Originally,
truffle oil was high-quality olive oil infused with black or white truffles, but today, most of the stuff is
made synthetically with ingredients like 2,4-dithiapentane, an aromatic molecule that gives truffles their distinctive smell. Some people love the oil, but a lot of chefs despise it.
“One of the most pungent, ridiculous ingredients ever known to chef,”
Gordon Ramsay once told a competitor on
MasterChef.
Reaching for the oil is "a sure sign of someone who doesn't know what they're doing," Joe Bastianich said in the same episode.
“Fake truffle flavoring is one of those things that's especially upsetting, because not only does it taste like a bad chemical version of the real thing, it's the flavor that almost everyone now associates with truffles,”
Jonathan Gold says.
Still, chefs use it as a way to project quality onto their plates, and diners eat it up, whether they’re aware or not that it’s all just a ruse.