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Carpaccio of scallops with white truffle at Akrame in Wan Chai.

Chefs take an adventurous approach to preparing truffles

The days when truffles were so abundant they were used as stuffing are long gone, but some cooks still push the boat out

As the white truffle season follows the European summer black truffle season, and will in turn be followed by the Australian summer truffle, Hong Kong diners have become more than familiar with the pricey fungus. Often it comes to us shaved over pasta, or in scrambled eggs or an omelette. These dishes are well-liked, but a look at historic recipes and new dishes from adventurous chefs shows that the ingredient can be more versatile.

By conventional wisdom, white truffle, mainly found around the town of Alba in Piedmont, Italy has always been given the Italian cooking spin - a good ingredient treated simply, with little technique.

Black truffles can be handled very differently under the influence of the more complicated techniques of French or Spanish chefs and cooking styles.

Chef Gabriele Milani at modern Spanish-Italian restaurant Vasco is from Tuscany and says that if he were a more traditional chef, he might make cheese fondue emulsified with egg yolks and truffles. That is on the menu at the more relaxed Isono downstairs. Or he might make tagliolini, he says.

"Traditionally, we take this fresh pasta made with lots of eggs and cook it in chicken stock for a little meat flavour and then sauté it in truffle butter."

A northern Italian menu might also include scrambled eggs, risotto and pasta. His current white truffle menu is a little more complicated. The restaurant has a six-course white truffle menu that even includes the fungus in the dessert. Milani's watercress risotto with snails and burrata is his take on snail paella. 

Watercress risotto with escargot, burrata and white truffle at Vasco. Photo: Jonathan Maloney

The truffle is well integrated into the dish - the distinctive aroma isn't even the first thing you notice, given the dish's vivid green hue. The fungus provides depth and subtlety to a dish of venison with an apple purée and fondant potatoes.

The truffle-laced dessert of chocolate, cocoa, Piedmont hazelnut and coconut ice cream also works well - the earthiness of the truffle matches the chocolate and hazelnut and doesn't overpower. Yes, in this chocolate dessert the truffle really is truffle.

Dishes such as these are the exception to the rule in Hong Kong restaurants. If modern day chefs are too often sticking to the tried and tested, it's because they don't have one advantage that chefs in the past enjoyed - quantity.

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, and sources disagree, but it seems that 150 years ago, chefs had a crop at least 200 times the size of the current one.

While smaller crops have had an inevitable effect on prices, they also seem to have made chefs rethink the way that they use truffles.

The 19th-century Italian composer Gioachino Rossini is said to have cried three times in his life: when an opera failed, when he heard the violinist Paganini play for the first time, and when he saw a truffled turkey fall off a boat into a river. Chefs back then would have thought nothing of using enough truffles to stuff a turkey.

There are two ways of doing this. One is to insert slices of raw truffle under the skin of the bird and roast it. The early 20th century gourmet Henri-Paul Pellaprat suggests 340 grams of truffle for a 6.35 kilogram turkey. 

Chef Gabriele Milani of Vasco.

A small truffle can also be chopped and blended with foie gras and butter to form a cream to be piped under the turkey's skin before roasting. When published its take on the second method in 2012, it suggested using 21 grams of truffle for an entire turkey.

While Pellaprat recognises that truffles are "not an everyday pleasure", he also suggests cooking 450 grams of truffles over a mirepoix of onion, carrot and lean bacon tossed in butter with 285 millilitres of port, madeira or champagne. The sauce is finished with extra butter, of course.

Michel Guerard, who invented nouvelle cuisine, but also wrote the 1970s paean to rich cooking , advocates a liberal use of truffles. His butter sauce with truffles uses 40 grams of tinned truffles, the juice from the tin, 130 grams of butter and some whipping cream - to make enough sauce for four people.

This is a dish ordered by those who want people to know that they are rich
Len Deighton, cookery writer

Guerard also suggests making truffle pastries for four by combining four whole truffles with foie gras for the filling and using a sauce based on white Bordeaux wine. Or you could make a scallop-filled pastry and mask it with a truffle sauce.

You want to play an April Fool's joke on your friends? Dress a fillet of beef with slices of truffle so it resembles a fish. That prank needs 200 grams of truffle for 10 people, not to mention a 2.2-kilogram fillet of beef.

Perhaps beef and scallops are not decadent enough for you? Try Guerard's take on lobster - this uses the same amount of truffles (20 grams) in the sauce for four small lobsters.

Perhaps Guerard realised that "peak truffle" had already arrived. His "truffled chicken" recipe uses an under-the-skin stuffing of mushrooms, parsley, shallots and fromage frais, with nary a truffle in sight.

Guerard doesn't limit himself to using truffles exclusively with luxury ingredients. The best accompaniment for stewed tripe, he says, is a "simple" salad of sliced truffle dressed in olive oil and lemon juice.

Cook, cookery and thriller writer Len Deighton, writing in the 1980s, recounts how truffles were traditionally wrapped in fatty pork and then in pastry before being cooked in an open fire or an oven. He believes that truffles are best used to flavour foods such as chicken or potatoes, and are a let-down on their own. He writes that chefs of the time were cooking whole truffles in brandy and stock, with many variations.

"Sometimes the pots are specially designed for the purpose, for this is a dish ordered by people who want everyone to know that they are rich," Deighton said.

Harlan Goldstein is treading the fine line between tradition and innovation at his restaurant Gold, offering dishes such as taglioni pasta with Italian white butter and parmigiano topped with three grams of truffle but also ravioli with scampi, melting egg yolk and white truffle dashi.

Chef Akrame Benallal's white truffle menu at Akrame features a five gram serving of white truffle over lightly cooked vermicelli, with a cream broth but his other white truffle dish comes as fungus sliced over a carpaccio of scallop, presented in a closed scallop shell, which is opened at the table to have olive oil drizzled over it.

Benallal says that white truffles often used to be cooked with vegetables but now that the truffle is rarer "chefs prefer keeping it raw. We try to work with the product while looking for some finesse."

 

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: The stuff of dreams
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