I’ve got a problem. I keep coming across descriptions of black truffles — such as those pictured here, heaped upon each other and still caked with dirt from the roots of a Douglas fir — that spend a lot of time talking about how ugly and unappealing-looking truffles are.
Calling them ugly seems to be the entrance point to most discussions of truffles, and that’s a real shame. Because if you’ve actually tasted a truffle, or if you’ve carried them in a carved-out plastic milk jug tied to your waist by your belt, truffle scent wafting up in your face as you trudge through the Oregon forest, you know just how beautiful they are.
Spring Oregon black truffles, which are in season RIGHT NOW!, are richly black, sticky black, like the top of macadam laid out in summer.
They’ve got grooves and ridges and are firm in texture and feel a little like really, really dense packing Styrofoam. They come in all shapes and sizes, but tend to be bulbous, which lends them their alien look.
To clean my personal stash, I submerged the twelve I dug out of the ground on Monday in chilled water and brushed the peaty earth off of them with a toothbrush.
As with cantaloupes and husbands and all the best things in life, the best way to tell if a truffle is ready for use is to smell it. But you can also use some visual cues, such as the dappled granite-y color the truffle interior gets when it is ready.
Imagine me standing in the woods as Jack Czarnecki flicks the corner off of my largest truffle to show me how to test ripeness, letting the little chunk fall to the moss-covered forest floor.
I just about had a heart attack.
Still, lesson learned, and I’m not afraid to break a few truffles to find the good ones.
Not all of my truffles are ripe, so I placed them in a plastic bag with some paper towells to absorb moisture and stuck them in the fridge.
But one is very, very ripe.
The scent is so complex it borders on the indescribable, but since I like a challenge, here goes: It smells like pineapple, dirt, forest, chocolate and Oregon.
Everyone has their deities, and I find it an almost religious experience to prepare a meal to honor a single ingredient.
Mushroom risotto is an obvious choice for showing off the capabilities of Oregon’s black truffles because of how arborio rice leaches off its starch into the mixture to create a creamy glue to hold the dish together. The recipe I often use is from a fantastic cookbook with a terrible title, the Bride & Groom First and Forever Cookbook by the Corpening sisters. I’m not sure why any cook would want to limit their audience to newlyweds, but I was one recently and have caked the pages of this book with many a floury fingerprint.
If no one has told you this yet, make sure you always use truffles with creamy or fatty dishes. Dropping truffles, or truffle oil for that matter, on acidic foods such as a tomato sauce is pretty much like dropping gold into a swamp.
As I worked through the risotto recipe I began to shave the thinnest of slices off of my biggest black truffle. I later sliced those down to truffle shards and tiny truffle pieces. Most restaurants would shave the truffles onto the dish directly at the table, but I can’t bring myself to lose even a gram’s worth by putting these babies through the grater.
At the very last stage of this mushroom risotto, you remove the pot from the heat and add about 1/4 Cup of grated Parmesan.
I let that sit for about a minute and then added about a Tablespoon of finely sliced truffles.
Truffles aren’t really like other fungi — they are not even really fungi, though they grow similarly to other wild mushrooms. You should never, ever “cook” a truffle. Never saute it like you would a porcini or a chanterelle.
Truffles are kind of like a matchmaker who arrives after the parties have already met.
Here the ingredients are, meeting:
I mixed the truffle slices throughout the heated risotto, which allows the flavor and the heady cocktail of gases living in the truffle to be released.
Then I took some truffle shards I had set aside and arranged them in a little failed Stonehenge on top of the plated risotto.
We generally top off our risotto with a sprinkling of more Parmesan to taste, but I found that unnecessary when truffles are part of the mix. I also left out the sprinkling of thyme the recipe calls for.
The plates are on the table. The forks are in the hand.
This is the point when my dear neighbor Keith arrived and got into a heated conversation with my husband about the scientific merits of the film What the Bleep Do We Know. That film is a major intellectual wormhole — pretty much the last thing you’d want to start talking about when you’re preparing to devote all of your attention to your tongue.
I was done with my risotto before my husband even touched his.
It wasn’t long before I had drifted into a state of complete and utter bliss — until I got to thinking that maybe these truffles weren’t really truffles at all, but magic mushrooms. Within minutes, I had spaced out completely and was moved, as if ordered by remote control, to take more from the pot.
My husband had a similar, if muted, reaction. Sadly, he has a pretty bad sense of smell because of his allergies, which does affect his truffle experience.
Still, this first experience really hammered home for me the real truth about truffles. They just make everything taste better.
They are like little umami catalysts.
They are little symphony conductors that force all of the parmesan, arborio rice, white wine, garlic, onions and mushrooms to play exactly as loud as they should.
They are music to my tongue.
I am so jealous. I have never had a chance to cook with fresh truffles. It sounds spectacular. I look forward to the rest of the truffle adventure.
Dear Readers, that is Ivan, my friend from way back who taught me how to make sage-roasted potatoes. To win his jealousy means, to me, that I’ve come full circle in the kitchen.
Oh man. I am a native Oregonian and have never actually tried truffles. . . I am curious how you managed to be invited along for the hunt?
I invited myself! No really, I just called and asked. But I’m a writer and a journalist, so there’s always something in it for the people I write about… I’m working on a more in-depth story about the truffle hunt.
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