La Toque has long been known for our extravagant truffle menus. On Friday January 8th, we launched our 28th Annual All Black Truffle Menu. Black truffles are off to a great start this year with particularly good perfume. They were ripe and flavorful earlier than usual by Mid December. The current truffle menu features two dishes new to the menu this year. The first one is a 62.5 degree egg slow cooked in the circulator and served with Truffle Monkey Bread, a pull-apart truffled brioche. The other is a white and black truffle cannelloni with parmesan broth and porcini foam. Nature willing, the Truffle Menu should be available nightly well into February. Keep your fingers crossed, last year we had good truffles into the first week of March.

Our truffle season began in October with the arrival of the first white truffles, tuber magnatum pico, from Italy. It was a very good year with excellent quality. The very cold winter in Western Europe has brought White Truffle season to a close, pretty much on schedule, and the last of them are now perfuming the La Tur cheese filling in the cannelloni.

For the second straight year we also featured dishes with fresh "Burgundy" truffles as well. Tuber uncinatum is a fall truffle, black on the outside with large pyramidal warts on the skin and a milk chocolate colored center. The aroma is dusky and sweet, quite tasty, but lacking the intensity of white truffles or the depth of flavor of true black winter truffles. Ours are hunted in the area of Monti Sibillini between Umbria and Marche. At just over three hundred dollars a pound, they are a relative bargain. Their season wound up in Mid December this year just as the first Black Winter Truffles ripened up.

We do not use truffles from China. These small truffles from the Himalayas are true truffles, but their flavor pales in comparison to the real thing. Sadly many people don't know the difference and are either easily fooled, or worse, mix them in with real truffles to save money.

We also don't use "truffle oil" at La Toque unless we make it ourselves. First of all it is a misnomer, truffles contain no fat. You can press a million dollars worth of truffles as hard as you want and still not get a single drop of oil. Truffle oil is a relatively new phenomenon. It is no coincidence that "truffle oil" appeared a few decades ago around the same time scientists successfully duplicated the chemical compounds in the laboratory that are responsible for truffles legendary aroma. You can infuse fresh truffle flavor into oil or butter, but it doesn't keep any better than fresh truffles which are best consumed within 10 days of hunting. Because of this very short shelf life, real truffle flavored oil is simply not a viable product. Commercially produced truffle oil is invariably artificially flavored, no matter how fancy the bottle or prestigious the purveyor. It is simply too good to be true. Real truffle flavored oil or butter is always subtle in flavor unlike the powerful products sold commercially. That little scrap of "truffle" at the bottom of the jar is often from an inferior species, and in any event, it takes much more than a little crumb of truffle to infuse oil with any amount of flavor.

This January we will also feature another session of "Truffle camp". This is a hands on, full immersion 3 day truffle cooking and eating experience in the La Toque kitchen with Chef Ken Frank. It is limited to 12 participants. Truffle Camp will be held on January 17th, 18th and 19th . For more information, contact Chef Ken Frank through this website by clicking the contact button on the home page.

For more information on truffles I recommend two books; The Little Book of Truffles published by Flammarion, and Truffles Ultimate Luxury Everyday Pleasure by Rosario Safina and Judith Sutton published by Wiley.

I also recommend that you visit simplyflavors.com , my favorite and most trusted purveyor of fresh truffles.

You can see our current truffle menu and truffle menus from previous years by clicking on the links below.