L'atelier des Chefs Part Deux: La Truffe Noire

I have an incredible amount of work to do at the moment, so for anything pleasurable, I find myself trying to really justify to no one that what I want to do will be VERY productive for improving my quality of life. Otherwise, I better just sit right back down at the computer and keep on working. Fortunately, the bad angel over my other shoulder tells me that I'm only in Paris for a few more months and I'll regret it later if I miss out on living the good life while I've got it. So my brain gets stuck on the decision whether to seize the day for work or for play, until something unusual comes along.

Now, what could be more rare and intriguing then the ephemeral black truffle? You'd have a hard time finding one even if you were standing in front of it in the forest, as they're hidden in the leaves and well camouflaged like black golf balls covered with dirt, requiring the use of trained dogs to hunt them down. I've never even tried truffle oil, and I'm pretty sure that I won't be cooking with truffles in the foreseeable future, but I always wondered what all the fuss was about. It just so happens that the Atelier des Chefs was holding a 2 hour class to explore cooking with black truffles. Et voilà, it's, as they say, 'Mon Noël à Moi.'

It turns out that a black truffle is just a little ball of fungus, with hard, dry, bumpy exterior, and an interior very finely marbled in white and black. The more finely and evenly marbled your truffle is, the better its quality. How can you know this before buying it, I wonder? They're stored in cool conditions, but once at room temperature or warmer, black truffles exude a rich, earthy aroma which, while strong, isn't really pungent or assertive. I think it's this balance of earthiness and delicacy that makes truffles special in food dishes. But who in the world first thought of eating something the dog picked up, which smelled like dirt? It frequently occurs to me that there is no limit to what weird stuff the French will eat, and the weirder the better. It must be something in the wine.

The instructor was the same Japanese chef that I studied with last time when the 'special' ingredient was corn. This time we made a whole menu of starter, main dish and dessert, all featuring truffles. For the 12 of us, there were two good size truffles, coming from Drôme, a département in the Rhône-Alpes region. These truffles probably retail for 350 euros per kilo, while their cousins of another species from the Perigord region in the southwest retail for about 1000 euros per kilo. Funny enough, I read in a French cooking magazine, Regal, that you have to be careful because there are also Chinese black truffles on the market which are a different species, mass produced, of inferior flavor, and no aroma. I'd probably buy the wrong ones anyway, and that's why I'm happy to let the chefs do the buying. At L'atelier des Chefts, our recipes involving truffles for 6 people called for 30g of truffles. The menu, with four recipes, called for 20g of truffle per person, for a cost of 7 euros of truffles per person, not counting any other ingredients. Fortunately, the recipes make economical use of the strong aroma of the truffle, which acts as a condiment. According to the chef Regal interviewed, though, a dish should be 10-15% truffle, at minimum, or half as much if you have the pricey kind from Perigord.

First, by storing the truffles in a closed plastic container with eggs for two days, the eggs were allowed to soak up some aroma from the truffles. For the starter, we poached those eggs and served them on a creamy lentil soup, on top of which some slices of truffle were crumbled at the last minute. This picture shows the soup and the eggs, but not the truffles, since they really need to be crumbled on top at the last minute. The best temperature for appreciating the aroma of truffles is 57C (from the Regal article) and the aroma degrades quickly, somewhat like the way that the aromas in coffee don't last very long at high temperature.
In the next dish, we cut incisions part way through a trio of beautiful scallops and tucked a thin slice of truffle inside each, then skewered the scallops and truffles together. After letting the scallops rest in the fridge to allow the truffle's fragrance and flavor permeate the meat, we simply pan-fried each face of the skewered scallops in a small amount of olive oil. What was left of each truffle after our slicing was chopped up and added to a vinaigrette of radish and celery brunoise (very small dice, about 5mm on a side) with olive oil and white balsamic vinegar. To take advantage of every bit of the truffle's flavor and aroma, the dry outer part that we peeled off before slicing the truffle was saved by chopping it up and using it to infuse some softened butter that was later added to a potato purée.


Our purée was 'façon grand chef' which implies a heart-stopping 450g of butter for 600g of potatoes. The women in the class were quite hesitant about all of this butter, but the men in the class almost universally called for our instructor to bring out more butter!

The dessert was a traditional fondant au chocolat, with a slice of truffle hidden in the middle. I wasn't all that impressed with this, compared to the direct aroma and sense of the truffle in the starter and main dish. In fact, and since you can't see the truffle and its taste is a bit mild, I didn't feel that truffles really enhanced the chocolate cake. I'm sure there is some other combination of truffle and chocolate that is more interesting. Sorry, no picture on this one, but it looked pretty much like any other molten lava chocolate cake. I like this photo, if you must have one.

It was pretty fun to play around with a fascinating ingredient that I would never come across otherwise, and the food was indeed delicious in the end. For less money than I would have stresfully spent trying to cook with truffles on my own and wonder if I was missing something because I bought Chinese fakes, I got to relax and play around with them in someone else's kitchen. It was fun for sure, and definitely an experience I'm glad to have had in Paris.