My new soup cookbooksMy prayers have been answered! I'm a big soup fan, specially during Winter. While I know my fair share of basic soups, I sometimes lack imagination for more exotic soups or basic soups I've...
I strongly endorse the suggestion of doing blind taste and smell tests; that (and the intensity difference which is fairly familiar to people who have some depth of truffle experience) underlay my suggestion of seeking the clbuttic T. magnatum or T. melanosporum. If you do not get acquainted with the scents and tastes and uses of these fungi, then it is all too easy to let yourself be sold something that is appealingly cheaper, yet disproportionately blander, hence poor value by most people's informed judgment. (Unfortunate cases exist already in some online food fora.) Seek disinterested advice and opportunities to try. Every case I know personally of relative criticism of the various "new" truffle varieties comes by comparison with smell and taste experience with the clbuttic species, and actually and demonstrably is unrelated to fashion or "prestige" which however surely operate there among people who play those games, as with any pricey commodity, with wines for instance, as you can see implicitly demonstrated every day on today's HTTP wine fora (and occasionally even discussed explicitly, as done for 15 years on the wine newsgroups before the HTTP fora ever existed). In fact if taste judgment predominated over fad or fashion, it would be harder for the less scrupulous restaurateurs and packaged-product jobbers to sell T. aestivum fraudulently as "Black Truffles" as they have done in recent years to the US public. Certainly I've seen those and other secondary species, which people didn't bother with so much in the past, become much more fashionable and prestigious in the US than they were 20 and 30 years ago, when the clbuttic blacks and whites were already extremely expensive. Try for yourself and decide what you like, as always!
