How to avoid a truffle kerfuffle

It starts with a small, early black truffle. It sits on my desk, taunting me with its aroma. I am petrified.

It isn't the monetary value of the chunk; it is the stigma. I know nothing of truffles, I just know they're fancy. They conjure images of high-society European dinner parties with champagne and caviar. The closest I have come to real truffle (and not the synthetically flavoured oil) is as a waiter serving at those parties years earlier.

The more I study the warty black exterior of the fungus, and the more I catch its sweet but earthy perfume, the more nervous I become. I don't know what to do with it! And lord knows I don't want to waste it.

Advice is to keep it simple - go for scrambled eggs. Sure, I love eggs. I whisk, throw them in the pan, and grate in truffle as they cook. Not too bad. But I feel like it should be more.

With a little internet sleuthing, I discover infusion: I grate truffle into a bowl of broken eggs, let it infuse for an hour, then fry a rich (in more ways than one) scramble. Fancy bread on the side, and extra truffle over the top, and maybe I'm getting the hang of it.

But, in the back of my head, is my editor's voice - "I smell them and they make me go a little crazy," she said. I'm not getting that. They're not driving me wild. And, at a cost of about $2500 a kilogram, I'm starting to question whether they're worth it. I whip the rest into butter for longevity, and feel fear and trepidation return - what am I doing wrong?

Wind the clock forward a week, and enter the Canberra Truffle Festival, Three Seeds cooking school, and chef Andrew Haskins.

"There are all sorts of things you can do with a truffle. The one thing you can't do is get instant flavour," he says, confirming my suspicion that I hadn't quite hit the mark.

"Where I think truffles fall down is when people look for that last-minute flavour hit. That's where things just really don't work. The longer you can leave a truffle infusing into ingredients, the more flavour you're going to get into the dish … If you were going to put together the ultimate scrambled egg, you need a day's preparation."

Haskins and his wife Catherine are huge advocates for truffle education, and will host cooking classes and demonstrations at the Fyshwick Markets over July.

Their message? Don't be a wimp - yes, truffles seem expensive, but they shouldn't be exclusive; they can be approachable and even affordable, so long as you make it work.

"The taste you'll get from raw truffle is minimal," Andrew Haskins says as he hands me a sliver which tastes like a bit of earth and not really much else. "So when you think shaving that little bit of truffle on top, what does it achieve? Not a whole heap."

He says the key to truffles' allure is their pungency, which will readily leach into fats and proteins. To experience the truffle fully, you should aim to infuse multiple layers of a dish - in the case of my scrambled eggs, I should have placed the eggs whole in a jar with some truffle, then cooked with truffle-infused cream and butter, and finished with truffle salt.

To prove his point, he shows me how to put the precious fungi to work and build some serious flavour from as little as a few grams.

We begin with infusions. One small chunk is grated first into a cup of cream, then grated into a few tablespoons of salt, and finally whipped into about half a stick of butter. To be even more economical, Haskins says rather than grating, you could place a whole piece in the cream or in a container next to the salt, seal, leave to infuse over a day or two, then wash off the truffle, dry well, and use again for something else.

Getting a little more complex, he cuts a decent wedge of creamy brie, butterflies it open, and places ultra-fine slices of truffle along the cut, before closing it back up.

Knowing how truffle works, and hence how to store it effectively, makes for

significantly more efficient use of the ingredient.

"Because it's fungus, over time they lose a huge amount of weight, and they lose it through condensation," he says. "First thing you need to do is keep it really nice and dry. They've got to be kept cold, and they need to be kept dry to reduce the amount of condensation, because you're paying for the liquid.''

His truffles sit on paper towel (changed daily) in a sealed glass jar in the fridge. And he says the infused ingredients are no exception to the condensation rule - whipped truffle butter should be stored in baking paper then wrapped in cling wrap. Truffle salt and truffle cream should be well sealed, and truffled brie should be cloaked in a paper towel then cling wrapped. It will take a good day or so for the flavour to permeate, so plan ahead.

But you can't (or perhaps shouldn't) live on salt, butter, cream and brie alone. Time for some meat, and Haskins recommends the lighter flavours of chicken, fish and even young veal, which won't compete with the truffle.

We stuff a chicken breast with the truffled brie, slide some truffle butter under its skin, gently seal it in a pan, then shift it to the oven. For the veal, we let it marinate in a mix of grated truffle and olive oil - no salt, so as not to draw the moisture away from the oil - and fry it to rare. For dessert, a truffle-flavoured chocolate truffle, using the infused cream, and infused pieces of chocolate.

Because our ingredients haven't had time to fully absorb the truffle flavour, Haskins says I must use some imagination as I take my bite, and perhaps help it along with a whiff of truffle from the jar. But I'm already starting to feel better, and a lot wiser. I think I can do this.

While the lesson has taken some intimidation out of the cooking, I confess I find the buying part equally nerve-racking. How much do I buy, what should I look for, how do I stop myself looking the fool?

"[Last year] we were encouraging people to buy small pieces of truffle and experiment. To me, that's more important. And then the second year they come, then they're game, they'll buy the chunk, because they've gone 'Well hang on, I can make that work, now I'm game to make a dinner party for five or six people,' '' he says.

"The way to tell a really good truffle is the darker and richer the colour, the better quality the truffle is. The white that you see running through the truffle is a good sign, that's where the flavour is."

Truffles are also graded from A (the best) to C, with most A-grade truffles not harvested until towards the end of June. He warns against paying for dirt - make sure the truffles have been well-cleaned - and while the basic infusions of our lesson used only about four grams, he says for a dinner party you should budget for about 10 grams a guest.

It's a decent investment, but he is adamant that matched with good ingredients and with the right preparation, it's worth it. And as I jot down final notes and greedily finish the food, I'm closer to being a convert, if not for the flavour (which I devoured before it fully developed), then definitely for the potential.

Hamish Boland-Rudder is a staff writer.