A taste of food: truffles

The following food column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London, here: http://www.felixonline.co.uk/archive/IC_2011/2011_1486_A.pdf

Truffles always sounded slightly remote to me.  Not really in an impossible way, more an unlikely one.  And if like me, and Daniel Barenboim, you are more immediately interested in the impossible rather than the very difficult, or the unlikely, perhaps they are not something you have yet considered much either.  Ever the scientist though, my interest to learn more about them was primed from conflicting information about them.  They are in chocolate but also are grated, well, thinly sliced, onto (savoury) starters and put into soups.  Manifestly they were not the same and so I took my sweet tooth, grabbed the chocolate bull by the horns and set about trying to find out more. 

Like most people I have had truffles in chocolate selection boxes, those which include truffles start more or less a cut above the cheapest ones.  These I found a disappointment and rather avoid now: poor-quality chocolate with a chalky texture, frequently with too many nuts, inside also-not-very-good chocolate.  I like milk chocolate more than most others but if it is too milky or too greasy I cannot say I enjoy it for anything other than a source of fuel, albeit an important job for food. 

Anyway, so next, rather than look up what it was or should be, by chance I came across some much better ones, namely the Pink Marc du Champagne truffles from Charbonnel et Walker.  These are quite exquisite, if you can get past the frankly unnecessarily pink presentation.  I still think even now that they are sufficiently well put together that one alone is just right.  I should say how these are constructed.  They use white chocolate, and so have non cocoa, only cocoa butter in them.  Marc du champagne is an impossible-sounding thing really, as Marc is a drink made from the fermentation of grape skins alone, after they have been removed from the wine, or in this case, champagne, making process.  Typically this is done to supplement income when a bad year drives down the yield of grapes.  The same thing happens in Italy but there it is known as Grappa, and is perhaps more familiar than Marc though both are very bitter.  Pink Marc is perhaps unusual as it requires a mixture of both white and red grape skins to make it.  Either way, the bitterness seems at odds with the white chocolate but in this case it works well because the sweetness ad fattiness are reined in and so the flavours balance well and are deeper.  Only trouble is that a box costs £10 in the Gloucester Road Waitrose and there are only about nine in each box.  Worth it though.

Pralines are often mixed up with truffles, they are quite similar.  If your experience is like mine, they will also have been disappointing if not very similar to the cheaper truffles noted above.  Supposedly they are a type of truffle which does contain nuts, though can be either almonds or hazelnuts.  Normal truffles are made with chocolate mixed with cream or butter and flavoured, typically with a spirit.  This is similar to the ganache used to decorate pâtisserie in which chocolate is melted at body temperature before the cream and/or butter is mixed with it.  I must say that mixing chocolate and cream and adding a flavouring sounds rather achievable.  Time to experiment I think...

I do not have a nut allergy but I do not have a massive keenness either.  However, a recent present of chocolates and champagne showed me that it can, and indeed is, done well with nuts.  And more to the point, milk chocolate, but it worked.