For many years I’ve read one particular Roux recipe with a combination of awe and longing*. The recipe involved carving a hollow into a potato, into which you would insert a truffle. The potato would then be put back together again to be cooked – when ready it would be sliced into 1/8 ths, a little like a boiled egg. I looked at the photo – I could smell the truffle, I knew what a fantastic combination it would make, but I certainly didn’t have a truffle big enough lying around to make this dish – I would have to dream about it for a while…
Fast forward several years and I was given a lovely little truffle as a gift. In additional to scenting some risotto rice (which is an essential part of having a truffle – that, and scenting eggs for the best scrambled eggs ever!), I looked again at the Roux recipe. I concluded it just wouldn’t work unless you were able to be incredibly generous with the truffle – it’s really something you’d need to be able to give to someone individually, or at most to share with one other person. Perhaps that’s just being greedy, but as a generous host, I just don’t feel that I could divide it up between many people :0( So. How to achieve the same results on a much more meagre quantity of truffle?
This summer I noticed that Mister Truffle had English summer truffles on his web site, and I thought it would be fun to try them, especially as they are a little cheaper than winter truffles. I ordered a fairly large truffle, and the lovely Mr Truffle very generously sent me an enormous one. Now we were talking! I’d ordered it for a celebratory dinner I was cooking for friends and family, and I thought I would scale up the size of my gratin this time. Whilst the flavour of the creamy dish was lovely, I thought the crispy Pommes Anna would suit the nature of a truffle better, and not swamp the truffle with too many other flavours. So, armed with my huge truffle, I began layering fine layers of raw potato and truffle into a dish, dotting each layer with butter.
The final dish looked fabulous – I brushed the top of the gratin with some truffle oil, and the scent as you ate the dish was amazing. I also warmed the truffle trimmings in the butter before lining the dish, and this increased the scent-load.
I still look at the Roux recipe with longing, but I’m not sure in this economic climate that one could really use truffles in this way. With winter Alba truffles running at £2,900 odd per kilo – truffles remain a rare extravagance. Indeed, at a recent dinner in Ducasse they were charging £36 per plate for tiny quantities of Alba truffles. However if you want to try small quantities of truffle, Mister Truffle will sell you from as little as 1g. If you buy an white truffle though – absolutely don’t cook it like this – it should be finely shaved over a dish at the last possible moment.
