Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/760410
6 | t h e c l e v e r r o o t D G THIS Executive Chef Wilfried Bergerhausen of Le Cirque in Las Vegas offers a truffle tasting menu designed to celebrate the unique flavor of fresh white truffles. Truffles are in season. Rejoice! Bewitchingly delicious, their haunting, earthy-mushroomy redolence adds intrigue to savory cuisine. Exquisitely rare, they must be foraged wild or painstakingly cultivated. And they're phenomenally expensive—one ounce of prized white truffle will set you back about $200. But they're expensive for a reason. Truffles are fiercely difficult to procure, foraged by truffle-hunt- ers, alongside trained dogs. Even cultivation is no guarantee of fortune, as it can take a plantation—a truffière in French—up to ten years to come online. The price is also due to truffles' prized flavor. Nearly ineffable, it's variously described as musky, funky, nutty, garlicky, sweaty, cocoa-y, pungent, earthy, animal. Sounds weird, but it's really just weirdly compelling, a flavor you want to taste again and again. And since it shares a chemical kinship with human pheromones, it's no wonder the effect is so lusty—and so confusing. Wilfried Bergerhausen, Executive Chef at Le Cirque in Las Vegas, knows that must-taste-it-again obsession. "People really enjoy white truffle, and once they eat it, they always want more," he says. His truffle tasting menu offers diners the option to (try to) get their fill. "We actually leave the truffle on the table and they can shave it as they like." Fortunately, eating truffle again and again is what you must do when you've managed to get your hands on one. Even under the best storage conditions, they lose 5% of their weight each day as their moisture evaporates, aromatics spiriting disappointingly into the ether of your fridge. Within ten days they'll have lost 40 percent of their mass and be no more exciting than a handful of wrinkled button mushrooms—that cost $3,200 per pound. Truffles are mushrooms, of course, the fruiting body of a fungus that spends its lifecycle under- ground, locked in a symbiotic relationship with an oak, hazelnut, poplar or other tree. The tree feeds by Meg Houston Maker / photos by Mona Shield Payne