West Australia is reporting a record crop of truffles this year and as a neat coincidence, my birthday coincides with peak season. My present was a 62 gram irregular black sphere of the fungus, the “diamond of cookery” as French gastronome Brillat-Savarin called them. It’s not as if I have any personal experience in cooking with them; they’re the pinnacle of food extravagance, an ingredient that we only really eaten as fleeting black shavings atop a fancy restaurant’s plate.

Once fresh and in the home kitchen, the whole room gets infused with its deep, earthy redolence and the desire to eat. Because the truffle is at its most fragrant within 10 days of unearthing, you have a narrow window in which to cook it. As with any good ingredient, I figured, the simplest recipes are by far the best.

I truffled a chicken, slipping a few thin slices of truffle between the skin and the breast of the chicken, then roasted it in the rotisserie. I ate slices shaved over scrambled egg. I left the truffle in a sealed container with some eggs to take in the rich fragrance, then boiled the eggs. I put one of these eggs into a meatloaf, possibly making the most decadent Scotch egg ever conceived.

Then I tried it in ice-cream.

My copy of Larousse Gastronomique, the French culinary dictionary that you pull out to bludgeon your friends with Gallic culinary esoterica, makes the comment that the use of truffles is “more restrained than in the past” and then goes on to recommend an ice-cream recipe that contains at least 100 grams of truffle. At current prices, this works out at around $250 for a single litre of dessert, which suggests the French have a very different idea of culinary restraint.

Their recipe suggests boiling whole truffles in milk, removing them, using the milk to make ice-cream and then layering julienned slices of the truffles into a tulip glass, alternating with layers of the ice-cream. As I didn’t want to burn through the remaining truffle in a single decadent dessert, here is an even more restrained recipe. The ice-cream seems to hold the rich fragrance of the truffles and intensifies in the back of your throat as the cream warms upon your tongue.

I’ve tested this once, so your mileage may vary.

Ingredients

250ml of milk
150gm of sugar
500ml of cream
6 egg yolks
20 grams of black truffle, chopped very finely

Recipe:

Warm the milk, sugar, half of the cream and the black truffle in a saucepan. Remove from heat and allow to steep for half an hour.

Whisk together the egg yolks in a separate bowl. Pour in the milk and truffle mixture, whisking constantly. Scrape this mix back into the saucepan and warm over medium heat, stirring constantly until the mix forms into thin custard. You'll know when it is done when it coats the back of your spoon.

Pour the custard into the remaining cream. Whisk and set in an ice bath to cool.

Once chilled, pour the mix into your ice-cream maker and make as per its directions.