Truffle Oil? No Truffle In It.

An interesting piece in the New York Times demolishes something we’ve always taken for granted: Truffle oil is not made from truffles. Rather, in a “Fast Food Nation”-like twist, they are a synthetic creation, with chemical compounds substituting for traces of truffle in the olive oil. The official party line, you see, is that the essence of truffles is too slight to capture using actual truffles:


But, much as I did for years, chefs want to believe. Stories of sightings of natural truffle oil abound, like a gourmand’s answer to the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. One chef told me in an excited, slightly conspiratorial tone that Jing Tio of Le Sanctuaire in Santa Monica, Calif., who sells high-quality specialty ingredients to chefs, mixed his own oil to order.This seemed unlikely. When I asked Mr. Tio, he gave me a funny look. “Natural?” he said, rolling his eyes. “Nooo …”

An interesting piece in the New York Times demolishes something we’ve always taken for granted: Truffle oil is not made from truffles. Rather, in a “Fast Food Nation”-like twist, they are a synthetic creation, with chemical compounds substituting for traces of truffle in the olive oil. The official party line, you see, is that the essence of truffles is too slight to capture using actual truffles:

Truffle Oil? No Truffle In It.