The Food Maven Diary
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No To Truffle Oil, Yes to Roma
I hate truffle oil. Maybe you've heard me say this before.
I love truffles – white, black, beige, summer truffles, fall truffles, winter truffles, the ones you cook, the ones you eat raw. I love any kind of truffle, real truffles. They're sexy. But I hate truffle oil. And most truffle paste, too.
Let's start with: Truffles don't contain oil. Truffles are a fungus, like mushrooms, but they grow below ground, not above ground. That's why truffles are so hard to find, and why pigs and dogs, with their superior sense of smell, have to sniff them out for humans to dig up. Truffle oil is merely oil that has been scented or flavored with truffles – when it is real truffle oil, which does exist.
However, most truffle oil, and most truffle pastes or spreads – I'm guessing 99 percent these days – is not an infusion of truffles and oil, but oil or paste with a chemical added to make it smell like truffles and taste like truffles. These products have as much to do with truffles as cherry Lifesavers have to do with cherries.
Yes, most truffle oil is nothing more than artificially scented oil, and who knows what kind of oil. It's not top-grade olive oil, I can tell you that.
The chemical that gives that truffle scent is Bis-(Methylthio)methane. It is apparently easily synthesized at a fraction of the cost of real truffles. I find it enhancing truffle paste, too, and almost any product boasting truffles, including cheese flavored with truffles. The give-away is the words "truffle aroma" on the label. That's Bis(Methylthio)methane.
There is such a thing as truffle oil scented only with real truffles, generally the shavings, scrapings, essentially the leftovers or byproducts of canning, jarring, in general the processing of truffles. You won't find this truffle oil in a bottle in a grocery store. You'd have to make it yourself, and you know how much truffles cost.
Okay, I got the truffle oil thing off my chest
I meant to send this newsletter out before I left for Italy. One last-minute errand led to another, however, and then I had to pack and get to the plane. Instead, I wrote this while sitting in my hotel in Rome. I am staying near my friend Iris Carulli, who has just moved from a very chic street in the historic center of the city to a middle-class neighborhood outside the center. Her new neighborhood is called Monteverde and you won't find any touristic sites or tourists here. It's sort of like living in Brooklyn, but close-to-Manhattan Brooklyn. There's a tram on the corner that takes you, in only 15 minutes, into the center of the city. The stop is Largo Argentina, which, by the way, does not refer to the country of that name, but to the fact that this ancient Roman square used to house many silversmiths. It is within walking distance of most historic monuments. So Iris, as one of Rome's top private art, history and food guides, doesn't have far to get to work. (By the way, if you want to use here, write to her at imcarulli@hotmail.com.
Because Iris moved into her new, more spacious apartment (with a huge terrace, no less) only three weeks ago and is not yet set up for sleep-over visitors, I'm staying, with Bob Harned, at a hotel around the corner. It is called the Monteverde, the same as the neighborhood, and it is totally adequate -- very comfortable, immaculately clean, and very inexpensive. We have a large room with a large bath and a tiny terrace that I enjoyed sitting and reading on this morning. The breakfast coffee is fabulous, and it comes with good rosette rolls and a barely serviceable, pre-packaged cornetto (croissant). A double room is 100 euro (about $130). A single is 80 euro. In the center of Rome, you can't find a hotel with equivalent cleanliness and comfort for that price. Of course, if you are a tourist and stay at the Monteverde, you have to take the tram to see the city.
But as someone who comes to Rome several times a year and has done most of the tourist things many times, I am very much enjoying being in a normal Roman neighborhood. For one thing, as is the case in NYC, everything costs less outside the center of the city. We stayed nearby to eat lunch today and it cost a mere 20 euro each for wonderful food and attentive friendly service. The restaurant is called Hostaria-Pizzeria da Settimio, and it is at Via di Val Tellina, 81. (tel.: 06 58 23 07 01 – reservations are a must; its tiny and popular with the locals).
There is no menu. The owner-hostess, Carla, recites the dishes of the day, all typical Roman dishes. The only thing you can be guaranteed is that they will have bucatini all'Amatriciana because that is the specialty of the house. It is a wonderfully porky version, with lots of guanciale, the fatty check meat that is its hallmark – as opposed to the more frequent substitution of pancetta, which is bacon – and not that much tomato. A couple of us did order that, an especially large portion, while the rest of us took the house-made pappardelle (very wide noodles) with wild boar ragu. For antipasti, we had a board of salumi, cured pork products that included several tiny dried sausage from Sienna, dried liver sausage from Abruzzo, other dried sausage in slices, capocollo, and headcheese, plus slices of both young pecorino and some kind of cow's milk cheese that no one could identify but I thought tasted like a very young provolone. A board like that, enough for six, would cost $100 in New York, maybe more – no joke. Our whole lunch, including pasta and main courses, plus a few artichokes, a salad, and a plate of vegetables to round it out, cost – I repeat -- 20 euro each, including wine and water and service, but no coffee or dessert (we were too full) – about $27 a person.
I really had no intention of writing about Rome today. I stuffed my bag with all the menus from the New York restaurants that I was going to write about, which would certainly be more useful to most of you, but I think this will go on too long if I recount details from those meals. I'm staying in Rome tomorrow, too, with no agenda – dolce far niente – the sweetness of doing nothing, Italians say. Unfortunately, I am not that Italian. I have trouble doing nothing. So my intention is to write up those restaurants tomorrow.
