There Are No Truffles in Truffle Oil (2014) | Hacker News Reader

There Are No Truffles in Truffle Oil (2014)

priceonomics.com

166 pointsobi1kenobi184 comments

If this is true, I am genuinely surprised that it is legal to sell "Truffle oil".

Take the truffle oil offered by 3 big UK supermarkets [1][2][3]. All three stores describe it as having:

  > Ingredients:
  > Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Truffle Extract

What else are we to interpret "truffle extract" as, other than an extract made from truffles?

Sainsbury's describes it as "Truffle flavour" [3] which I guess I could see as not actually stating it contains truffles (aside from the previously mentioned ingredients list). But Tesco describes it as "Truffle Flavoured" [1], which seems to me to more strongly imply it actually contains some truffle, and Asda describes it as "Flavoured with White Truffle" [2] which to me sounds like an unambiguous statement that it contains at least some white truffle.

If this article is accurate, it seems like a complete and utter con.

[1] http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=292974500

[2] https://groceries.asda.com/product/seed-nut-oil/la-espanola-...

[3] http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/gb/gro...

I agree that this seems odd, and all I've ever seen as proof that "truffle oil does not contain truffles" is the bald assertion, without any other evidence.

In the US, I can imagine (barely) that this might be permissible, but in Europe, with DOC and AOC laws, it seems almost impossible that something could be called "truffle oil" as opposed to "truffle-flavoured oil". "Truffle Extract" and "Flavoured with White Truffle" seem to be pretty unambiguously claiming that truffles were involved in the preparation.

> all I've ever seen as proof that "truffle oil does not contain truffles" is the bald assertion, without any other evidence.

It's not even possible to make commercial truffle oil with real truffles, because the flavor doesn't last longer than a day or two. You could theoretically make it in your house and then use it immediately, but there wouldn't really be any point.

> It's not even possible to make commercial truffle oil with real truffles, because the flavor doesn't last longer than a day or two.

Actually, the reason it's not possible to make real truffle oil is because (drum roll plz) truffles aren't soluble in oil. Or rather, the compound that holds the truffle essance is not soluble in oil.

It's slightly, but only a little. When you buy truffles you should preserve them in oil actually (because it won't take out the flavour), it will be scented but barely so. And the truffle will last more

Surely it doesn't need to be a solution - it can just be a suspension? The difference between extra virgin olive oil and purer grades are that the purer grades are filtered, not (e.g.) distilled.

Extra means the oil contains no more than 0.8% of free oleic acid.

Virgin means the oil comes from a mechanical process, not a chemical one.

The purest grade extra virgin olive oil is the first cold pressed. It's neither filtered nor distilled. Refined olive oil however is filtered and also tasteless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil#Commercial_grades

From the same page: "The refining process removes colour, odour and flavour from the olive oil, and leaves behind a very pure form of olive oil that is tasteless, colourless and odourless and extremely low in free fatty acids"

I don't mean 'pure' in a good sense, just that it is a simple mixture.

I am primed to believe the worst after learning that a container labeled as "100% Extra-Virgin Olive Oil. Product of Italy." might not bear even a single truthful statement. The barest of investigative scrutiny reveals it as filtered and deodorized Spanish third-pressing olive oil, cut with hazelnut oil, that spent a traumatic night in Italy once. Or when I learned that the "clover honey" sold in grocery stores might actually be Chinese honey, from hives supplemented with high-fructose corn syrup, with all pollen and particulates filtered out to conceal its origins, then cut again during bottling with high-fructose corn syrup.

The burden of proof is actually on the manufacturer to show that their "truffle oil" contains actual truffles. The question is whether or not I can believe their claim without proof--and I don't.

If it sells at a premium above a near-equivalent commodity good, my default assumption is that the claims are marketing bullshit aimed at credulous buyers.

But how important is the claim anyway? If it makes my food taste better at a fair price, I don't really care if it has any actual truffle in it. I don't even know what actual truffle tastes like--nor do I really care to learn, at their typical market prices.

But I think in the U.S., there would definitely be a problem if a food label stated "natural flavor" or "truffle extract" when it was actually "artificial flavor". The name on the front of the package doesn't matter much here, except for specific exceptions. But if the back read as anything other than "olive oil, artificial flavor" the manufacturer could get slapped on the wrist so hard.

The difference between "natural" and "artificial" flavors is academic at best. Fundamentally, they're the same chemical compounds: the difference is how those compounds are obtained... and the premium you can charge for being "natural". But natural does not mean that the named ingredient was involved at all.

From an older Scientific American article:

  Natural coconut flavorings, for example, depend on a 
  chemical called massoya lactone. Massoya lactone comes 
  from the bark of the Massoya tree, which grows in 
  Malaysia. ... This pure natural chemical is identical 
  to the version made in an organic chemists laboratory, 
  yet it is much more expensive than the synthetic 
  alternative.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-differ...

I would really like artificial flavors to be on sale for consumers. I like yogourth not because some sad chip of fruit sinking in it, but for the proteins and calcium. A drop of some flavor would save me from the sugar spoons added to the fruit flavoured ones. "Natural" yogourth comes without any added sugar.

It is also extremely easy to make (which is what I strongly recommend you do).

You can buy them:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VMAZQL0

You can find a limited variety of artificial flavors in unsweetened Kool-Aid packets. You can probably find them for $0.10-$0.25 each at your local grocery store. The downside is that some flavors taste quite dissimilar to the fruits they purport to mimic.

I use them with powdered stevia, and sometimes erythritol or xylitol, to make sugar-free gelatin desserts. Also useful for such purposes are the bottles found near the baking supplies: vanilla, almond, and mint flavors.

Another cheap natural source of low-sugar flavorings can be found in the outer layer of citrus rinds. Lemon, lime, and orange zest adds a bit of [bitter] flavor that is still vaguely fruity.

You can also get powdered malic acid and citric acid in bulk, which will let you make things more tart without making them taste like vinegar.

While it is difficult to find some flavors/fragrances in the grocery store, some essential oils are marketed for cosmetic purposes, for DIY soapmakers or perfumers, but you have to be careful to buy them as food-grade and do your own research into potential toxicity if you ever intend to flavor foods with them.

Thank you for your thourough answer. I'm in Spain, so the options are slightly different. Sacharine + cyclamate (I think it's banned from the USA) tastes much better than anything else.

Cocoa (with no sugar added) and orange peel is my favourite choice for the natural additives.

The artificial flavors are more or less the same. But it's very limited. There's no way to find the complex, more subtle mixes used in branded yogourths, say mango, papaya, kiwi, raisins and the more realistic fruit varieties.

I believe that the lack of choices is caused by the artificial bashing propaganda. People would not buy artificial flavors yet they're consuming them anyway, just because they're conveniently fooled by a few fruit bits in the mix.

I buy artificial flavors all the time, for adding to yogurt or shakes. It comes in little bottles in spice section of any American grocery store. There are various fruit flavors, plus vanilla, almond, cinnamon, root beer and mint.

It is easy to get most of the flavor profile of a natural flavoring using a single pure synthesized molecule. But natural flavors have a host of other "support" molecules that add to the flavor, like adding harmonics to a musical chord.

For every molecule like vanillin, which is a powerful enough component of vanilla that it can often stand in for the whole, there are dozens of molecules that produce variations in flavors when combined. Most humans can't tell the difference in a blind taste test in baked goods.

Furthermore, those support molecules can become easier or harder to taste in the presence of proteins, sugars, or non-aqueous solvents.

So if, for instance, you want to make your artificially flavored vanilla ice cream taste exactly like naturally flavored, the aromatic additive cocktail you must use in addition to the vanillin will need to have a different composition from another food-chemist's concoction for vanilla-flavored sugar cookies.

But even then, you will have to decide what kind of natural vanilla you will choose to mimic, because the country of origin of cured vanilla beans can be discerned by professional tasters and with 100% accuracy by chemical analysis!

It's only moot because it is possible for people to prefer the taste of the artificial flavoring over that of the natural flavor, not because they are indistinguishable from each other.

And as I mentioned elsewhere, compounds purified from genetically engineered microbes can still be called "natural". That seems to be a clear case of pitting the letter of the law against its spirit.

Edit: I mean natural in the vernacular sense, not in regard to whatever is allowed by food labeling laws. That sense is "natural", in scare quotes. Natural coconut flavoring can only come from actual coconuts. "Natural" flavoring can come from the bark of an unrelated tree, beaver butts, engineered microbes, mushrooms, or anything else that could grow in the wild if it were released there. Artificial flavoring comes from a biochemist with a tank of ethylene and a CRC manual.

Unfortunately, "natural" flavoring doesn't at all mean that you're getting those additional flavor molecules, or that they even come from the plant the flavor purports to be from.

See another poster's comment here about natural coconut flavoring, which comes from the bark of a tree and not coconuts. In many, many cases, "natural" flavoring is literally the exact same compound as "artificial" flavoring, just extracted from a source in nature.

Any sources on the honey? Also, are you aware of any good resources for vetting various brands while shopping in store? I'd love some scanner app that would just tell me if it was fake or not.

I think the only way to know for sure is to identify the pollen grains under a microscope. If you can't find any, the origin of the honey has been concealed with filtration, and is therefore statistically likely to contain mostly Chinese honey, based solely on examination of amounts produced and amounts exported. If you can find some pollen, but there doesn't seem to be enough, honey with an identifiable origin was probably cut with filtered honey.

Honey can also be "laundered" by feeding it to another hive, then extracting from their combs.

There is no scanner app. If it's in stores, its origin is suspect. Buy honey directly from your local apiary. They will be able to tell you exactly where the hives were feeding before the honey was harvested, and the honey from some locations, or from single-flower honey, has a very different taste than the store-shelf-standard clover honey.

Are there any easier tests that don't involve a microscope, particularly to sort out HFCS in the honey? Like, do they have different melting points, or any other easily testable solution?

My wife picked up a cheap bottle of what claimed to be truffle oil at a chain grocery store in Herculaneum (that's in Europe) last year. On inspection, it was actually a bottle of cheap vegetable oil with a slice of some other kind of mushroom in it and a hint of trufflesque flavoring. Maybe somewhere in the fine print it said what the flavoring actually was, but the rest of the bottle, from the "TARTUFO!" label on the front to the fake truffle chunk inside, was a blatant con.

There's also been cases of shredded Parmesan not containing and Parmesan at all, and a big part of it actually being woodpulp.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-16/the-parmes...

>Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania-based Castle produced mainly imitation cheeses for nearly 30 years. The company, whose factory was adorned with crenelated battlements and curved archways to look like a medieval castle, had $19 million in sales in 2013.

>According to the FDA’s report on Castle, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, “no parmesan cheese was used to manufacture” the Market Pantry brand 100% grated Parmesan Cheese, sold at Target Corp. stores, and Always Save Grated Parmesan Cheese and Best Choice 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese, sold by Associated Wholesale Grocers Inc., which along with its subsidiaries supplies 3,400 retail stores in 30 states. Instead, there was a mixture of Swiss, mozzarella, white cheddar and cellulose, according to the FDA.

>Castle President Michelle Myrter is scheduled to plead guilty this month to criminal charges. She faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

30 years of $x million annual sales of essentially counterfeit product results in "up to" a year long sentence and $100,000 fine. Madness.

Though I find it ironic that they responded honestly to the FOI request.

You are surprised the FDA responded honestly to a Freedom of Information Act request?

The FOIA request was a request to the FDA from Bloomberg for the FDA's investigation on Castle. It was used by Bloomberg to write the article. The Freedom of Information Act is only to request information from a government agency. To uncover the fraud the FDA physically visited Castle. They were tipped off by a disgruntled former employee. Without the tip off there is a extremely small chance they would have ever been caught.

Actually missed this point about the FDA visiting on the tip-off, hence my surprise.

The FDA can only respond with the information they have, so as it took the FDA actually visiting Castle (on a tip-off no less), they must have been lied to as well.

Surely, a FOI request can't realistically trigger someone jumping in a car to verify data held on file.

Cellulose powder - says so right in the ingredients, alongside lipase, calcium chloride, and potassium sorbate: http://www.garycameron.org/files/2012/04/Kraft-100-Parm-q50....

Even better, it says "The label doesn't just say parmesan, it says 100% parmesan. That's because we only use the finest ingredients, carefully crafted and aged for a sharp, distinctive taste that enhances your favourite dishes - a taste that's 100% real, 100% parmesan."

They can get away with it because "parmesan" doesn't actually mean anything outside of the EU.

Edit: As that other poster just pointed out, maybe it does mean something in the US (that label was from Canada), since someone's actually facing criminal charges for it.

Totinis frozen pizzas changed their description in last year or so. The new description says "pepperoni flavored pizza topping" now. Who defines what "pizza topping" is, however, IDK.

Flavored? It makes you wonder what those slices are actually made of. Ah, now I googled and saw the box. It says "made with pork, chicken, beef". In no particular order and in variable proportions, I guess.

"mystery meat" doesn't have the same ring to it as "pepperoni flavored pizza topping"

The word "parmesan" pretty much literally doesn't mean anything in the US. If you want actual "parmesan", you must go with "parmigiano reggiano", which is a protected designation.

Protected designation where? IIRC that's not a thing in the US.

> There's also been cases of shredded Parmesan not containing and Parmesan at all

To a reasonable approximation, the only shredded Parmesan you can buy that is likely to contain anything like Parmesan is the stuff that's shredded on-site by places that also sell wheels/chunks of Parmesan.

OTOH, there's rarely a good reason to buy shredded parmesan even if its real; for most uses you want shredded parmesan, the size/shape of shreds you get from such a product aren't great, and its better (and, in any case, cheaper in the long run) to just get blocks of parmesan and a grater, and in typical use quantities you aren't saving much time or effort by getting pre-grated.

I agree and don't buy shredded parmesan. Just insane that that is allowed to exist at all.

Right? You can grate some just as fast as it takes to open the tub. Price wise it's just about cheaper to buy a wedge anyways. I'll give people a pass for store shredded, but god when I see people using Kraft parmesan "dust"...

Pretty much all packaged grated cheese has added cellulose to stop the flakes sticking back together.

If you want 100% Parmesan (or even 100% cheese!) you need to buy a block.

Who cares if it's permissible? Food fraud is surprisingly common and the chances of getting caught are close to zero. If you buy fish there's a 33% chance you get a different fish than what you bought.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/21/172589997/one...

I saw this article and was slightly dubious as well. Some follow-up research indicates that the testing methodologies used had known error rates approaching the discrepencies detected during the analysis. That was enough to make me somewhat skeptical of the analysis, without doing the due diligence to dig any deeper into it. I would be much more comfortable if someone had a sting operation or videotaped an instance of actually substituting the fish as claimed, which should be incredibly easy considering how common they allege the substitutions are.

I can't speak for all Europe, but here in Austria truffle oil has small pieces of truffle in it.

Of course, those do nothing, as the chemicals found in truffles are, to a first approximation not soluble in oil. It's just the same chemical crap with some placebo truffle in it.

Friends don't let friends buy truffle oil.

Well they sell Girlscout cookies...

...and baby oil.

> But Tesco describes it as "Truffle Flavoured" [1], which seems to me to more strongly imply it actually contains some truffle

"X Flavoured" is accepted terminology for not containing X. For example, sweets can be "fruit flavoured", crips (US/chips) can be "bacon flavoured", with no expectation (either cultural or legal) that they are made using real fruit or bacon.

"Flavoured with White Truffle", on the other hand, would need to use actual white truffle in some way.

There are actually a lot of kosher "bacon" potato chip flavors. The flavor is usually faked with smoked paprika. "Bacon salt" is also kosher, for the same reason.

In that case, keeping it kosher widens the market a bit, and the man on the street probably can't tell the difference anyway. Beside that, it's probably cheaper and easier to flavor with smoked paprika than actual bacon.

I have some truffle oil at home and always wondered how it could possibly be profitable to produce; one wouldn't want to squeeze anything out of a truffle. I guess now I have the answer, but I'm not too upset about it. It's probably as close to truffle-flavor as any grocery store in my state will actually get.

I was on a bus with some bacon flavoured peanuts. I read the ingredients (which was thankfully in English; most of the package was in Russian) and noticed it had no actual bacon.

Two of my friends on the bus were vegetarian and one said, "oh yea, smoked paprika. That's used in a lot of vegetarian stuff for bacon-type flavour." They then precoded to try some bacon peanuts.

The "bacon bits" sold at most US grocery stories under brand names like "Bac'n Pieces" and "Bac-Os" are a famous "I can't believe it's vegan" food - they're just bread with smoked paprika / liquid smoke based flavoring. Similarly, "Butter Lover's" microwave popcorn is generally vegan also.

Well what is the butter flavoring then?

Typically diacetyl, acetylpropionyl or acetoin, the first falling out of favor due to lung disease risk.

They should go full throttle and just label things "Truffle Blasted!"

It's Got What Plants Crave!

> For example, sweets can be "fruit flavoured", crips (US/chips) can be "bacon flavoured", with no expectation (either cultural or legal) that they are made using real fruit or bacon.

I'm not sure that's really the case.

> For example, orange flavoured sweets derive their flavour from real oranges, but orange flavour sweets are synthetically flavoured.

https://www.slough.gov.uk/business/trading-standards/food-st...

I stand corrected

So it's basically the same word, one being a noun versus the other being an adjective. That difference is so tiny that I can't see how it can be legal or meaningful. Are consumers really expected to think of parts of speech when reading labels?

I'm not sure it's that silly. Some sweets are flavoured with orange. Some just have the same flavour as orange, but weren't actually flavoured with any orange.

How can it be meaningful and legal? Well someone decided to give it a meaning and make it a law (or regulation).

I don't mean to sound snarky, but noun versus adjective is hardly a "tiny" difference. (I think you'd find quite a lot of written laws to lose their meaning were these two fundamental tenets of basic grammar to be conflated)

+1 for using slough borough council as reference.

"Maple flavoured syrup" is another one.

> with no expectation (either cultural or legal) that they are made using real fruit or bacon.

I'm sorry, no. If there weren't a cultural expectation that words have these meanings, they wouldn't feel the need to put it on the label. It's a lie.

    > Ingredients:
    > Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Truffle Extract

That's like a double lie, right there. If they are cheap enough to skimp on Truffles, what is to say, they aren't cheap enough to skimp on Virgin Olive Oil?

     > Honest ingredients:
     > Sunflower oil, Olive flavor, Truffles flavor*
     
       * which might have at one point passed near a guy
         that ate actual Truffles

I'm sure the explanation is that: "Extra" refers to them using a larger portion than normal, "Virgin" is the company name of their supplier, "Olive" is a variety of sunflower seed, and there is a missing dash in "Truffle Ex-Tract".

It is estimated that 70% of Olive Oils in super markets are fraudulent so I definitely don't think truffle oil contains the good stuff.

I just read somewhere that the only Whole Foods 365 evoo that is actually pure and unblended is their California one and not any of the other Mediterranean country ones. Super sketchy. This should be outlawed.

It is outlawed. Organized crime controls a shocking proportion of the European olive oil market. For the last several years, I've exclusively bought olive oil grown and produced in America. To my knowledge, it's all real.

probably in addition to the honest ingredients the sunflower oil has been known to fraternize with the palm and coconut oil

... oh and try the truffle flavored veal

Or canola oil

And "Extra Virgin Olive Oil" generally isn't. This has made the rounds a few times - a quick googling turns up this article from about a year ago:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11988...

EDIT: I see @codezero beat me to the punch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453683

It could easily have truffle extract in the practical sense but none in the homeopathic sense if you know what I mean.

Maybe it's homeopathic. I've heard of water memory, but is there such a thing as olive oil memory?

I am under the impression that the food term "extract" is generally not very well regulated and says nothing about when or how it was extracted. At least in the US, I don't think the FDA regulates the terminology that heavily, but I may be mistaken.

I believe there are some well known flavor extracts that were chemically extracted decades ago and since have been maintained as artificial cultures in various ways (certain types of banana extracts used in candies, for instance). I don't know if truffle extract is one of them, though. I guess more accurately, I don't know if we can tell from just an ingredients list which sort of "extract" it might be, if it's a recent "fresh" extract product or some form of a longer term chemical extraction process.

(I think the US FDA, at least, does regulate what constitutes "Natural Flavorings" and so the lack of the word "natural" in packaging could be a sign, maybe.)

What the article states is not true (but - at the same time - it's not false!): it's simple, you can buy "truffle oil" that does not contain truffle, or you can keep your eye sharp (and pay more) and buy oil containing real truffle (I have done both!)

Same applies to a lot of food out there. Here is a good example, olive oil: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/is-your-olive-oil-really-oliv...

Of course you can buy perfectly genuine, high quality, olive oil, you just need to know how to pick. The same applies to truffle oil.

The article is really saying that there are brands out there selling artificially flavored truffle oil (not a great surprise, if you ask me), and it fails to clarify a number of underlying premises it's making (or should be making). For example:

1) it is just not true that truffle is the most expensive food in the world. WHITE truffles are. Black truffles are a lot more common and a lot less expensive.

2) white truffle and black truffle are very different: not only they have a different taste, or grow in different geographies, but you eat them differently. For example you always only eat white truffle raw, while you usually cook black truffle. Truffles oil is normally made with black truffle, because the flavor of white truffle is hard to preserve in olive oil.

3) truffles are an underground mushroom. Like all mushrooms, there are many varieties (beyond the fact that they may be white or black), some are more flavorful than others. Their flavor is also affected by the type of tree they grew on (on the roots), which I think it's quite interesting.

4) black truffles grow in a handful of geographies around the world (the best ones are normally considered to be from France, Italy, or Spain), they last several days so they can be transported relatively easily

5) high quality white truffles come only from one - small -region in Italy, they last only 5-7 days from the moment they are picked and are difficult to transport (without making them spoil). The world's capital of white truffles is here (for October to December): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alba,_Piedmont

People spend huge sums for white truffles, some get bought for $30k, $40k or even $50k, which are even more astounding amounts, if you consider they are for a rock-like looking mushroom that will flavor one or two meals for you and will otherwise spoil in a few days...

Bonus fun trivia: truffles have not been successfully farmed, so they have to picked in the wild. Picking methods are different in different parts of the world: In France they normally use pigs to sniff truffles in the forests. Apparently one of the essences emitted by truffles is similar to sexual feromones in pigs, so they are naturally attracted to them and instinctively dig in the ground for them (but then the truffle picker has to pull The pig away before it the truffle gets eaten). In Italy, they use dogs. It takes years to train a dog to hunt for the smell of truffle (they told me 3-5 years is common), but then dogs do not eat truffles and when they find them, they carefully dig in the ground without breaking the truffle.

What do you think of the numerous comments here pointing out that the flavor compounds in truffles are not oil-soluable, and that oil is used to PRESERVE truffles because it does not take the flavor away from the truffle?

Here is what I think: the natural (black) truffle essence will dissolve in the oil exactly in the same way its artificial twin does (as you can ready in other comments in this thread the artificial and the natural essences are identical). That's how you make truffle oil at home yourself (if your priority is to make truffle oil, you will thinly slice the truffle before you add oil, if your priority is to preserve the (black) truffle, you will keep it whole).

Anyway it's generally a bad idea to preserve a truffle: if you get your hands on a great truffle you want to consume it as quickly as possible. If the truffle it's not great, when then do not waste your time and money on it... ;-)

"truffles have not been successfully farmed"

that's not true, but it's hard to grow them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArqhhVnxZG4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlpQGExn4pw

Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zboif/e...

> If this article is accurate, it seems like a complete and utter con.

It is absolutely true. Except in rare (and usually very expensive) cases, truffle oil does not contain anything made from truffles.

Something like a "chicken pie" would have to say how much chicken is in the pie. There's an exemption to that rule for ingredients that are used in small quantities for flavour.

http://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdfs/q...

> An ingredient or category of ingredients which is used in small quantities for the purposes of flavouring

> Regulation 19(2)(a)(iii)

> 30. This exemption would apply whether or not pictorial representations are included on the label. Labels must comply with Schedule 8 to the Food Labelling Regulations 1996, as amended, concerning the use of the term “flavour” and should not infringe the provisions either of Section 15(1) of the Food Safety Act 1990 (concerning false or misleading indications) or the Trade Descriptions Act 1968.

Schedule 8 of The Food Labelling Regulations 1996 say:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1996/1499/contents/made

> Any description incorporating the name of a food in such a way as to imply that the food, or the part of a food, being described has the flavour of the food named in the description.

> Shall not be applied to any food unless the flavour of the food being described is derived wholly or mainly from the food named in the description, except that any description incorporating the word “chocolate” which is such as to imply that the food being described has a chocolate flavour may be applied to a food which has a chocolate flavour derived wholly or mainly from non fat cocoa solids where the purchaser would not be misled by the description.

> This shall not be taken to prevent the use of the word “flavour” preceded by the name of a food when the flavour of the food being described is not wholly or mainly from the food named in the description.

I genuinely don't know who regulates this.

England: DEFRA Scotland, Wales, NI: Food Standards Agency

See http://tna.europarchive.org/20130513091226/http://www.food.g...

> how much chicken is in the pie

Yeah, I love the percentages on the ingredients for each item which is mentioned in the name of the product. My only real complaint about EU food labeling is that I wish they were a little more consistent about allergens. Sometimes they're bolded, sometimes only mentioned in a list at the end.

"Vanilla extract" is often artificial as well.

What's more interesting: in its intended application (baked goods), repeated Cooks Illustrated taste tests were unable to distinguish artificial vanilla from the expensive stuff.

> "Vanilla extract" is often artificial as well.

In many countries there are legal requirements for "Vanilla Extract" vis a vis the percentage that comes from vanilla beans, as opposed to "Vanilla Essence", which can and is typically artificial.

(I confess I bake a lot)

No need to "confess"; baking is science for hungry people.

( https://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code... )

Chemically speaking, synthesized vanillin is indistinguishable from the vanillin extracted from plants.

But vanilla plants contain a lot of other flavor/odor chemicals (like anise alcohol/methylguaiacol, p-hydroxybenzaldehyde/trimethylpirazine, p-cresol/anisole, guaiacol, piperonal) in addition to the one primarily chemical (vanillin), which may also be desirable in certain applications, such as foods or perfumes.

I would have no problem buying 750 mL of 40% grain alcohol loaded up with sugar and artificial vanillin if I'm gearing up for a giant bake sale or something, but I'd still keep the 10 mL bottle of the real stuff for finishing sauces, frostings, icings, or beverages.

Important caveat, though: vanillin derived from engineered bacteria or yeasts may be eligible to be labeled as "natural flavor"!

In my experience in the US, it is usually labeled well whether it is artificial or natural. Natural usually costs at least 3x as much artificial.

Note that "natural" does not mean it's "real" vanilla extract. It just refers to how the chemical compounds that taste like vanilla were obtained (which may or may not have involved actual vanilla in the first place).

Commented more above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454658

Yes, but if you're using vanilla the way most people do, paying the 3x extra for "natural" is not strictly speaking a rational decision; it's the vendors of "natural" vanilla who are playing games in that case.

Which is what makes vanilla, I think, an interesting parallel to truffles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/dining/16truf.html?_r=0

I think it is US specific as you could not do that under existing EU laws.

You better check what do they define as "extra virgin olive oil" because in many cases it's also not olive oil ;)

Oilception.

There was an episode of Cutthroat Kitchen where a contestant used truffle oil on a dish.

Jet Tela (judge): truffle oil, man, there's just no place for it in the kitchen.

Alton Brown (host): yes there is. throws the bottle in the garbage.

Harsh.

(I do agree that using truffle oil is a sign of an amateur chef)

Reminds of this over-the-top reaction on masterchef https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJEaSGzSOqE

The funny part is that Gordon Ramsay's BURGR restaurant has truffle oil in the menu: https://gordonramsayrest-2938.kxcdn.com/assets/1-Menus/USA-R...

I don't see truffle oil specifically - it has truffle aioli which would obviously be a different condiment/ingredient. Their reaction in that clip seems to be in response to a few things:

1. the assertion there's no actual truffle in white truffle oil 2. that it's pungent and the contestant was pouring it on

I imagine Ramsey is not opposed to truffles, per se, but certainly to fake scents manufactured to smell like truffles and using the flavor to excess.

Dang it, I read that menu too fast :)

I see a lot of Truffle Aioli... which could be truffle oil, but could also be truffles mixed with oil, garlic, etc in the production process. (Or, perhaps more likely, it is truffle oil and his restaurant is just marketing it )

I don't see any truffle oil on that menu.

I love how youtube is showing me advertisements for truffle oil right at the moment where Ramsay is completely blasting it.

uBlock is a great extension. You ought to check it out. It'd help with the advertisements.

Reminds me of the early days of SEO where the google ads would say things like "Find the best prices for DEAD BABIES BOILED IN HOOKER BLOOD only on eBay!" If that's what you searched for.

Alton Brown is amazing. Wish he still did Good Eats. The geekiness of it all... I think he really loved that.

(For those who don't know - he plays a caricature of himself on Cutthroat Kitchen, an angry and "evil" version, he grew the beard just for the show. Naturally his normal persona is a food geek.)

Good Eats was on for 14 years and has 252 episodes, what more can you possibly ask for? That's a good run for any show nevermind one as labor and time intensive as Good Eats.

What makes you think his Good Eats host character is his "normal persona"? He doesn't play a caricature, just a character.

Truffle oil is usually a sign of an amateur chef, but I would disagree it has no place. Most people abuse it and I would include truffle fries on the list. It's a bitter and inferior truffle flavor.

However, I love finishing white mushroom pizzas with by distributing 10-15 drops of truffle oil on a medium pie. Clearly, it's not the same as shaving truffles, but it actually works well when the oil isn't cooked and it's paired with a combination of fresh and earthy flavors.

There are many things that are flavored like something, but don't actually contain any extract from the actual thing. I don't think you should focus on truffle oil. This sort of thing is all around you, with many types of food.

Often times, the molecules used to flavor these foods are a major component of a flavor of a given fruit, vegetable, nuts, or fungus. However, it is sometimes cheaper to produce them synthetically rather than extract them. In many cases the stuff used to flavor the food was never in the thing whose flavor is being imitated.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoamyl_acetate is used to imbue a banana flavor.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzaldehyde gives you an almond flavor

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanillin is pretty much what you get in most vanilla-flavored things

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dithiapentane is used to make truffle-flavored oil

The list goes on and on.

It's great to be aware that there is an industry in making things that taste like other things. If you walk down your supermarket isle and pay attention, you will notice that many things are not what they seem. You will first feel surprised, maybe cheated, and perhaps angry.

Is truffle oil with truffles a scam? I don't know. I was certainly fooled once.

I now try to pay attention to these types of things more. Things flavored with actual extracts tend to cost more and are harder to find. However, with many things, once you taste the real thing, you will notice that the fake stuff is off. Often times, the synthetically flavored food taste flat, sometimes chemically, and fake.

Don't get angry. Get educated, spread the knowledge, and pay attention to what you eat!

Why do I have to be angry? Is it not possible to appreciate that more things now taste like vanilla, which is quite expensive when extracted using traditional methods?

The problem with truffle oil is that it smells like gasoline, not that it's synthetic. It smells nothing like truffles. And it can't be made any better since the compounds that give truffles their complex signature are not soluble in oil.

There's a resemblance between rubbing alcohol filtered through bread and bourbon, just like there's a resemblance between truffle oil and real truffles, but the comparison is really apt. Even though there's some resemblance, it's nothing alike, and it's really bad.

I'm always amazed that this sort of blatant false advertisement is just allowed anywhere in the world.

In other news:

> Historically, there is at least some mention of Italians infusing olive oils with real truffles, and Urbani Truffles sells truffle oil that it says is made from real truffles

I actually do that myself. Get a truffle, cut it in a couple of pieces and leave it soaking for a month or two in good olive oil. Not that hard, not even that expensive either if you live remotely close to where they grow. It's a bit funny how they try to make this look like if it was some arcane secret.

Do be careful with making your own infused oils. Truffle/Garlic variants (and I'm sure others) definitely carry botulism risk.

The only careful way to make your own flavoured oils at home it to not make them.

It's safe to make truffle or garlic oil at home. What's not safe is storing it for long periods of time.

I make garlic oil at least once a week (by very slowly simmering cloves in olive oil for an hour or so, which also produces spreadable roasted garlic.)

Eaten that day or the next? Long periods of time include a week - and certainly a couple of months in the GPs case has a huge hazard and a non-zero risk. I hope you and she continue to have good luck.

This is Russian Roulette with a gun with literally hundreds of millions of empty chambers, because virtually nobody ever gets botulism from garlic. Look up the stats, remembering the implicit denominator.

Heat of any real kind quickly denatures botulism toxin. Significant heat --- above 120c --- detroys spores, which are not themselves toxic. The roasted garlic itself isn't brought uniformly to 120c, but the oil is, for well over the few minutes it takes to get a 10D reduction. Botulism spore germination is retarded (though not eliminated) in refrigeration.

Paranoia about garlic oil doesn't make a whole lot of sense, considering how many food systems we happily introduce not just cooked garlic into but also raw garlic. In many of those systems garlic is isolated in anaerobic environments and little if anything is done to retard its germination and doubling. But we happily eat Chinese food leftovers every day.

Garlic is also not a uniquely dangerous food. It's just a low-acid vegetable that happens to grow underground. There are lots of low-acid vegetables that are also potential settings for botulism; we just don't preserve them in oil. But, like garlic, we use them in all sorts of food systems that could easily germinate botulism. And still: almost nobody gets food-borne botulism.

To sum up:

Yes, I agree, don't jam a bunch of raw garlic cloves into a bottle of olive oil and forget it in the back of your refrigerator. You'd almost definitely be fine if you did, but a small risk of great harm is something worth taking seriously.

But don't act like combining garlic and oil is the culinary equivalent of combining pure sodium and water. It is not.

If you want to be paranoid, put some lime juice in your garlic oil and make a mojo. Whatever.

as someone who appears to be claiming a bit of experience in the olive oil area,

> leave it soaking for a month or two in good olive oil

I've heard an olive oil merchant explain that olive oil has a range of complex flavors of its own, but that it has a relatively short shelf life before it becomes genericized and boring, and loses the majority of its flavor and complexity and such.

Is there any truth to that?

Depends whether or not you're going for that early harvest taste. If you want your olive oil to taste peppery, almost difficult to eat, then yeah. I find that flavor lasts a month or two in a dark bottle kept out of the sun, though I have no idea how long the bottle has been on my grocery store shelf.

Australia has very strict false advertising laws.

If you advertise it, there are severe penalties if it's not true.

Two examples come to mind:

General Motors (Holden) had a sale called "Employee pricing for all", after which it was discovered that customers were not getting quite the same deal as employees. GM had to either take the car back at full refund, or refund the price difference plus some other stuff, along with paying a huge fine.

A glitch on a website offered laptops for something like $300 instead of $3000 and a ton of people ordered them... the company was not allowed to back out (I think it was HP..)

Meh. The truffle fries at my local burger spot still taste good. As long as it doesn't kill me I'm not overly concerned.

I sort of agree.

To be clear, I don't think they should be charging extra and calling something "truffle oil" if it's got no truffle molecules in it, or "olive oil" if it's actually some other kind of vegetable oil. That should be prosecuted as false advertising.

That said, we keep hearing news like this, where what we thought was high-end "gourmet" food is actually the same as the stuff on the middle or bottom shelves at the market. And yet, we've been eating and enjoying this stuff for years. As long as it's marketed and priced honestly, I've got no problem buying and eating the cheap stuff.

French fries and popcorn are the only two allowable venues for truffle oil.

Truffle salt and fresh grated parm is really nice on popcorn.

Dunno man, the smell of gasoline really turns me off.

Actually, that's not right. I find the smell of truffle oil similar to gasoline, but I like gasoline. Truffle oil turns my stomach around.

It is just a coincidence, obviously, but the Italian for "scam" is "truffa". Truffle itself is "tartufo".

And if you want to get meta angry, most olive oil isn't olive oil!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12281775

It would be nice if there was a website where you could look up the local groceries you have in doubt. Maybe check how honest the brand is... We rate movies why not groceries?

Here's on bottle I bought in Marianno's, a supermarket in the US. The bottle was around 10-15$ I think.

http://i.imgur.com/6ygdyRR.jpg

I does say olive oil, flavored, but also has a dehydrated truffle in it. Does the dehydrated truffle not contribute anything to the taste?

Also, it tastes pretty good.

> Does the dehydrated truffle not contribute anything to the taste

It does not.

Cannot parse: "it is olive oil mixed with 2,4-dithiapentane, a compound that makes up part of the smell of truffles and is as associated with a laboratory as Californian food is associated with local and organic ingredients."

Synthetic 2,4-dithiapentane is associated with some laboratory somewhere, whereas "Californian food", whatever that is, isn't necessarily "local and organic". It's not local if I'm enjoying it in New York rather than in California, and it's not organic if it didn't come from an organic farm.

> it is olive oil mixed with 2,4-dithiapentane, a compound that makes up part of the smell of truffles and is as associated with a laboratory as Californian food is associated with local and organic ingredients.

So, what this is saying is 2,4-dithiapentane has little more to do with a laboratory than any other randomly selected ingredient, despite being linked to it in popular culture? (Or, more likely, that this is an extremely poorly chosen analogy...)

This analogy also gave me quite a pause. I'm going with the latter, personally.

The truffle oil you buy from the grocer has a deserving reputation, it's just scented oil, but I've eaten in restaurants where their truffle oil was literally sliced black truffles in olive oil, so at least on a restaurant menu you shouldn't dismiss "truffle oil" immediately.

Fair enough, but at least in the US, if you're not eating prix fixe or paying $30+ per plate, you should assume things that are "truffled" don't contain actual truffles.

Also: apparently (according to eGullet, at least), oil infusions of real truffle aren't all that powerful, and if you're trying to disperse truffle flavor in a fat, butter is the way to go (you end up with flecks of truffle strewn throughout).

I read in the article that truffles are outside of the domain of human ability to control its growth.

  > Truffles are the world’s most expensive food because they resist all our efforts to control them. They cannot be mass produced or meaningfully eaten out of season.

Have there been any efforts to create some controlled version of truffles to meet demand or make it more available? To me, the idea of a GMO truffle that's available year round seems pleasing.

The distinctive scent/flavor is probably highly influenced by soil conditions. Also they're symbiotic with trees, and the tree health probably also affects flavors.

It'd probably be easier to GMO standard mushrooms to taste more like truffles.

The recent discovery (appeared on HN I think) about a complex, three-organism symbiotic relationship in lichens explained why it has heretofore been nearly impossible to grow them in "captivity". I wonder if there is a similar discovery waiting to be made about truffles.

Yes, in fact the cultivated truffle industry is starting to get going now. In the past few years, farmed truffles have appeared on the market. I tried truffles for the first time a month ago and they came from Australia, presumably one of the new farms there.

The history of this is pretty fascinating.

Truffles grow in the roots of certain oak trees. To cultivate them, you need to plant those trees, carefully protect them from other undesired fungi, and wait 7 to 10 years for the fungus network to mature in the trees roots. Any given tree has an active lifecycle of only about 30 years, so after that, you have to replant. This process was figured out in the late 1700s. By the 1800s, there were over 100,000 acres of truffle farms in France, and truffles were a reasonably priced easily available foodstuff.

Then WWI hit. 20% of the male workforce was killed and many others had left rural areas and moved into cities. Without expertise and available labor, many truffle fields were lost. This is when they became a rare expensive luxury.

In the past few decades, after truffles became fashionable, cultivation has started again. It's only in the past few years that these new fields have begun to sell product. Going forward, you can probably expect real truffles to become more common and less expensive.

Oh, and the truffle I tried was shaved on top of a mushroom risotto. It's possibly the best tasting thing I have ever eaten.

There's a guy in Tennessee that's spent decades trying to grow black truffles (melanosporum) commercially. It sounds like he's having some ups and downs: http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/living/domestic-truffles-eatoc...

Here's his website http://tennesseetruffle.com/

Commercially available truffle oil sold in US markets tastes absolutely horrid. It has a pungent, chemical aroma, and its taste completely overpowers whatever you put it on.

Do yourself a favor and just buy some high quality olive oil if you want a better finishing oil for your food. Oilve-oil and vinegar taprooms seem to have exploded in popularity in the US over the past few years.

Agreed, I went to culinary school years ago and we had access to both high quality black and white truffles, to say the least I fell in love on first bite, we used to fry slices up in butter and eat them like a potato chip while in class, that was heaven. My first introduction to truffle oil was years later and conversely flavor hell. I could never really put the flavor into words until I read this article, a gasoline like flavor is a perfect description. I knew when I tasted it that there was no way any essence of truffles where in it. Truffles make other flavors "pop" and have umami. Truffle oil kills the flavor of the underlining ingredients and replaces them with a chemical and gasoline taste.

Not only in the US. Everywhere is the same.

Black truffles are not that expensive, and you don't need much. I encourage everyone to try them instead of this ridiculous thing. There is some slight similarity with the real thing, but the word here is slight. It's obscene, gasoline-like, and lacks the very essential complexity and subtleness that make truffles really unique.

I beg to differ :)

http://i.imgur.com/RtAsZKp.jpg

This is from a fancy-ish local (European) supermarket that's generally praised for the quality food they sell. The cost was around $15.

The flavor compounds in truffles aren't oil-soluble. So even if you bought a piece of truffle dunked in oil, you're probably not getting what you hope to. If it tastes like truffles, that flavor is virtually guaranteed to not come from the truffle at the bottom but instead from 2,4-dithiapentane.

Oi vey, please kindly adjust your tinfoil headwear.

They might be insoluble in theory. In practice, it's dead simple to infuse oil with truffles - take oil, heat it up, add shaved truffles and let it sit for a bit.

Now leave that bottle on a shelf for a week, and see if the original bears any resemblance.

It won't.

This isn't controversial, it's basic chemistry. The aromatics in truffles (excluding 2,4-dithiapentane) are water-soluble, not fat-soluble. Applying heat to your truffles-in-olive-oil mixture is not going to change this simple fact.

> The aromatics in truffles (excluding 2,4-dithiapentane) are water-soluble, not fat-soluble.

Source, please. What you say goes against what I personally sniffed at my friend's house, which was the home-made truffle oil as per above.

Those are almost certainly random mushroom chunks and not actual truffle. A lot of brands do that as a deception.

Perhaps, but I've also bought olive oil with a whole black truffle in it.

For related topics, see: fraud, signalling, Veblen goods, status, status signalling, and aspirational goods.

Something rare and expensive is used to give the appearance of quality, undercut by not only the lack of the underlying element within the good (a chemical imposter is substituted), but with either an implication or outright false representation that the aspirationally desired quality is in fact present.

There's a tremendous amount of criticism of the concept of market function in this story.

Truffle oil is just the less-scary-sounding version of adding msg to a dish. 'Truffle flavoring' is plain msg, most likely.

MSG is great for cooking, it is the taste of "Umami". Umami/Truffle/Parmesan are all just means of adding this msg taste to things without triggering the anti-MSG rhetoric.

The Family Seasoning for Steak: Lowry's Garlic Salt, black pepper, msg. Delicious.

It's still quite possible to buy truffle oil with real truffles but of course, it's not going to be 2.5 pounds for 250ml but instead 12 pounds for 250ml...

I usually buy this one http://www.edelices.co.uk/olive-oil-flavored-black-truffles.... which is quite good...

Truffles, like most mushrooms, contain basically 0% fat. 0.2g of fat in a 28g truffle is basically fat free. No fat, no oil to extract.

This hypothesis can be easily and cheaply tested: buy some nice normal mushrooms and fry them in olive oil. Does the oil taste of mushrooms afterwards?

(If you want to do it properly, carefully heat a few cups of olive oil with mushrooms in it, let it simmer for half an hour and then let it cool completely before draining.)

I'm not suggesting there are no oil soluble materials in mushrooms. But just because there are such materials does not mean there is any such thing as "truffle oil" or "mushroom oil" in the same way there are nut, avocado, and olive oils which are produce by extraction. To actually get truffle oil would be insanely expensive and insofar as I'm aware, there's no evidence either the flavor or smell we're interested in with truffles is even in its own (minimal) fats.

Well, "X oil" does not necessarily mean "oil made by pressing X", it can also mean "oil infused with X". Case in point: chili oil, or "olio al peperoncino", has been made in Italy for centuries and the name is not made up to confuse consumers.

In fact, one can argue that the English language is really the problem here, because it does not have prepositions like e.g. Italian has. In Italian, we wouldn't be having this argument, because "olio al peperoncini" or "olio al tartufo" are clearly in a different class of things from "olio di olivo" or "olio di noce".

Sure, but lots of "X oil" products, especially where "X" is a flavoring ingredient, are oils from other sources infused with that ingredient for taste. "Chili oil" is not "oil pressed from chilis," it's "neutral oil flavored with chilis," and nobody expects otherwise or is confused. The complaint here isn't that truffle oil isn't pressed from truffles, it's that it's neither that nor oil flavored with truffles. Truffles are not involved.

If this is true of Truffle salt, then I have definitely fell for it before. At least Wikipedia suggests truffle salt is not usually of synthetic origin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle_salt)

TL;DR Why don't US consumers give a toss about consumer protection?

This comes up time and again on HN. Most recently Apple not recognising the iPhone 6 faults. US consumer protections appear to be none existant. I've long known things were more "relaxed" over there, but it seems relaxed to point of no longer even basically functional.

What the hell happened since the start of the 20th C when there were efforts both sides of the Atlantic to ensure that the food you buy is what it claims to be, unadulterated and safe? That stemmed from widespread adulteration, short measures, and often horrific safety.

Why are American consumers (Republicans included) not picketing and email bombing the Whitehouse or Congress? Do you not want to buy what you expect you're buying? Do you like paying expensive restaurants for Artisan food when they apparently buy the lot from the nearest discount wholesaler?

UK has the Tory party, who also love the market as the solution to everything, even what it patently cannot solve. Every now and then they suggest some industry voluntary agreement, or to relax some aspect of labelling. These ideas rarely hit statute, as the Tory voters are consumers too and don't want safety to be simply handed to multinationals. It's going to lose them voters, so we usually end up with something fairly acceptable. EU legislation helps greatly on this too.

We had the piece about restaurants in the US recently. That gave the impression restaurants able to lie to such an extent that the expensive "organic locally sourced salmon" you order from the menu might be none of those things.

If it were the UK, and you sold Truffle Oil containing no truffle, the retailer has broken the law and would be liable to fines and recalls(usually used for safety issues, or discovering beef isn;t). The retailer can then claim against the supplier or manufacturer.

There are legally mandated amounts where you can name something Chocolate Spread (min % choc), reduce it below and you end up in the band where you have to call it Chocolate Flavoured Spread (As found in cheaper ranges). Keep going to the point of no chocolate and you have to switch to "flavour" which can be artificial flavourings (bottom of the heap discounters). Those wordings correlate to whatever percentages or weights have been mandated.

Large retailers therefore test products for safety, legality, labelling before first sale, and they'll periodically randomly check. When this comes up, Americans often claim this isn't possible, there's simply too much stuff. Walmart (Asda) do it here, and if you look at supplier guidlines for any large UK retailers they'll all have details of the testing process you as a supplier are expected to meet.

We then have Trading Standards who randomly check products on sale for safety, especially food, and including restaurants. Breach those rules and you can go to prison, or have the business closed. They can, and do, test for the foods being what are claimed, the presence of allergens, labelling and even whether it's organic or not.

All is not perfect here, of course. The Conservatives reduced the number of Trading Standards such that the public are at higher risk (not enough to go around), and some labelling has minor loopholes such as get outs for country of origin, and the assorted terms "farm fresh", "free range" and the like. They sometimes don't legally mean what common sense and the public think they do.

So if I buy a bottle of Truffle Oil here and it has none, I can sue Tesco (not for very much I expect). Realistically I'd take it back for a refund, or more sensibly send it to Trading Standard who can send a letter with legislative force.

Realistically anywhere you buy truffle oil, be it in the US, UK, or France, the flavor is not going to come from truffles --- regardless of whether local regs require some real truffle component in the product. Not because purveyors are chintzing out (though: they are), but because truffle oil made from real truffles isn't very potent and isn't shelf stable.

That's not a defense of truffle oil as a product. Don't bother with it.

This is a pretty silly thing to picket the White House over.

I meant about consumer protections, labelling and so on generally rather than this specific issue.

Sorry if that didn't come across well.

I wonder how long this will last after the Brexit, as this is EU legislation in action.

Well most of the framework has a long history in UK law too. I can only hope Brexit doesn't lead to significant watering down of what we have now.

The US government want their scams to spread to Europe too with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. It is all due to "lobbying", which is a politically correct way to say "bribing" in America. Corrupt US politicians doing the bidding of those multinationals, screwing over the general public. As usual.

With Brexit expect some of that EU legislation protection to disappear in Britain too. Maybe you'll get greek yoghurt instead of greek-style yoghurt now, though it might be neither Greek nor yoghurt ;-)

I don't much like the sound of any of the parts of TPP I've seen leaked.

I'm not a fan of Brexit, it's a silly idea. Doubly so if govt decide to start fiddling with the best aspects of legislation (consumer, worker and human rights protections). I imagine one of the tabloids would try and get a campaign going if they wear things down too much.

Well I hope so - I'm happy to pay a bit extra for stuff in return for the proections we have.

What I find interesting is that truffle oil is often denigrated for not containing actual truffle based solely on this lack of authenticity. I have eaten white truffles in Italy, black truffles and dishes with truffle oil. From an anecdotal perspective, white truffles are damn good, black truffles are pretty damn good and truffle oil can be a nice addition. As long as you're not being defrauded, I say no harm, no foul.

Sometimes one wants to go whole hog and buy organic this and prime that and create all components of a dish from scratch. And there are many time when one simply wants an easy dish that tastes great and doesn't cost a mint.

To me the real confusion in truffedom is caused by truffles being funghi and there also being chocolate truffles. That's just wrong.

Related question: where can I buy real truffles? I've had them in the past, but I have no idea where I can buy them from, online or in person, that I can trust the quality of. Anyone have any leads?

Nicer grocery stores tend to carry them. The Central Market chain in Texas tends to have them. Accessibility may also depend where you live--much easier to find in major cities.

if you like truffles you should try morels - awesome mushrooms IMO on par with truffles

One morning in college, I was walking to class and saw a cluster of morels growing near my apartment. I checked that they weren’t false morels, and resolved to pick them after I got back from class.

I returned to find that the lawn had been mown, and those poor shrooms had been blown to smithereens. :(

Not surprised. There are many products like this. Most commercial maple syrup for example contain no actual maple syrup, just flavored corn syrup.

Not in Vermont. http://www.npr.org/2011/02/03/133456136/Vermont-To-McDonalds...

That's "pancake syrup" or "Maple-flavoured syrup" or just "syrup." anything labeled maple syrup, by law, must be maple syrup.

> 2,4-dithiapentane

Now I know what to blame when my roommate pours a couple tablespoons of truffle-oil on whatever it is she is cooking.

i am not surprised at all.

a lot of this new fancy food type stuff is a scam... in most cases selling inferior products and scams at higher prices.

"organic" means "not made with the benefit of modern developments in agriculture" after all... i am stunned why people think this is a good thing.

noble savage "logic" perhaps?

Truffles kinda lose their appeal when you have two lagottos digging some up every few days.

Ok. They can grow truffles on a farm. In fact it was really big before the world war. However it killed the price and after the war everyone had a gentleman a agreement not to do it again.

[citation needed]

This Wikipedia article talks about cultivation of truffles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#Cultivation

I can not attest to the veracity of the sources however. It also makes no mention of a "gentlemen's agreement" to artificially inflate the prices of truffles.

Also, duck sauce contains no duck.

Duck sauce is a sauce you put on duck. Is truffle oil an oil you are supposed to put on truffles?

The author's claim that truffle oil is just olive oil and and added scent doesn't match up with my experiences. Truffle oil tastes totally different from olive oil, and I don't like the flavor.

The oil being artificially flavored is much less of a con than not being any different from olive oil.

They didn't say it tasted no different from olive oil, they said it was olive oil, with artificial flavoring added. Which is true. Tang is artificially flavored water. That doesn't mean it's no different from water.

> "Despite the name, most truffle oil does not contain even trace amounts of truffle; it is olive oil mixed with 2,4-dithiapentane, a compound that makes up part of the smell of truffles and is as associated with a laboratory as Californian food is associated with local and organic ingredients. Essentially, truffle oil is olive oil plus truffles’ “disconcerting” smell."

That implies that (most) truffle oil is only different to olive oil in smell, which is a big difference from oil that tastes of either real or artificial truffel flavouring.

A large part of taste IS smell.

Aside from differing levels in what you can directly sense with your tongue– Sweet, Salty, Bitter, Sour, and Glutamates (umami), which we would all consider to be 'seasoning' elements (not broaching the topic of different chemical effects, such as with capsaicin)– the primary difference between any two foods is how they smell, which is why when you have a totally blocking cold, you can easily tell if something is too salty, but you couldn't say what herbs were used in it.

Consider a lime lollipop and a cherry lollipop with the same ratio of sugar base to whatever acid they were using for sourness. Going strictly by your sense of taste, maybe because of Anosmia, they would be utterly indistinguishable. The flavoring components, however, which really just give the pops a scent, are what makes the lime one taste like lime, and the cherry one taste like... whatever cherry lollipops are supposed to taste like. Our brain combines the tongue sensations and smells (and arguably, its appearance, mouthfeel and sound) to create our perception of something's 'flavor.'

This is why seasoning food, especially with salt, is important. It's not going to change the intensity of the brownness of a steak, or the freshness of an ear of corn, but it stimulates the tongue in a way that makes our brain much more aware of what we're smelling. It turns up the volume on the existing flavors, as if to say "hey! pay attention to what you're smelling, because it's coming from what's in your mouth." (I imagine this evolved from a combination of our need to seek nutrition, as well as our need to detect poisons.) Lacking stimulation on your tongue, foods come across as flat and uninteresting.

I'm sure our bathrooms would be designed very differently if our brains were worse at making the distinction between what we're just smelling, and what was in our mouths.

> They didn't say it tasted no different from olive oil, they said it was olive oil, with artificial flavoring added. Which is true.

Of course, "real" truffle oil is also oil from some other source (usually olive), with natural flavoring (consisting primarily of the same actual compound in the "fake" version) added (IIRC, often by proximity rather than direct contact, which keeps a lot of the elements of truffle flavor that are present in whole truffles out of the oil, achieving a result not very much unlike the "fake" truffle oil in how it differs from the flavor of whole truffles.)

Yeah. Not really different from the fake stuff IMHO.

Real, unadulterated truffle oil, if it even does exist today, is extraordinarily rare: like, more difficult than getting fresh truffles. This is largely because truffles simply don't transfer their flavor to oil well.

I'm a culinary school trained former chef that worked in some pretty high end restaurants and I've never seen it in person. Neither did Daniel Patterson with the NYT when he tried to track some down. What I have seen a lot of is the usual sort of truffle oil with little bits of dried truffle in it for show though.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/dining/16truf.html?_r=0

Scent and taste are intimately linked, and you pretty much can't change scent without changing taste (the reverse is not quite as true), and the ingredient identified, while certainly a key component of truffle's distinct scent, also is a component of truffle's distinct taste.

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