Eugenio Boer's recipe: a pear and truffle dessert that tastes like Piedmont

"Holland is in my DNA, but my heart is all for Italy: never before have we restarted from our beautiful country!". The chef Eugenio Boer, owner of the [bu:r] starred restaurant in via Mercalli, Milan, looks to the recovery of a certainly different future that will be built day after day.

Dutch by blood "Born by mistake in Italy" 42 years ago, Boer spent the first seven years of his life in the land of tulips, before moving to Italy with his family in Sestri Levante. Like many of his colleagues, imprinting comes from his family, from his grandmother, a professional cook who, at the age of three, puts him next to him in the kitchen and makes him knead the dough.

It's a feeling that captures him to the bone. The kitchen will be his future, whatever the cost. And the first price to pay is a tough negotiation with his commercial agent father who absolutely wants him to carry on with his studies as an accountant. In the end, the young Eugenio succeeds but on one condition: he will attend school regularly, and will thus be able to go to work in the afternoon in the restaurants in the area, above all at the Pescador at the Porto dei Pescherecci in Sestri, facing the sea managed by Carlo Carmagnini where he his first apprenticeship.

Having obtained his diploma as an accountant, Boer can finally take flight which, like migratory birds, will take him from Italy to Germany and vice versa, crossing the whole boot in stages, becoming passionate about a territory that overwhelms it with smells, tastes and noises, absorbing the mix of cultures that permeated the city and learning how to make traditional local dishes. At the same time, passing to the court of great masters and great starred chefs, he is increasingly rooted in the belief that cooking has enormous cultural value and that the key to the future must be found in the past.

After so much wandering he lands in Milan where in 2014 he opens Ezzenza. It only takes him three years to win the Michelin star. A year later, however, the owners decide to close, for Boer it is an incentive to go ahead and not be conditioned by setbacks. And here, after a year, he opens a restaurant of his own: [bu: r] in via Mercalli, a stone's throw from Bocconi. The slightly wacky name says it all: it's the phonetic transcription of the Dutch name of him.

Dutch by genetics but very Italian by feelings so immersed in the Italian gastronomic culture that Trufflelanghe one of the most important Italian companies specialized in the management of the supply chain and in the transformation of truffles with 20 hectares of truffle grounds between the Langhe, Roero and Monferrato and customers all over the world in haute cuisine involves him in an "Aria d'Alba" event to promote the white truffle of Alba around the world which was held in Hong Kong and Macao.

And on that occasion Eugenio Boer presented alongside other dishes the "Pear with mulled wine, hazelnut cream, white chocolate with wasabi and white truffle" that we offer to First&Food readers this season in which truffles are strictly present on the tables of enthusiasts .

The recipe - explains Boer - was born from the desire to enhance a classic autumn dessert "Chocolate pears and red wine" contextualizing it to the land of Piedmont. The introduction of the white chocolate mousse with wasabi, together with the more classic chocolate mousse, gives a touch of style to the Chef's recipe which, from wine with hazelnuts to chocolate with truffles, is a real elegy of the Piedmont area and its fruits

The Recipe: Pear in mulled wine hazelnut cream white chocolate with wasabi, black chocolate mousse and white truffle

Ingredients, for a preparation:

75cl of Nebbiolo

200g of brown sugar

1 vanilla pod

1 cinnamon stick

2 cloves

4 juniper berries

8 sichuan pepper berries.

The mixture must reduce by half to cool and be used to cook pears under vacuum.

Once the pears are cooked, filter the sauce and reduce it to glaze the exiting pear.

Ingredients for the hazelnut crumble

50g hazelnut flour

15 g broken hazelnuts

50g butter

50g flour 00

50g cane sugar

everything should be cooked at 170° for 12/15 minutes, always moving it.

Ingredients for the dark chocolate mousse

250g of chocolate

2 eggs

60g of sugar

100ml milk

500g of cream.

Cook the eggs in a "bain-marie" with the milk and sugar, while the chocolate melts. The semi-whipped cream will be added when all the compounds are cold.

For the white chocolate mousse, the doses are the same: the only precaution is to infuse 3 slices of fresh wasabi crushed with a meat grinder the night before in the milk.

It is put on the plate as shown in the photo, with an abundant rain of Alba White Truffle