Tajarin al Tartufo Bianco

What you keep out is as significant as what you put in. Nowhere is this more true than with tajarin al tartufo bianco. The pasta is extraordinary: twenty yolks or more per kilo of flour in the traditional Piedmontese ratio, creating strands so golden and rich they border on excess. The sauce is butter. That is all. The truffle requires nothing from you except restraint.

The white truffle of Alba is not an ingredient you cook. It is not something you mince, sauté, or fold into a sauce. You shave it, raw, over warm pasta at the moment of serving. The heat releases its perfume without destroying it. The aroma fills the room before the first bite reaches your mouth. Any chef who cooks white truffle has revealed they do not understand it.

This dish appears in the hills of Piedmont each autumn when the truffle hunters and their dogs emerge from the forests around Alba and Asti. For a few weeks, the restaurants charge fortunes and the home cooks spend freely, because the season is short and the truffle waits for no one. If you have the truffle, you need almost nothing else. Butter. Pasta. The wisdom to stand aside.