Friday, September 25, 2009

The Elusive Truffle Butter

Have you ever heard of truffle butter? No, not truffle oil, truffle butter. Neither had I. But this summer, while visiting my sister and her family in Sioux Falls I bought Andy a Barefoot Contessa cookbook. Of all the Food Network stars, only Ina Garten and Alton Brown have my undying devotion. They simply make you want to try new things! (By the way, Alton's recipe for Dulce de Leche is simply amazing!) So I paid way too much for the cookbook and on the way home to Grand Forks Andy and I drooled over the wonderful things she was cooking up in the pages. One recipe, in particular, caught our eye. It was a truffle butter pasta. You took some heavy cream, salt, truffle butter, pasta, and a bit of the pasta-cooking water, threw it together with some parmesan cheese on the top and you have a meal fit for a king. It is one of the simplest meals we have ever made and also one of the most delicious. We have fallen in love with it. So much so that we were willing to order the truffle butter required to make said meal through an internet company that was amazingly reasonably priced. The 8 oz. of white truffle butter was around $16. If you know anything at all about truffles, I am sure you are saying "Wow! That's a great deal!" And it was! Until they hit us with the shipping charges. You see, truffle butter needs to be kept cold, which means that it needs to be packed on ice and shipped overnight UPS. If you are keeping track, that runs about $35 for shipping. Suddenly, my butter was up to $51.
Due to our truffle butter pasta addiction, we have paid the shipping fees more than once, all the while hoping we would be able to find the butter locally for a decent price. Here are the results as they stand so far:
It is unavailable in Grand Forks, East Grand Forks, and Bemidji. Also unavailable in Sioux Falls (and we checked all the specialty stores we could find - including those that the people who worked in the stores named!). A friend of ours spent a considerable amount of time searching Byerly's and Whole Foods in the Twin Cities to no avail.
So my question to all of you is this: Does anybody have any idea where I can buy truffle butter in the tri-state area? We have run out again and I don't think Andy's salary is going to support much more of these delivery fees!
Just in case you were keeping track - the tomato soup from an earlier entry came from the same cookbook. The woman is a genius!

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