Black truffle substitutes

Ordinary brown mushrooms or a mixed wild bag, sliced thin and browned hard in butter with a smashed garlic clove.

Best for

pasta, risotto, scrambled eggs, roast chicken, polenta, mashed potatoes

This is the swap that produces the best actual dish, as long as you stop expecting it to taste of truffle. You get real earthiness, savoury depth and browned-butter richness, so a truffle pasta becomes a very good mushroom pasta. What is completely absent is the aroma, which is the whole point of truffle: a truffle dish smells intensely of damp earth, garlic and something faintly gassy before you ever taste it. Mushrooms smell like mushrooms. Push the browning further than feels comfortable and finish with a knob of cold butter to get closer.

A jarred paste of chopped truffle, usually blended with mushroom and olive oil, sold as tartufata or truffle sauce.

Best for

pasta, risotto, eggs, crostini, cream sauces, mashed potatoes

The closest thing to real truffle you can keep in a cupboard, because it does actually contain truffle, usually the milder summer variety padded out with mushroom. Read the label: the good jars list truffle high up, the cheap ones are mushroom paste plus flavouring. Expect maybe a third of the aroma of fresh, a much darker and muddier appearance since it never looks like clean shavings, and a slightly oily body that can dull a delicate sauce. Add it at the end with the heat off, because the aroma is volatile and boiling drives it away.

Oil carrying truffle aroma, in most cases from a laboratory-made aroma compound rather than from truffle itself.

Best for

finishing pasta, fries, popcorn, mashed potatoes, eggs, risotto

Powerful and easy to overdo, and the reason so many people say they dislike truffle. Real truffle smells complex and shifts as you eat; most truffle oil hits one loud note and holds it, which after a few bites reads as perfumed and slightly chemical. Used with restraint, a quarter teaspoon over a plate of buttered pasta genuinely reads as truffle to most people. Never cook with it, never use it as the fat in a pan, and buy the smallest bottle because it fades within a couple of months of opening.

Coarse salt blended with small pieces of dried truffle.

Best for

eggs, fries, steak, popcorn, roast potatoes, risotto

The most forgiving of the flavoured truffle products, precisely because salt limits how much you can add before the dish is ruined by saltiness. The aroma is quieter and drier than fresh truffle, with none of the damp, alive quality, but it does not taste synthetic in the way cheap oil does. Sprinkle it at the end rather than cooking with it, and remember to remove the plain salt from the recipe so you do not double up.

Cheaper truffle species, sold fresh or jarred, with the same texture but a much fainter aroma.

Best for

shaving over pasta, risotto, eggs, carpaccio, butter

If your recipe wants shavings on the plate and you want them to be actual truffle, this is the way. It looks right, it shaves right, and it is real. It simply smells much less: a summer truffle is mild and nutty where a Perigord truffle is heady and almost aggressive, so use nearly twice as much and still expect a subtler dish. Storing it overnight in a closed container with eggs or with cooked rice transfers a surprising amount of aroma and stretches what you have.

Rehydrated dried porcini or cepes, chopped fine, with soft roasted garlic mashed in.

Best for

pasta, risotto, sauces for beef, stuffings, gratins

A cook's workaround rather than a substitute. Porcini supply the deep forest-floor earthiness and roasted garlic supplies the sweet, slightly sulphurous note that is part of what makes truffle smell the way it does, and together they land closer than either alone. It is still recognisably not truffle to anyone who has eaten it, and it is darker and chunkier on the plate. Worth it in a rich braise or a baked pasta, not worth it in a dish built around clean white shavings.