Truffle cream sauce fettuccine

Make a truffle butter with 14 grams of fresh truffle and lightly toast it for just 30 seconds to release the fat-soluble aroma compounds into the butter, then set it aside.

Add 150 grams of heavy cream to the pan, bring it to a simmer, then stir in 50 grams of parmigiano reggiano until melted and creamy enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Add a little drizzle of white wine vinegar, then separate the sauce into three equal 50 gram portions.

Boil the fettuccine, mix it with the sauce and stir different amounts of the truffle butter into each portion.

The three portions measured out at 7.7 percent, 3.5 percent and 1.89 percent truffle rather than the intended 10, 5 and 2 percent.

Of the three, the 10 percent tasted best and 5 percent is a reasonable middle; 2 percent was not enough to taste the truffle.

For the substitute test, add a one gram drizzle of white truffle oil, a one gram drizzle of black truffle olive oil, a one gram spoonful of truffle paste and a 0.5 gram sprinkle of truffle powder to four more bowls of the same pasta.

At one gram the white truffle oil and the black truffle olive oil drowned out the sauce and turned bitter; the truffle powder, the lightest, tasted best of the four.

For the final comparison use 0.1 grams of white truffle oil and 0.4 grams of black truffle oil against freshly grated fresh white truffle.

The oils read as one piercing note, while the fresh white truffle has that top note plus complexity underneath; the substitutes do not recreate fresh truffle, and a gram or two of truffle oil can overpower a dish where a whole fresh truffle would not.