Anyone here ever tried fresh truffles? The black, French ones. Aside from a few questionable, insipid little black flecks in a canned pate, I’ve never tasted them. What do they taste like?
This is a two-part post: I wonder why we can’t take a whack at growing truffle oaks here in North America. Would the taste vary tremendously from the French kind? Would they grow at all? I’ve seen a couple of websites trying to promote American truffle cultivation, but I’ve heard naught about any real attempts at it, and I read a lot of gourmet magazines and newspapers.
Hmmmm. Wish I owned an acre or two of land and was about fifteen years younger. At $1,000 a pound for fresh black truffles (and going up), I think I’d venture.
I’ve tried black truffles shaved onto a salad, the taste is extremely mild, a little earthy and a little like nothing else. I also had white truffles a few times which had a slightly more pronounced flavour.
The texture is somewhat firm, so you can feel biting through even an extremely thin slice. The smell is more pronounced than the taste. Good quality truffle oil is probably the best way to get a truffle flavour in home made food. Traider Joes currently has both white and black truffle oil, I would recomend both. I have never cooked with fresh truffles myself, the price is so high, I would want to be very sure of how I prepared them before using them myself.
They are starting to grow truffles in the oak forests of Tasmania here in Australia. The thought is they would available for export to Europe in the off-season and thus bring in lots of export bucks.
I’ll disagree with Bippy, truffles are delicious. It’s a strong earthy flavour like really good wild mushrooms times ten. I love it. His suggestion of truffle oil is a good one, I use a teaspoon of it when I do scrambled eggs and it is sensational.
Black truffles, properly prepared, are amazing. The flavor is so strong that only the tiniest amount is really needed, which is fortunate given the price. In fact, it’s probably cheaper just to fly to Italy and eat them there.
I’ve allways found the smell fantastic, but the taste a little mild, very pleasent but mild. And I’m sure at least a few of the places I’ve had them would have prepared them propperly. So I guess the taste is a YMMV sort of thing.
Second the scrambled eggs cooked with truffle oil, mmmmmm.
SuperLorie, I believe chocolate truffles are so named because they resemble real truffles, which are small and round.
And yes, they’re really found by pigs. Female pigs, because truffles coincidentally smell like the pheromone of a male pig, so the sows are really attracted to it. Dogs, however, can be trained to perform the same task, and are much easier to control.
This website has some fascinating facts about truffles, including their proposed cultivation in America or New Zealand. Who has a nice plot of land and a long lifespan ahead of them?