Behind the Knife - tools, food, and the secret lives of chefs

The Love Tool: Truffle Shaver

The Chef: Ken Frank of La Toque at the Westin Verasa in Napa. Chef Frank not only offers a special truffle menu at his restaurant, but is also leading an upcoming Truffle Camp from January 17-19th, which is billed as a hands-on, full immersion truffle cooking and eating experience in the La Toque kitchen.

The Love Tool: A Truffle Shaver by Gefu (which is also listed in online kitchenware stores as a Parmesan shaver). Gefu is a German kitchenware manufacturer.

Where You First Fell For It, And Why? “I was surprised to find this fine German tool in Italy at a very cool hardware store near the Duomo in Florence a few years back,” Frank explained. “While it’s an elegant design, it’s also very practical. The handle makes it much easier than a traditional shaver to use tableside, and you can also use it while it sits on a work board.”

How Do You Use The Tool? “To shave truffles,” he happily replied. [Duh, Lisa.] To his credit, Chef Frank patiently answered my question free of smirks.

Do You Use It For Anything Besides Cooking? “While you can use it to shave other things — cheese for example — I only use it for truffles.”

Interesting Factoids: Because truffles are so imbued with mystery in our culture, I asked Chef Frank if he could help demystify them for readers. He happily obliged, providing details from the La Toque website:

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La Toque has long been known for our extravagant truffle menus. Our truffle season began in late October with the arrival of the first white truffles, tuber magnatum pico, from Italy. So far the quality has been excellent with availability and pricing slightly better than last year. We will feature at least one dish on our menu with fresh white truffle until the season winds down, typically around Christmas. Last year we enjoyed a very long season with great white truffles well into January. Our best white truffles come from a friend who hunts them between Gubbio and Citto di Castello.

Currently we are also featuring fresh “Burgundy” truffles as well. Tuber uncinatum is a fall truffle, black on the outside with large pyramidal warts on the skin and a milk chocolate colored center. The aroma is dusky and sweet, quite tasty, but lacking the intensity of white truffles or the depth of flavor of true black winter truffles. Ours are hunted in the area of Monti Sibillini between Umbria and Marche. At just over three hundred dollars a pound, they are a relative bargain and we were happy to have them to play with.

Sometime in December the first true Black Winter truffles, tuber melanosporum, will begin to appear. The early ones are rarely ripe enough to be very good but generally by Christmas they are hitting their stride. Many truffles are black, but only the melanosporum have the real magic that truffles are famous for.

We do not use truffles from China. These small truffles from the Himalayas are true truffles, but their flavor pales in comparison to the real thing. Sadly many people don’t know the difference and are either easily fooled, or worse, mix them in with real truffles to increase their profit.

We also don’t use “truffle oil” at La Toque unless we make it ourselves. First of all it is a misnomer, truffles contain no fat. You can press a million dollars worth of truffles as hard as you want and still not get a single drop of oil. Truffle oil is a relatively new phenomenon. It is no coincidence that “truffle oil” appeared a few decades ago around the same time scientists successfully duplicated the chemical compounds in the laboratory that are responsible for truffles legendary aroma.

You can infuse fresh truffle flavor into oil or butter, but it doesn’t keep any better than fresh truffles which are best consumed within 10 days of hunting. Because of this very short shelf life, real truffle flavored oil is simply not a viable product. Commercially produced truffle oil is invariably artificially flavored, no matter how fancy the bottle or prestigious the purveyor. It is simply too good to be true. Real truffle flavored oil or butter is always subtle in flavor unlike the powerful products sold in a store. That little scrap of “truffle” at the bottom of the jar is often from an inferior species, and in any event, it takes much more than a little crumb of truffle to infuse oil with any amount of flavor.
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So now you know.