I’ve had truffle fries a few times, all of them made by adding truffle oil to them.
The flavor wasn’t bad, but they wound up being very greasy, even by French fry standards, and I’m not sure I’d want to have them again.
I haven’t had them, but I’ve had truffles and/or truffle oil in pasta sauce and in mac & cheese. Those are two very different things, but in my opinion, truffle ruins them both equally.
I never heard of them.
I can take or leave truffles, they taste fine to me, but at the cost, there are so many things I’d rather spend the money on. And since potatoes are often held up as a paragon of bland plus filling, anything you use to season them tends to be needed in quantity.
If I want “upscale” fries / pomme frites, I want them in duck fat. That’ll make me far happier.
Touching on the sub-topic though, I like either skinny shoestring fries, or mostly skinny (but not quite fast food skinny) fries made from a whole potato. Steak fries, crinkle fries, waffle fries, huge chonky chips, all are right out.
On very rare occasion curly fries are a fun reminder of my teen years when they became a thing, but it has to be a mood.
That’s a classic recipe for great fries! Not truffle-ifying them. I’ve been tempted to get an air fryer for that very purpose.
I fried slices of potato in duck fat last weekend. I used the fat from the duck breasts i cooked. They were very tasty, but maybe not worth the effort.
Yep to both. Truffles are one of the most amazing flavors on earth to me, but truffle oil does not do them justice.
My thinking (about the air fryer) is based on the observation that frozen oven fries are much, much better when deep-fried in oil like raw potatoes, but it’s a messy process that leaves you with a large amount of used cooking oil. So I’m thinking that they might do well in an air fryer with a small amount of duck fat. Getting a little off-topic, though, sorry.
My all-time favorite “appetizer” is an off-menu item at Sinatra: fettuccini in a simple butter sauce, then the waiter shaves truffle over it. My instructions are always “Stop when it becomes a felony.”
Absolutely outstanding.
Because you don’t like it? How is it any more clichéd than any other toast?
Honestly, the reverse snobbery in this thread is repugnant.
Same. I’ve had real truffles in (and from) regions that they’re native to, and I thought they tasted delicious. But comparatively cheap “truffle flavorings”, especially oils, are mostly synthetic, containing no actual truffles.
Some truffle salts do actually contain small amounts of dried truffles, but if you like that, why not just get some properly packaged dried or jarred truffle and use that as a flavoring according to taste?
IMHO anything that enables us to use rather than discarding good-quality animal fat is worth the effort.
It makes me weep to see carnivores grumbling about the high prices of good butter and olive oil while dumping jars of poured-off bacon grease or beef/pork/lamb fat—from high-quality sustainably-raised animals, even!—into the garbage.
May i suggest popcorn. I make it in a cast iron skillet with a lid. (The kid was designed for another frying pan, but fits.) It’s also excellent for sauteing vegetables.
Um…
I know I advocated not wasting good-quality animal fat, but are you sure you’re not taking it a little too far?!
(yes yes, I know it was really a typo for “lid” 
)
I swear that I don’t taste the truffles, or maybe I just get a bit of a “dirt” taste.
As Kimstu mentions, most truffle oil is artificially flavored. If the ingredients say something like ‘essence of truffles’, that’s a dead giveaway. But it’s hardly practical or affordable for most of us to keep fresh truffles on hand.
So I think this excerpt from my earlier post bears repeating. This truffle oil, which is made from actual truffles, I find to be very good. I don’t have a ton of experience cooking with fresh truffles, so I’m not a truffle expert, and of course YMMV, but this oil works for me. I’m not trying to do a brand endorsement of this particular stuff, I just want to say that I think truffle oil has gotten a (mostly deserved) rep as garbage, but they’re not all created equal.
Well, the Truff oil might be good, I have no idea, but the Truff brand pasta sauce is the one I was referring to when I said earlier that IMHO truffles have no place either in a pasta sauce or in mac & cheese. And I say this as someone who is fine with mushrooms and pasta, with the right mushrooms done the right way. But truffles are wrong for pasta sauce, and the hot sauce that Truff adds makes it even worse. It’s the same way that the strong flavour of dried porcini mushrooms works for some dishes – they’re great added to hunter sauce for beef or to vegetable broth when cooking rice, but they will totally ruin a pasta sauce.
I did notice that the Truff brand makes a hot sauce, which just seems weird to me-- I would think that hot sauce flavor and truffle flavor would not complement each other at all; they’d just duke it out with each other and both flavors would lose out. Ditto with Truff pasta sauce-- I googled and see they make a truffle-flavored red sauce, which also seems like a bad combo to me-- tomatoes and truffles just don’t seem like they’d work together very well.
As I mentioned upthread though, I make a white clam sauce that is really elevated by finishing with truffle flavor. I think some non-tomato sauced pastas work very well with truffles; the flavor works really nicely with certain added cheeses, like Parmesan or Romano. I think they might work well with an ‘upscale’ mac & cheese dish as well, though again, I think M&C, like french fries, may be an inferior truffle flavor delivery mechanism.
(Emphasis mine.)
I didn’t either, before I found I have them lying around. They were beyond my budget so I didn’t bother learning about how to cook with them. In case you ever find yourself with some, please learn from my mistakes:
Don’t wet them, just clean them with a brush.
Don’t cook them. All the aroma and flavor of the truffle will disappear if you do. The white ones should only ever be shaved over prepared foods. The black ones you can warm briefly in a pan just to release the aroma, but be careful to not cook.
In general, acid foods should be avoided. You’ve correctly discerned that tomatoes and truffles aren’t a marriage made in heaven. Personally, I’d never combine these 2 ingredients, though I love both.
Like you, I find truffles or truffle flavors are delightful with cream-based pasta sauces, and they are nice with seafood.
I do hope you are able to one day try an actual truffle! I’d offer to send you one, but my efforts to do this in the past have failed. 
Thanks for the great advice on using fresh truffles! I am very envious of the availability of fresh truffles where you live, and your ability to find them.
I have had fresh truffles in restaurants on a few occasions. My first time experiencing fresh truffles (you always remember your first time!) was in my early 20s, on a date with a serious girlfriend, and I took her to a fancy restaurant- a notch or three above Red Lobster. I don’t remember what I ordered, probably a seafood risotto or something similar, but I remember the waiter shaving fresh truffle onto my meal at the table. I felt so grown up and sophisticated!
I’ve thought about buying fresh truffles in recent years, but at over $100 for a golf-ball sized truffle it doesn’t seem worth it-- I’d either have to have a dinner party large enough that I used it all up in a night, or be putting trufflle in everything I make for the next several days until it’s used up just to justify the cost, and be sick of the flavor by then. How long does a fresh truffle even last?
They actually make two – a black label which is a truffle-infused marinara, and a red label which they used to call arrabbiata but now call “spicy marinara”. The difference is that the marinara is hot, and the “spicy” one is very hot. And both are ruined by truffles, which as noted, have no place in a tomato sauce, and worsened by the spiciness. They’re also rather outrageously expensive. I love a good pasta sauce but this sure ain’t it. I’ll gladly take Rao’s at half the price, or my beloved Pusateri’s semplice or Stefano marinara at less than one-third the price!