Day 62: White Truffle Oil

I put white truffle truffle oil on just about anything. One of my favourite things is to put it on eggs, but I put it into pastas, into ground beef - I once put it into my cereal and regretted that day for the next 2 hours. It's a great substitute for truffles during the off season (although they are in season now, so no excuses), and also if you don't have the money to spend on truffles on your eggs.

The bottle in the foreground has the ingredient "white truffle flavour" in the ingredient list, and the shorter bottle in the background actually has white truffle oil slices inside of it. Yum. The flavoured oil actually had a stronger truffle flavour to it, I thought. The other one was weaker. They both cost around the same (~$17) although I did get the bottle with sliced truffles inside of it from Homesense on discount, and from what I gather, oil with sliced truffles usually costs a bit more.

I actually especially love putting it onto fresh field mushrooms.

Chef Gordon Ramsay has described white truffle oil as "one of the most pungent, ridiculous ingredients ever known to chef." But fortunately, I feel a lot of tv chefs like to make comments that sounds good, but really make no sense. For instance, like how everyone cooks with extra virgin olive oil, and claims that it tastes better, even in its cooked form! So while Ramsay may have the money to buy real truffles, I doubt many of his customers do, and so I would think they would benefit from this compromise.

On Truffle Oil: Truffle oil is a modern culinary ingredient, used to impart the flavor and aroma of truffles to a dish. Most truffle oils are not made from actual truffles, but are a synthetic product that combines a thioether (2,4-dithiapentane), one of numerous organic aromas or odorants found in real truffles, with an olive oil or grapeseed oil base. As with pure olive oils, these range from clear to cloudy, and yellow to green. A few more expensive oils are alleged to be made from truffles or the by-products of truffle harvesting and production, though the flavor of truffles is difficult to capture in an oil.

Truffle oil is commonly used to make "truffle fries," which feature french fries cooked in truffle oil, parmesan cheese, pepper, and sometimes other ingredients. Some pasta dishes and whipped dishes such as mashed potatoes or deviled eggs incorporate truffle oil.

Truffle oil, available in all seasons and steady in price, is popular with chefs (and diners) because it is significantly less expensive than actual truffles, while possessing some of the same flavors and aroma. The emergence and growth of truffle oil has led to an increase in the availability of foods claiming to be made with or flavored with truffles, in an era when the price of truffles has pushed them out of reach for most diners. "Their one-dimensional flavor is also changing common understanding of how a truffle should taste," Daniel Patterson complained in a New York Times article.