SERIOUS TRUFFLE ENCOUNTERS
Tucked into a corner of a restaurant with a glass of prosecco, I was perusing the menu when it ambushed me. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by an incredibly powerful smell. Someone had ordered a dish with white truffles and the instant it breached the kitchen the heavy fragrance of truffle engulfed enveloped the room. And how to describe that seductive, intoxicating, primal perfume? Imagine a thick cloud of ripe cheese, tinged with garlic, layered with forest floor, musk and sex descending on you. This is the allure of the white truffle its rich, strong, smell, not its looks. To the eye, it resembles a small, dirty, potato, without its odor a white truffle is just a fungus.
To get up close and personal with a truffle I made a pilgrimage to Alba, the Mecca for white truffle lovers. Set in hills of the Langhe region of Piedmont, this town is famous for its hazelnuts, Nebbiolo grapes, and the truffle market held every October. Located in huge tented space in the centre of town, the market is a mix of slick salesmen their stands piled high with truffle pastes and oils, and the local trifolau or truffle hunters. Note, you don’t harvest a truffle - you hunt it! These hunters, dirt still under their fingernails from digging for their spoils, lurked furtively at the edges of the market, their cache wrapped in scraps of paper and held close to their chest. Wandering through that market felt like being inside a giant white truffle, so intense and overpowering was the odor of truffle that it permeated everything. I exchanged a wad of euros with a weather-beaten hunter for a walnut sized fungus and scurried back to my rented kitchen.
There, as I brushed the traces of earth from my prized fungus a cloud of truffle scent filled the kitchen. I boiled a large pot of salted water, quickly cooked some fresh pasta, tossed it with lots of fresh butter then tipped it into a warm bowl. I took my truffle and wantonly shaved it over the top. As those slices hit the hot noodles their aroma exploded completely enveloping me. I inhaled my truffle long before I swallowed it.
Eating a white truffle is a seductive, sensory experience and like all the best food indulgences it is indelible and ephemeral.
Jennifer McLagan
Jennifer McLagan has been called courageous, a contrarian and even a little crazy. Well in these dietarily correct times, she is definitely a provocative iconoclast who challenges us and makes us rethink our relationship to what we eat. And while she creates delicious recipes she believes that food is more than recipes. So equipped with a quirky sense of humour, a taste for the bizarre, and bowerbird tendencies she delves into food’s history, myth and culture adding to the literature of food and cooking. Her books garner prizes everywhere, BONES won the James Beard Best Single Subject Cookbook award, was a winner in the Gourmand World Cookbook Award, and a finalist in the IACP cookbook awards. FAT won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Cookbook Cover, the Silver Sprout Award, and both the IACP and James Beard Awards for Best Single Subject Cookbook. It was also named Cookbook of the Year 2009 by the Beard Foundation and is short listed for Cuisine Canada awards. But her publisher just wishes they’d sell better.