Culinary Steroids

By Reece Hirsch

What would my protagonist Will Connelly bring to the Criminal Minds Thanksgiving dinner?  Since he is a single, thirty-something guy, don’t expect him to cook.

The things that he knows how to prepare aren’t staples of anyone’s Thanksgiving Day menu – nachos, omelets and pasta.  Will would bring a decent bottle of wine and perhaps a small jar of my great culinary secret – truffle salt.

Truffle salt is to cooking what anabolic steroids are to baseball.  Add truffle salt to a dish and you will make the inedible edible, the mediocre good and the good amazing.

What’s so great about truffle salt?  Well, first, it’s salt, which is already one of my vices.  When it comes to white, granular substances, there are worse addictions.

Second, as you would expect, truffle salt contains tiny specks of ground truffle.  People pay hundreds of dollars for liberal shavings of black truffles on a pasta dish, but truffle salt is relatively inexpensive and it has just enough of the precious stuff to add that rich, aromatic truffle essence to a dish.  And, most important of all for guys like me, you don’t have to be Alice Waters, David Chang or even Guy Fieri to achieve the effect.