Let's eat a whole black truffle

celebrating the rubbery taste of luxury

Hello, my beautiful clowns!

I hope your week is going well. I woke up on Monday after my alarm went off, found a cat turd on the floor (typical), and drank my morning coffee as usual. Shortly thereafter, I packed up my work bag and left for the office, marveling at how quiet and smooth my hour-long commute was. There was barely anyone on the train and I even got a seat, which is rare.

When I got to work I noticed that I was eerily alone. I sat at my desk, trying to figure out if the rapture happened, and if I was left behind due to my blaspheming culinary crimes. (Remember my Communion wafer Nachos Bell Grande?)

Then I realized it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and our office was closed. If you heard a banging sound around nine in the morning, that was my forehead hitting my desk.

Today’s edition of the newsletter is a simple one, because it’s a taste test.

I generally do not delve into the subject of luxury on Food is Stupid, partly because I am a humble and simple man, but mostly because I am not exactly rich. Apparently the audience for questionable food experiments crossed with juvenile ass-based humor is much more niche than I’d anticipated. Based off my last bank statement, I have made some huge miscalculations about where my career is headed.

hermosachicago

A post shared by Hermosa (@hermosachicago)

Speaking of luxury, my dear friend Ethan, who is one of my favorite chefs in Chicago, recently posted a photo of a truffle he had purchased.

He later featured it during a course on the tasting menu at his restaurant, Hermosa. I know a few fine dining chefs, and when they post pictures of their truffle hauls online, I am known to respond with what is easily the funniest comment ever: “Eat the whole thing all at once.” I reuse this statement frequently, because I am widely regarded as a comedic genius and I must constantly assert my dominance.

As we all know, truffles are a symbol of opulence, since they are quite expensive. Even just looking at one makes you feel fancy. But then, as I was typing “Eat the whole thing” on yet another photo of a truffle, it occurred to me that they’re merely used as garnishes for a dish, and never featured as the main ingredient.

Why doesn’t anyone just eat a whole truffle, then? Wouldn’t that be the pinnacle of luxury itself? Could the hilarious comment that I’d been leaving on chefs’ Facebook and Instagram posts actually be the key to experiencing the apex of haute cuisine?

So for today’s experiment, I decided to finally put my money where my mouth is. Davida and I would each eat an entire truffle to see if it could change our lives forever.

Since fresh whole truffles are difficult to come by, and can cost more than rent money, I decided to go the more reasonable route and get jarred ones.

Hey, you can still be fancy on a budget. This small jar of three whole truffles was about $25 at a specialty grocery store. That’s expensive, but within reach, if you’re splurging.

The return on my investment already felt huge. I felt like a million dollars simply holding the jar, and if my numbers are correct, a million dollars is almost a million dollars more than the $25 I just forked over!

If you ask a fine dining chef about preserved truffles, they will generally make a face at you and say that jarred ones are bullshit.

The thing about truffles of any sort is that their flavor degrades quickly. If you manage to get your hands on a fresh one, you need to store it properly then enjoy it within a few days, otherwise the thing will completely lose its flavor. Then you will feel sad.

That’s why truffle products are fortified with artificial flavoring, which is pretty close to the real thing, but that idea offends fine dining chefs greatly. If you even show a fine dining chef a jar with truffles in it, they are obligated to turn around and never talk to you again.

While I am sorry at the loss of your Michelin-starred friendship, I would also like to assure you that truffle-flavored stuff is in fact delicious, as long as you use it sparingly. But they’re not for everyone.

The truth is, truffles taste weird. They taste sort of like mushroom perfume, with some floral qualities, but taste a little like dirt at the same time. It’s a very specific flavor and some people fucking hate them.

After opening the $25 jar of truffles, I let the cats examine the scent of opulence.

They became wildly excited, but I think it is because they believed I had cat food for them. After some serious inhaling they became bored and tried rooting around for their own treats in the kitchen, of which there are none, since Sub-Zero (the black and white one) managed to figure out how to get on top of the refrigerator and eat them all in one sitting.

The odor wafting from the jar was admittedly pretty nice. It was complex, and for lack of a better word, musky. Not like nasty sock musky but okay, maybe a little sock-musky.

I gingerly fished one out and let the gang look at it.

As Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Pepper considered this bulgy rock-looking object, I was suddenly reminded of the cat turd I found in the office. I wonder why.

I mean, doesn’t this lumpy thing just scream money to you?

I finally took a bite and made sure to document the deed, along with my scraggly mustache.

(Upon later review, Davida asked me why I never look at the camera lens when I’m taking selfies. Listen. I have a condition where I never know where the camera lens is, so I always look confused when I take them.)

I knew the texture of the truffle would be unusual since it was sitting in truffle-flavored juice, but I wasn’t exactly prepared for it to crumble the way it did. The thing practically splintered into little rubber bits in my mouth.

I’d liken chewing on the thing to biting into an ancient racquetball that’s been sitting out in the sun for a few decades.

It was crumbly, wet, and bouncy at the same time. This was extremely unappealing, and easily one of the least sexy food experiences I’ve ever had. Chewing on this brittle pencil eraser made me wonder if rich people have no idea about what actually tastes good.

I grudgingly popped the remaining half in my mouth and chewed it into oblivion.

This was the first thing I’d eaten that day, and I should have felt good about it. I mean, who gets up and just like, eats an entire truffle for breakfast? On paper, you’d think the answer would be “a champion,” but in reality, it tasted like disappointment. I would have been better off eating a Hostess Honey Bun that I dropped in a muddy puddle.

Next, it was Davida’s turn to try one, and here’s what she had to say:

You really get diminishing returns with these things. Once you reach a certain amount of flavor there’s no real need to keep going, so there’s no point in eating a whole one.

All it really did was put the texture front and center, which kind of reminds me of black olives. Definitely worth it for me, personally, though, because I was just recounting to a friend how I was on the reduced-lunch program as a kid and now today I rolled out of bed and immediately ate an entire black truffle. Alexa, play “Juicy” by Biggie.

So in conclusion, you can indeed have too much of a good thing. If you really want to flex on your friends, families, and enemies, don’t do it by eating a whole truffle. You will spend your kid’s future college tuition money all for something that looks suspiciously like a cat turd and probably tastes marginally better than one.

But there’s still been a nagging thought at the back of my mind. Maybe we shouldn’t have just eaten the thing raw. Perhaps we should have prepared it in the manner in which the most delicious foods are cooked.

So later this week, we’ll be trying a different approach: What if we deep fry a whole truffle?

Stay tuned, because the journey continues to continue.

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I hope you enjoyed our introspective journey into eating entire truffles. Please do me a favor; if you took the time to read this whole thing, give it a share on social media. This is hard-hitting journalism that the world needs to know about:

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So now, if you’ll excuse me, I better go scrape the couch cushions for some spare change. If I’m going to be deep frying a truffle, I’m going to need it.

As always, I love you all a million times over, and I’ll hop into some of your inboxes later this week.