The truffle industry is a scam
tasteatlas.com
tasteatlas.com
The truffle industry is a scam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668896 - Nov 2022 (373 comments)
After tasting different varieties I concluded I liked fake truffle taste more.
A lot more.
A simple spaghetti dish with real truffles tasted okay, but not as good as the one with fake truffle oil.
I'd be very grateful if they started labelling it accordingly as they do it with other synthetic flavours (eg strawberry, GER)
I feel like they probably over do it so you can specifically taste it rather than let it blend in at a normal level.
Perhaps I would enjoy the "real" experience more...
I was so excited to make up some fake story about how I went to Italy and had real truffles on pasta. My story was almost identical to yours: coming out in favor of truffle oil!
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.
Got truffle oil, with black truffle, from Costco. It was one of the most vile thing I’ve ever tasted.
Either I don’t have the genes to like truffle or it was some fake shit.
You would absolutely hate it. Yet, vanilla is fairly universally liked by people everywhere…
I'm pretty sure I've had real truffle as well as artificial truffle. The real truffle is a "softer" more mild flavor that's hard to explain, that's vaguely similar to artificial flavor but different. I want to say it's more herbal or woody and less garlicy but who knows if those are the right words.
The real truffle was sort of surprising to me and took some time to think about but was something I didn't have to "acquire".
The artificial flavor I also like but that did take some getting used to, sort of. I had the real truffle first and didn't know the artificial was artificial so that might have something to do with it.
One thing is artificial truffle oil you should use very sparingly, like maybe one drop for a multiserving dish. One problem I think is that over time people have increased the amount used to too much and it's the intensity more than anything that turns people off.
Honestly as I write this I'm confused about what I've had. I've had things that were natural truffle, things that I'm not sure about, things that in hindsight that were probably artificial and good, and things that were artificial and bad, that I attributed to overflavoring but might have been a poorly produced product?
I liked the article but think it's too hostile to anything that isnt traditional European truffle. There are many different truffles and I think certain oils can be pretty good if used as intended.
It's hard to say if you just don't like truffle. I can see that — it's a bit like "do you like mushrooms?" I do think someone who doesn't like artificial oil might like natural truffle, and I also think there are probably better and worse artificial truffle oils out there.
First of all thanks for the long comment, makes sense.
Referring to the above quoted text, that makes a lot of sense. I’m ashamed to say this but I was trying to use it as dipping oil with bread. :D
When I open the bottle, it just hits, which is where your comment about intensity comes in. But I can imagine that in the right recipe a drop here or there might add some unique flavor, just like garlic.
Interestingly that conflicts when I see people shaving it on dishes, but it seems that the flavor gets concentrated in oil.
I’ll have to experiment. Luckily I didn’t return or throw it, we still have it, so can try again.
I've noticed that if used at room-ish temperature, most decent truffle oils don't have a strong sulfur-based smell, but if cooked, say on a pizza or a french fry where the temperature gets relatively high, I think some of the dithiapentane might degrade into stuff that's more more reminiscent of petroleum products.
Seems very likely, considering the process of refining or"cracking" oil into usable products is based on temperature and pressure, and organic compounds in general have different reactivity at different temperatures. In cooking with oils, one of the key properties to consider is their "smoke temperature", above which they will not be cooking your food but smoking and ruining the flavor, so you must select an oil that is good at higher temps than you need to cook the other ingredients. So, it wouldn't be at all surprising if there's a threshold temperature that will break or re-combine the molecules of this artificial "truffle oil" in a way that ruins it.
But some of it is that it's often not well used. As you say, it's easy and cheap. But often, it comes at a considerable upcharge, building on the halo glow of the price of truffles.
And part of it is that it stops being interesting when it's everywhere. Many "foodies" seek novelty -- in ingredients, in preparation, in presentation, etc. At one time truffle oil was itself a novelty, but now it's extremely common, and still presented as if it were a culinary achievement.
Truffle oil is hard to combine well with other flavors. It tends to get added to relatively straightforward dishes, literally meat-and-potatoes. So it's an interesting flavor by itself, but you rapidly run the gamut of its uses.
I expect to see it diminish on menus as some other flavor fad takes over. That's great -- it'll still find uses, but not so much that everything tastes the same.
just 854?