Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Baked Truffles
Baked Truffles
Wash well and scrub a pound or so of truffles, wrap each one in a piece of buttered paper, put them in the oven or under hot ashes, and bake them for an hour. When done take them out, and they are then ready for use. (2). Cut some large, fresh truffles into slices and place them on a dish that will stand the heat of the oven and can be served at table; dust them over with salt and pepper, strew over them moderate quantities of finely-minced parsley and shallot, baste them with a little olive oil, put another dish on the top, and put them in the oven. When the truffles are cooked squeeze the juice of a small lemon over them, and serve them in the same dish.
Two methods for fresh truffles, written when a hotel kitchen bought them by the pound. Both are workable; the quantities and the timings are the parts that need translating.
- The hinge: heat gently and keep the aroma inTruffle aroma is volatile and disappears into the oven air. The buttered paper in method 1 and the inverted dish in method 2 are both there to trap it, so seal properly — parchment twisted at the ends, or a lid or tight foil on the gratin dish.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits the wrapped truffles; for the sliced version 375F is enough, since the slices only need to heat through and release their perfume.
- Rethink the hourAn hour suits large truffles buried in ashes, where the heat is slow and uneven, though the recipe gives the same hour for the oven. In a modern oven a whole truffle of an ounce or two should be done in 20 to 30 minutes; sliced truffles in an oiled dish need 10 to 15. Longer than that and you risk baking off the very thing you paid for.
- A pound of trufflesTaken literally this is now a four-figure dish: fresh black winter truffles run roughly $50 to $100 an ounce at retail, and prices swing widely with the season. Scale to two or three ounces and treat the result as a garnish for eggs, pasta or poultry rather than a course.
- Buttered paper and hot ashesButtered paper here is ordinary kitchen paper; parchment is the nearest modern equivalent, and foil works but conducts more heat, so check earlier. "Under hot ashes" means the banked embers of a wood or coal fire -- the nearest equivalent is a covered grill or the edge of a fire pit.
- Preserved truffles are already cookedCanned or jarred truffles have been sterilised in the tin and will not improve with an hour of baking. If that is what you have, warm them in the oil and aromatics off the heat and skip the oven entirely. This recipe assumes fresh.
- Vessel"A dish that will stand the heat of the oven and can be served at table" is a shallow gratin or earthenware baking dish. The second dish inverted on top is a lid; any plate or a second gratin dish of the same size does the job.
- Seasoning and yieldKeep the parsley and shallot restrained, as the text says; the recipe adds the lemon at the end of cooking, and it is worth adding it as late as possible. Two ounces of truffle, sliced, serves four as a small first course or dresses pasta for two.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, and his 1896 book records the kitchen's working repertoire at a moment when American luxury dining was conducted almost entirely in French terms. Truffles then meant chiefly the black winter truffle, sold fresh in season and otherwise in tins, which is presumably why the second method specifies "large, fresh truffles." Cooking a whole truffle wrapped and buried in embers is the older of the two techniques, and the buttered paper of the Waldorf version serves the same purpose as a plainer wrapping. That a metropolitan hotel could treat a pound of truffles as a routine purchase says a good deal about the Gilded Age clientele the book was written for.