Yesterday the 150 (ish) attendees of the fourth International Workshop on Edible Mycorrhizal Mushrooms were treated to a guitar serenade at a restaurant in the Sierra Espuña National Park…
Later, an elder statesman performed a lengthy pean to his wife’s tortillas (I think).
Meanwhile, the truffle stuff at the workshop has been fascinating. More later – when I have time.
It’s white truffle charity auction time. Someone – obviously rather wealthy – spent E95,000 on a 1.2kg white truffle. The BBC report is terse and to the point, but the Independent‘s coverage is rather good:
“The appeal of the tartufo bianchi was dramatically underlined in London yesterday when a bidder from Hong Kong paid a staggering E95,000 (£63,000) for a 1.2 kilo Alba at a three-country charity auction organised by Christies, making it the world’s most expensive truffle and dwarfing the £28,000 paid for an 850g truffle at a similar event last year.”
The writer, Terry Kirby, also has some nice colour:
“At restaurants, none of this comes cheap, of course, which can provide a shock for unsuspecting diners wishing to sample the rare treat. Three years ago, one customer at Locanda Locatelli, a central London restaurant owned by celebrity chef Giorgio Locatelli, refused to pay £60 for two plates of pasta with white truffles and was locked in the toilet until he changed his mind.”
I will be carrying a fully charged credit card on my European tour, and will not be going to Locatelli.
Renowden’s first law of truffle journalism states that, however good the story, a journalist writing about truffles will inevitably end up spouting bollocks. Today it’s the turn of the Daily Telegraph‘s Hilary Clarke [Link].
I mean, it’s a good story. Soaring truffle prices driving tartufaio to piracy in an attempt to cash in on soaring prices. “…the village bars in the hills around Asti are awash with tales of sabotage and skulduggery. Car tyres have been slashed, paths scattered with nail barbs and poisoned meatballs left in the undergrowth to kill hunter’s dogs.” Happens every year, but let’s not let that get in the way of the story.
Where Clarke goes hilariously off the rails is in her attempt to find a telling description of what white truffles are: “White truffles are fungus balls that smell of rotten eggs but taste of garlic.” Pardon? These things that sell for £1,100 a kilo smell of rotten eggs? And taste of garlic? The byline states that Clarke is actually in Asti (not very far from Alba, in the Piedmont), but if that’s the case, surely she could have managed a slightly more educated sniff. Or perhaps she’s anosmic.
One suspects that the celebrities attending this year’s big charity white truffle auction in Italy will not be paying through their collective noses for something smells of rotten eggs. And I hope that if Roman Abramovich (Chelsea FC owner) and Gwyneth Paltrow buy a truffle this year, they will ensure that their chef doesn’t let it rot before they get a chance to taste it.
Saturday was a challenge. My daughter’s 17th birthday, and 17 bright young women descended on the farm to make merry. I had to make pizzas. 20 in all. The wood-fired oven got its first use since our mid-winter truffle extravaganza. It takes about four hours to get really hot – pizza hot – when starting from cold. This time, I used the dough recipe from Nikko Amandonico’s La Pizza: The True Story from Naples (excellent book, by the way), with a mix of organic stoneground flours provided (with fresh yeast) by Martin at Canterbury Cheesemongers (excellent shop — can’t leave without spending a small fortune on great cheese). Worked a treat. The dough was pliable and elastic, baking quickly to a lovely crispy crust. The girls seemed to like them, but my sternest critic was the most impressed. “Best yet” was Camille’s comment. I shall bask in the warmth of that praise for – ooh, hours.
Gordon Ramsay is a chef with a fearsome reputation – and tongue, if you have seen him on TV lashing some hapless young proto-cook on his cooking “reality” shows. He is, of course, an extremely fine cook, possessor of Michelin stars and the culinary gravitas that goes with that, and is therefore unafraid to charge like a wounded bull when the situation demands it. Which, at his Ramsay’s Maze in central London, it apparently does, because a pizza with white truffle shaved on top costs £100. The Daily Mail (I used to write a column for them in the early 80s) explains all…
Looks very nice, as you’d expect. But I’d rather make my own. And I wouldn’t shave truffle on top either. I’d make a pizza bianca, as I blogged earlier this year. But then I’m not Gordon Ramsay.
It wasn’t the ripest truffle in the world – still only whitish brown inside – but it had a good perfume, and its effect on pizza was remarkable – so impressive that my wife, who normally professes to dislike truffle, was moved to comment on how delicious it was. And it was exquisite.
We were hosting lunch for a gobble of local chefs who had just been to see the truffle being unearthed. They brought the pizza dough and toppings, Gavin and Chris, the truffiere owners, donated the truffle, Wilma brought two cases of wine (Cracroft Chase Pinot Gris), and I fired up the oven. Add to the equation a chef with considerable pizza skills (thanks, Nick!), and we had some stunning food.
There are two possible approaches to truffle pizza. You could make the pizza, and then shave truffle on top – perhaps the only way to do it with Tuber magnatum (Italian white truffle), or you could put the truffle onto the pizza base and then cover it with cheese, so that the flavour isn’t boiled away in the heat of the oven. We used both methods, but the better – by far – was the “cooked” truffle. A wood-fired oven cooks pizzas really quickly – in two or three minutes when its at its hottest. Nick did a version of pizza bianca, shaving the truffle onto the pizza base (lightly brushed with olive oil), and then covering it with a generous helping of fior de latte mozzarella and thin slices of cooked potato.
When it came out of the oven, the truffle flavour had worked its way into the cheese and into the base – not overwhelmingly strong (because the truffle wasn’t), but a wonderful accent to the crisp base, molten cheese and crispy potato.
And it didn’t rain.
By some very roundabout web wandering, involving Arts & Letters Daily, I came across a piece in the London Review Of Books by Harvard academic Steven Shapin. Ostensibly reviewing three diet books, two Atkins and one South Beach, Shapin either manages to fit the LRB editorial brief, or overwrite considerably:
Most fundamentally, eating is a moment of ontological transformation: it is when what is not-you – not rational and not animate, at the time you consume it – starts to become you, the rational being which ultimately decides what stuff to consume. Flesh becomes reason at one remove, and every supper is, in that sense, eucharistic. We are, literally and fundamentally, what we eat. The material transformation is simultaneous with the possibility of social and moral transformation or the advertisement of the social and moral states to which you are laying claim.(The Great Neurotic Art)
I’m not very big on ontological transformations. I thought Atkins was about weight loss. Worked for me, anyway.
Getting through Shapiro’s piece is a bit of a struggle – I dislike overtly academic writing, writing that has to wear its learning on its sleeve – but he does make some interesting points about changes in attitudes to self as evidenced in diets. But when I have to rush to the dictionary to check a meaning (soteriological, in this case), I think the writing’s getting in the way of the message.
Superb article by Malcolm Gladwell (originally published in The New Yorker) ostensibly about ketchup, but digging deep into what makes food products work. The Ketchup Conundrum is a really good read, especially if you have any interest in how companies manipulate the food we eat. But this isn’t a scare story about Heinz using rotten tomatoes: it’s about one guy trying to create the world’s best ketchup.
“If you were in Zabar’s on Manhattan’s Upper West Side a few months ago, you would have seen him at the front of the store, in a spot between the sushi and the gefilte fish. He was wearing a World’s Best baseball cap, a white shirt, and a red-stained apron. In front of him, on a small table, was a silver tureen filled with miniature chicken and beef meatballs, a box of toothpicks, and a dozen or so open jars of his ketchup. “Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”
Been there, done that…