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by zexbha
582 days ago
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In my past life, I was a chef. I owned a restaurant in Ireland. I only purchased the cheapest Chinese truffles money could buy. Why? People only want to taste the oil anyway. I've worked with high end white truffles and the flavor is very vague. I'd estimate that I've eaten several hundred grams of white truffle. |
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Doesnt that have a lot to do with region? I ask because I worked all over Europe and N. America during my chef days and I can definitely tell you that my stint in Croatia made me realize that truffles are not that highly regarded--I saw black ones thinly sliced on slices of $1.50 pizza slices at the bakery during the heavy season--when they are plentiful, and the oil was entirely non-existant. What wasn't used was canned and labeled a delicacy next to the little spreadable ham things that sold for like 80 cents back then.
While when I was in Italy you rarely saw them on menus outside of 100+ euro a menu places and typically only in season--I worked in mainly farm to tables is in the Emilia Romanga area so we got lots of parama ingredients all year round but truffles were a special occasion kind of affair that was limited to maybe 3 weeks or a so a year.
In London I just took it for granted that this was a marketing ploy to get the people in the city to justify the wildly expensive outings a reservation/menu cost, and in Cornwall they didn't even care about them at all. Germany, and Switzerland were pretty much the same.
I didn't have truffle oil until I got back to the US, and it was used for innocuous things like fries in a steak frites entree.