Truffles In Tuscany
So it’s been a quiet few weeks on Kitchen Decanted. This was mainly due to assorted technical difficulties while visiting Europe and also a little bit of laziness on my part. The reason that there was no blog build up to the trip is that it was a surprise for Weepix’s mum’s birthday. Her other half knew we were coming but our arrival was a complete surprise.
Who cares about technical difficulties though? All the foodie pleasures of Tuscany, Barcelona, southern Spain and Edinburgh need to be reported. So here we go.
Now that the trip is but a distant memory I can fill you folks in on the details.
First stop was a week in San Gimigiano, which is situated in the hills of Tuscany just outside Florence. Following this we headed up to Milan (where a woman in her 60’s tried to seduce me) and we caught the night train to Barcelona. We had a wee cabin with beds and a toilet and everything. It was very James Bond……if James Bond travelled in cramped train cabins that have seen better days. We only had one day and night in Barcelona, but we crammed every spare second with food and wine. From Barcelona it was quick hop down to Malaga and then a long drive up into the mountains north of Gibraltar where my folks run a guest house. Despite a day in bed with a horrible cold we ate and drank to excess….chorizo, rioja, iberico jamon, manchego….it was a good few days
After a week at my folks place we headed off back home to Edinburgh to catch up with family and friends, before heading back to Sydney via London and Singapore. It was a busy few weeks.
First stop in Italy after catching the train from Milan to Florence was the town of Poggi Bonsi on the way to San Gimigiano. What’s the first thing you do when you get to Italy? You have a pizza of course. Not that pizza is very Tuscan, but we’d been travelling for about thirty four hours at this point and could not be trusted with cutlery. And it was great! A perfect thin base with a nice crunch was smothered with tasty tomato sauce and topped with mozzarella, anchovies and salami. Throw in a carafe of perfectly lovely local wine for about €3 and I was starting to feel a little more human by the end of it.
As luck would have it there was a little food market right beside the restaurant and this was where we found our first truly Tuscan food offering: truffles. There was truffle butter, truffle sauce, truffle crostini topping, truffle salami and, of course, huge piles of actual truffles. I’ve never had real truffle in an unadulterated form before so I wasn’t about to pass this up. I bought two small black truffles each the size of a large marble for €10. And this was mere hours after landing! What a place.
Truffles are big business in Tuscany. The best truffle locations are jealously (and I’m told violently) protected from other hunters and passed down through the generations. The truffles in this region tend to be black and of two varieties; Black Perigord and Black Summer. Most Italian white truffles are from Piedmont to the north and are much more expensive. I didn’t know it at the time but I’d bought two Black Summer truffles, which have a subtler flavour and aroma.
I figured there was really only one way to eat your first ever truffles and that is to grate them fresh onto scrambled eggs.
The flavour of the summer truffles really was quite subtle and didn’t have much of the distinct truffliness I was after. They were tasty, but I suspect I’m going to have to save up and get hold of some of those white ones at some point.
