Deeply Savoury

Fonduta with White Truffles

Appears in
top 1000A Long and Messy Business
A Long and Messy Business

By Rowley Leigh

Published 2018

  • About
There are only a few ways to enjoy white truffles. Fine egg pasta tossed in butter and covered in shavings of truffle is excellent, as is a good risotto, or most ways of cooking eggs. Eggs impregnated with truffle – a truffle in a box of eggs, sealed in a bag for a few days – are especially good. But the best truffle dish I have ever had was a cardoon and custard tartlet festooned with truffle, on a bed of fonduta.

It was the fonduta that was key. During the truffle season in Piedmont there is always fonduta. The Fontanafredda winery entertained a group of us in La Villa Reale, a former hunting lodge of King Victor Emmanuel II on the estate. The cook is Giovanna: even her cookbook does not offer a surname but her cooking is exquisite. The first dish she gave us was carne cruda: she explained to me how she prepared the dish by rubbing a chopping board very lightly with a garlic clove and then chopping a perfectly cleaned piece of veal rump to a fine mince, seasoning it lightly, adding a few drops of olive oil, then showering it with white truffle.