Some truths in life are hard to swallow: Your spices don’t last forever, you’re probably storing your coffee all wrong and there’s actually a really useful purpose for that hole in your pasta spoon, which you should be taking advantage of (no, it’s not for draining water). Here’s another startling truth you probably don’t want to confront: There are no actual truffles in your precious truffle oil.
As Priceonomics puts it, “Truffle oil has been a remarkably successful con.”
Originally, truffle oil was high-quality olive oil infused with black or white truffles, but today, most of the stuff is made synthetically with ingredients like 2,4-dithiapentane, an aromatic molecule that gives truffles their distinctive smell. Some people love the oil, but a lot of chefs despise it.
“One of the most pungent, ridiculous ingredients ever known to chef,” Gordon Ramsay once told a competitor on MasterChef. Reaching for the oil is “a sure sign of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing,” Joe Bastianich said in the same episode.
“Fake truffle flavoring is one of those things that’s especially upsetting, because not only does it taste like a bad chemical version of the real thing, it’s the flavor that almost everyone now associates with truffles,” Jonathan Gold says.
So if it’s so despised, then why is it out there? It all comes down to money. Real truffles are rare. They’re hard to find and hard to cultivate. There are just a few precious places in the world where they grow naturally, and because the little buggers are very particular, they’re pretty impossible to cultivate unnaturally. Once known for being “hunted” by pigs – leading many to mistakenly believe truffles were somehow a part of a pig – now dogs are specially trained to sniff them out in the forests where truffles grow near specific trees. Once found, the human counterpart carefully digs them up by hand.
But wait, there’s more. Once they’re dug up, truffles are on the clock, degrading from the moment they’re exposed to air, and therefore must be used before their shelf life is over. Because of all of these elements, truffles are – and rightfully so – expensive. A single truffle can go for over $100, so chefs that use the real thing, shave off the precious fungi sparingly.
The restaurants that choose to use the imitation truffle smelling oil – because that’s what it should be rightfully called – then do it as a way to project “quality” onto their plates, and diners eat it up, whether they’re aware or not that it’s all just a ruse.
If you’d like to make your own real truffle oil, it is possible, but you’d need to start with some high quality olive oil, splurge for actual truffles, and take the time it needs to meld together. If you’re game, here are some tips from Live Eat Learn to help you along.
If you’re already privy to the blasphemy that is counterfeit commercial truffle oil and simply choose to ignore it as you pay a nice little premium on certain side dishes, amen. If this is news to you, we are sorry that you may never look at your $15 truffle fries the same way again.
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Photo Credit: Ingrid Balabanova / Shutterstock.com