatic sadness that one finds in hipster kitchens where running out of a luxury item is a potential crisis.
This is my “in memoriam” post. I’m thinking of ordering some from Amazon. Must avert crisis.
IMAGES: All Original Photos