MasterChef: Cooking with Unfamiliar Ingredients

Black truffles
Photo by Arpingstone, Wikimedia Commons

On MasterChef, the remaining home cooks were asked to cook with an ingredient that few home chefs have the opportunity to use: black truffles. I have never cooked with black truffles, and it was pretty clear that few of the home cooks on MasterChef had used it either.

Truffles are a kind of fungus, so it was the first instinct of some to use them as they would other more common kinds of mushrooms and use them to flavor steak. As I said, I haven’t cooked with a black truffle, but I have had truffle dishes at restaurants. The winning dish of this MasterChef challenge was in fact quite similar to a ravioli truffle dish that I have had before. Experience, even having eaten a particular ingredient before trying to cook with it, definitely helps.

I can sympathize with the cooks on MasterChef. Outside of television reality cooking shows, few of us would ever cook with an ingredient for the first time when we have important guests. We would experiment with the dish first, perhaps inviting a couple of brutally honest close friends to sample it before we tried to use it to impress.

Cooking with unfamiliar ingredients, especially when you don’t have a recipe or any experience cooking with or eating the ingredient is a good exercise for the home cook who wants to improve their culinary skills. It helps to develop a sensibility about which flavors can be combined and which simply can’t. I love to try completely new dishes for my wife and son.

If it isn’t good, I know they’ll tell me without pulling any punches. It can also be a good exercise for deflating my ego. When it is good and they like what I've prepared, though, they are equally honest in their feedback. The best compliment I can get when I try a new dish is “Dad, when are you going to make that again?”

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