Tagliarelle With Truffle Butter
- By Katie Roche
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- 18 Jul, 2019
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WHEW. You're looking at 6 ingredients here, but quite the ItemQuest confusion. First of all, Ina, WHAT is "tagliarelle"??? The best I can ascertain from some internet research is that it's a brand-specific renaming of the generic pasta "tagliatelle". That would at least explain why I couldn't find any "tagliarelle" in the grocery store, and to Ina's credit, she does list the actual brand she uses so if I really wanted to get it right, I could have tried to order it online. The company's website, however, just says that it's their version of tagliatelle. They didn't even say what they did to change it. It's just theirs. So ok. But I went to Whole Foods and bought the tagliatelle they had. I'm not even about to be the level of extra that buys designer internet pasta. Not today.
The real saga here was searching for truffle butter. I have only bought it one time, and that was after extensive searching throughout Anchorage when I still lived in Alaska. I finally found it at the Natural Pantry which, if you're Alaskan, should give you a really good LOL to picture me in there, and it was TWENTY DOLLHAIRS. For TWO OUNCES. So when I set out to find some in Columbia, I thought to myself, "SURELY, this will be easier than finding something so fancy in ALASKA." Well don't call me SURELY...this product was nowhere to be found. I tried Trader Joe's, where they said they only carry it during the holidays. (What are people doing with truffle butter on the holidays? I mean, really, what???) And so then I tried Whole Foods. I hunted high and low. I tried the butter section. I tried the specialty dairy section. (I found some clotted cream though!!! YAY!!!) And then, finally, we asked one of the patchouli-scented employees and he said they don't carry it but that I could try just mixing truffle oil with butter. I had no other choice, so I bought white truffle oil, which was mercifully inexpensive compared to the prices I have seen for truffle butter.
This is what I need to know: WHAT IS THE POINT OF WHOLE FOODS IF THEY DON'T HAVE THE EXPENSIVE THINGS YOU NEED??? It's not like Whole Foods is any real actual person's main grocery store. Every sane person knows that Whole Foods EXISTS to be the place that you look for the thing that Kroger is too middle-class to carry. This is just facts. So I'm kind of mad at Whole Foods now. I hope my tweets at them alerting them to this identity crisis they're clearly having in which their employees suggest regular-people solutions to rich-people problems has them shaken TO THEIR CORE.
The real saga here was searching for truffle butter. I have only bought it one time, and that was after extensive searching throughout Anchorage when I still lived in Alaska. I finally found it at the Natural Pantry which, if you're Alaskan, should give you a really good LOL to picture me in there, and it was TWENTY DOLLHAIRS. For TWO OUNCES. So when I set out to find some in Columbia, I thought to myself, "SURELY, this will be easier than finding something so fancy in ALASKA." Well don't call me SURELY...this product was nowhere to be found. I tried Trader Joe's, where they said they only carry it during the holidays. (What are people doing with truffle butter on the holidays? I mean, really, what???) And so then I tried Whole Foods. I hunted high and low. I tried the butter section. I tried the specialty dairy section. (I found some clotted cream though!!! YAY!!!) And then, finally, we asked one of the patchouli-scented employees and he said they don't carry it but that I could try just mixing truffle oil with butter. I had no other choice, so I bought white truffle oil, which was mercifully inexpensive compared to the prices I have seen for truffle butter.
This is what I need to know: WHAT IS THE POINT OF WHOLE FOODS IF THEY DON'T HAVE THE EXPENSIVE THINGS YOU NEED??? It's not like Whole Foods is any real actual person's main grocery store. Every sane person knows that Whole Foods EXISTS to be the place that you look for the thing that Kroger is too middle-class to carry. This is just facts. So I'm kind of mad at Whole Foods now. I hope my tweets at them alerting them to this identity crisis they're clearly having in which their employees suggest regular-people solutions to rich-people problems has them shaken TO THEIR CORE.
My friend Brittany was visiting when I was making this, and she suggested using a hand mixer to mix the truffle oil into the room temperature butter. It worked great! One might wonder why I have a fancy KitchenAid and also a KitchenAid hand mixer. I use both! I find that the hand mixer does better for certain things, like whipping ganache. If you've never whipped ganache before, I highly recommend you do that. In this case, I didn't want to get my KitchenAid bowl dirty, because Dan insists on handwashing it every single time, so I used the hand mixer because its beaters can go in the dishwasher and so can this Tupperware bowl.
I asked my main food sensei, Merra, what my butter to oil ratio should be and she suggested starting with one tablespoon for the stick; I did that, tasted it, and added a splash more just to make sure the truffle taste was front and center.
While I had the water boiling, I just had to simmer the cream and the add the truffle butter and let it melt on in. Full disclosure, I kind of didn't read the instructions super carefully and started melting the butter first and had to stop, bring my cream to a simmer, and then pour the partially melted butter in. Thankfully this was less laborious of a timing issue to resolve than the asparagus blanching from a few weeks ago.
The only other ingredient I had to prep was chives. I loooooove chives. Everything they go in ends up being insanely tasty. Chives are hands down the best herb. Parsley is my second fave, followed by cilantro. I remember seeing a poll in Food Network magazine a couple of years ago about how approximately 50% of the population thinks cilantro tastes like soap. Ina is one such person - she's a cilantro h8r - which honestly causes me to distrust any recipe of hers that has even a hint of Mexican influence. If you don't like cilantro, you need to stay away from writing Mexican food recipes and thankfully, she pretty much does. I realize this is completely off-topic, but if you're a cilantro hater and you're reading this, go wash your mouth out with ACTUAL soap, and then give cilantro another try. I promise, cilantro and an Ivory bar DO NOT taste the same.
TaliaTelle gets added to the cream/truffle butter mixture. This looks like fettuccine alfredo, but it is definitely not. As a side note, check out the Twitter "Italians Mad At Food" - it is hilarious. The highlight for me is the user who commented "Stop misusing pasta...she suffers." I fully recognize that here in the USA, we ruin a lot of other cultures' foods but IN OUR DEFENSE, they ruin ours too. I get it. We don't have the history they have. But like. You cannot put whatever you want on pizza and call it American. That is not ok. I saw a lot of corn-covered pizza in England. I object to that AT LEAST AS MUCH as Italians object to fettuccine alfredo. And maybe corn-covered pizza is delicious to someone. Fine. Fettuccine alfredo is delicious to me. But I'm on a tangent again, and the point was that this ISN'T fettuccine alfredo. For real though, check out that Twitter, it is hilar.
This is beautiful, and it came together in about 20 minutes. Ina recommends to serve it with large shavings of Parmesan cheese. Don't mind if I do. Also had a lil baby Mason jar (a recycled vessel originally used for smoked salmon) just to hold more chives so I could make it rain chives on top lest I ever ran out. I had grabbed a salad from Trader Joe's when I had been there looking for truffle butter, and had some rose in the fridge from when rose had been 2-for-1 at BiLo a couple of weeks ago. I meant to make more sangria with it but it just seemed right to drink it with this. We ate at like 8PM. The whole thing felt very European. The only thing missing from this was any sort of protein, which I KNOW, I'm supposed to eat like 100g of a day, but I was definitely not missing protein at all because we all know that carb foods are more delicious than protein foods.
The best takeaway from this experience is that mixing truffle oil with a stick of softened butter is the realest answer to the lack of availability of actual truffle butter. For one, if I HAD been able to find it, it would have been ludicrously expensive. For two, I had made this with actual truffle butter before and I think this turned out way better. Dan agreed. So if you're interested in making this, I really do recommend this middle-class hack. It's a lot more economical. One bottle of white truffle oil is around $11 and you only need about a tablespoon and a half to make a whole recipe of this.
Once again, Ina has given us a recipe that is simple and found a way to make it a giant pain in the butt. I know we've all seen the most iconic Ina meme ever that says "If you cant find butter infused with tears of virgin Dutch milkmaids, store bought is fine." In this case, I couldn't find butter infused with the essence of what are basically insanely expensive mushrooms and HOMEMADE had to be fine. Truly, a shocking twist on having to handmake asinine things like chicken stock and all the sudden, homemade is EASIER. As a parting sentiment, if you're not sure what truffle butter is and want more info, beware that when you Google that, a Nicki Minaj song will be the first result with the lyrics there for you to peruse, but don't. Nicki Minaj ruins things in a way Ina Garten never ever could and discovering that song was honestly the most traumatic part of this entire post. The dish itself was *chef's kiss*.
The best takeaway from this experience is that mixing truffle oil with a stick of softened butter is the realest answer to the lack of availability of actual truffle butter. For one, if I HAD been able to find it, it would have been ludicrously expensive. For two, I had made this with actual truffle butter before and I think this turned out way better. Dan agreed. So if you're interested in making this, I really do recommend this middle-class hack. It's a lot more economical. One bottle of white truffle oil is around $11 and you only need about a tablespoon and a half to make a whole recipe of this.
Once again, Ina has given us a recipe that is simple and found a way to make it a giant pain in the butt. I know we've all seen the most iconic Ina meme ever that says "If you cant find butter infused with tears of virgin Dutch milkmaids, store bought is fine." In this case, I couldn't find butter infused with the essence of what are basically insanely expensive mushrooms and HOMEMADE had to be fine. Truly, a shocking twist on having to handmake asinine things like chicken stock and all the sudden, homemade is EASIER. As a parting sentiment, if you're not sure what truffle butter is and want more info, beware that when you Google that, a Nicki Minaj song will be the first result with the lyrics there for you to peruse, but don't. Nicki Minaj ruins things in a way Ina Garten never ever could and discovering that song was honestly the most traumatic part of this entire post. The dish itself was *chef's kiss*.
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!