What the heck are truffles?
/* Posted March 12th, 2008 at 3:05pm *//* Filed under Cuong, Food */
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I’ve heard of truffles before. They were squishy chocolatey things my mom ate, and I did not like them. So imagine my surprise when I was invited to a truffle dinner, where we would be experiencing over $500 worth of truffles each? Wow, what a lot of chocolate, I thought.
Come to find out they’re actually like mushrooms, only way more expensive and stinky! I had my Truffle Dinner at Valentino’s in Santa Monica.
We took the train up to LA to avoid the rush hour traffic
The Menu
The Truffles!
The Wines waiting for the 40 of us
Karla and Amanda
All Having Fun!
Piero with Fiorenzo. Piero owns Valentino’s and Fiorenzo provided the wines from his vineyard in Barolo. Happy Birthday Fiorenzo!
Piero shows off the star attraction for the evening, the truffles!
Russ and I are ready to get this party started
Tastes on a spoon, a lentil soup with a shave of truffle
Veal tartar, quail egg, shaved truffles
Tortino of Porcini mushrooms and shaved truffles
We get shaved truffles from Piero himself!
Egg raviolo, shaved truffles.
Amazing, the egg is still raw inside the cooked raviolo!
The wine experts order a nice bottle
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Inspecting the cork as it comes out
Pasta with pigeon ragu
closeup of the pasta with pigeon ragu
Bonus dish, risotto with shaved truffles
Main course, braised beef with truffled polenta. The polenta filled the entire room with its truffly scent
Two cheeses, a pecorino and another hard cheese along with fruit and truffled honey
Dessert was a chocolatey delight with pomegranates and oranges
Here I am with Piero
We also had a tour of the private cellar upstairs. This would be a fun place to eat!
My signed menu as a souvenier. What a fun time, I hope everyone gets a chance to try Valentino’s sometime. It is a great restaurant. However, I did learn that I do NOT like truffles at all. Not even the expensive ones.
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Truffles are so expensive because specially trained pigs are used to find them. They probably mass produce them now but that’s how it used to be done.