Why I hate (the obsession with) truffles

If you watch any chef programme, or you go to any restaurant, you tend to find people who put on their menus that they have truffle this, or truffle that. You may have diners who light up in delight, saying how wonderful truffles are. “The dish MUST be good!” Then they fork over a handful of cash for a plate of cheap flakes sprinkled on cheesy pasta.

I tend to find that restaurants or amateur cooks try to use truffles as a culinary shorthand to signal that the food seems better than it actually is. In awful cases, people tend to coat their dishes with so much truffle that it’s a bit like being buried under a soiled layer of grit and dirt.

Don't get me wrong, I love truffles. Truffles should accompany a meal with a range of different notes and flavours, as a hint to accentuate other elements. But many forget this. If I wanted to have so many truffles in my food, I would have turned into a pig and trotted into a forest.

Also, it it has become a culinary shorthand for “delicious,” abused by restaurants to up prices. In very bad cases, it's used as a way of tricking people into thinking that a dish - which is priced at £30 (or more!) - is actually worth it. It reminds me of the recent trend with wagyu beef; few people know that it’s possible to make a cheaper version (the low-grade option), so it has led to large margins for chains buoyed by misdirected meat hype.

Add a dash, and enjoy the hint. But be careful beyond that.