Tajarin al tartufo bianco recipe from Piazza Duomo

This tajarin al tartufo bianco recipe rebuilds the dish Enrico Crippa serves at Piazza Duomo in Alba: yolk-heavy egg pasta cut into thin ribbons, dressed in butter emulsified with pasta water, then buried under fresh white truffle. The technical key is restraint — a dough built almost entirely on yolks, and a sauce with no cream, garlic or oil to compete with the truffle.

Crippa has run the three-Michelin-star kitchen at Piazza Duomo, on Alba's main square in the Langhe hills, since 2005, and tajarin al tartufo bianco stays on a menu that otherwise moves with the seasons. His published technique leans on fine flour and durum semola with a very high yolk-to-whole-egg ratio, the opposite of a standard pasta dough.

The ratio below is our own, reasoned for four servings from that same yolk-heavy logic and cross-checked against how traditional Langhe kitchens build tajarin generally. Get the dough right and the rest of this recipe is just timing.

A dough this rich needs no sauce beyond butter and water. Everything else is the truffle talking.

Ingredients

• 400 g Italian tipo 00 flour
• 16 egg yolks
• 1 tsp fine salt
• durum semola, for dusting
• 70 g cold unsalted butter, cubed
• 30 g Parmigiano Reggiano, finely grated
• 35 g fresh Alba white truffle, to shave at the table
• flaky salt, to finish

Method

1. Mound the flour, make a well, add the yolks and salt, and knead ten minutes. This low-water dough needs the long knead to build gluten strong enough to roll paper-thin without tearing.
2. Wrap and rest an hour so the gluten relaxes and the sheet stretches instead of snapping back under the pin.
3. Roll to under a millimetre, in batches. Dust with semola, fold loosely, and cut into ribbons about 2 mm wide, narrower than tagliatelle, so each strand carries more sauce.
4. Melt the butter with two tablespoons of pasta water over low heat, swirling until pale and glossy. Browned butter flattens the truffle's aroma instead of framing it.
5. Cook the tajarin in salted water 60-90 seconds; this thin a ribbon is done as soon as it rises and loses its raw sheen.
6. Lift the pasta into the butter off the heat and toss with more pasta water and the Parmigiano until the sauce clings. The water's starch binds fat and liquid instead of letting them separate.
7. Plate warm and shave the truffle over the top at the table, never in the pan: heat past body temperature burns off the aroma you paid for.

Serving it the Piazza Duomo way

Buy truffle firm and heavy for its size, smelling of garlic and wet earth; a soft one has lost what you paid for. Wrap it in dry paper in a sealed jar in the fridge, change the paper daily, and use it within three or four days — rice storage is a myth that only dries it out faster.

Pour a Nebbiolo-based Langhe red with age enough to have shed its harder tannins, a Barolo or Barbaresco from a serious producer. The Alba truffle season has just opened, so the freshest truffle is on the ground now.