How Gordon Ramsay Really Feels About This Trendy Ingredient
Truffle oil is one of those ingredients that you can add to just about anything to make it taste (and cost) a little more "gourmet." For instance, that boxed mac and cheese you have? Sprinkle some truffle oil on there and you instantly have truffle mac and cheese, which can be a very pricey dish if you're dining out. As it turns out, some chefs have some harsh criticism when it comes to this trendy ingredient. Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is one of them, and he feels pretty strongly about how truffle oil is often misused.
Oh, and did we mention that most truffle oil used in restaurants isn't even made with real truffles? It's often a synthetic blend of olive oil and chemical compounds, according to The New York Times. More specifically, that "truffle" flavor often comes from a chemical like 2,4-dithiapentane, which is a chemically-altered form of formaldehyde (via Town & Country). (Could that be another reason Ramsay has such a strong dislike for the oil? Food for thought.)
According to Ramsay, truffle oil is "the worst thing"
It's no surprise that Gordon Ramsay feels strongly about, well, a lot of things. Anybody who has ever seen him judge a dish knows that he doesn't hold anything back (there's even a whole list of his worst insults. A whole list.) So when Ramsay referred to truffle oil as "the worst thing" during an interview with PopSugar, it didn't come across as a total shock. "That thing needs to be let down," he said. "When [people] use it, they use the same f***ing top [as any other oil], so they pour it, and it comes out in abundance. This thing needs to be let out in tiny, tiny, little [amounts]."
That's not the only time Ramsay has made his dislike for the oil clear, though. In the first episode of MasterChef's second season, a contestant added truffle oil to their dish, which Ramsay then called "one of the most pungent, ridiculous ingredients ever known to chefs." Ramsay's co-judge, George Calombaris, followed his comment by informing the contestant that "truffle oils are made by perfumists that have no white truffles in them." And in case you were wondering, Ramsay and Calombaris are far from the only chefs who despise truffle oil — even Martha Stewart has called it a "hideous thing" (via Today).