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Thank God for food festivals, they rather highlight seasonal or regional food and bring much needed variety to the jaded appetite.The most interesting festival currently is the Truffle Festival at Vetro at the Oberoi. This is the harvest time for truffles from November to February.
When I mean truffles, I mean truffles pronounced like ruffles with a 't', as opposed to 'true-fals' an Americanised reference to a form of chocolate which got its name because of its apparent resemblanceto the great fungus.
Truffles are aform of fungus which are highly prized and expensive, they figure in literature from the time of Petrarch who described the truffle as a 'fruit so rare'.The great French gastronome Brillat-Savarin described them as "the black diamonds of haute cuisine".
They are basically two types of truffles -- black and white, although there are some 140 varieties.Traditionally the finest truffles come from the Perigord area in France, they are black both inside and outside. The famed white truffles come from Alba in Piedmont.
It has extraordinary gastronomic gifts, which includes the ability to infuse the most magical flavour in sauces and stuffings, almost anything, even eggs.Unfortunately, in the West the tendency is to use something called truffle oil as a flavouring agent. But truffle oil bears the same relation to truffles as vanilla essence does to vanilla.
In Vetro, the truffles were served the Italian way which is to eat slivers of truffles on a plate of oil with salt and pepper; lemon juice is squeezed over it before serving or we can sprinkle the truffles with Parmesan cheese. The antipasti which I had, was a tenderloin carpaccio, and slivers of black truffle.
The tenderloin carpaccio was delicate and the slices were cut so fine that they clung to the plate, it was superbly complemented by the black truffle and a salad. For the primi patti, one had the most extraordinary of dishes, a dish which a restaurant of the calibre of Vetro would have the confidence to pull off.
It consisted Ombrichelli pasta with that marvellous heady Barolo wine of the Piedmont, Pecorino cheese, a black truffle sauce with cauliflower cream, the combination of flavours were complimentary and witty.It takes cooking of a very high order to get this right, and it was excellent.
For the main course, I had, for the first time, a black truffle crusted Red Snapper, the crust is a most trendy culinary technique with fish, but I was not convinced it worked very effectively with truffles, they are too subtle and the charm is evanescent, like a rare perfume. Oddly enough, the truffle with the Tiramisu did work, not least because the Tiramisu was one of the most exquisite I have had in a long time.
The question is why can we not grow truffles in India? I was reading Blue Trout and Black Truffles by the great Hungarian epicure Joseph Wechsberg who relates a story of one Perigord truffle farmer to one Mr Barbier "There was another French cook on the boat who later became chef of the Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay.
He became so infatuated with truffles that he came to Perigueux and took a few young oak trees to northern India, where, he said the climate was the same as here."Mr Barbier rubbed his nose and laughed in his silent way."He is still waiting for the truffles to show up, pauvre garcon."
Email: javed.gaya@gmail.com
