FoodStuff: The great Australian truffle hunt
John Lethlean
Bread, cheese, olives, a glass of wine - joie de vive!
Pretentious Australians comme moi have never shied away from our European-ness at any opportunity. No, we embrace our inner Continental warmly: greet him/her with a kiss on both cheeks and farewell reluctantly with the more than occasional "ciao."
And the food and wine world affords myriad opportunities for letting the Euro genie out of the bottle ad nauseum. Particularly in Melbourne. You could go for months eating linguine and salsicce; sipping ristretto with biscotti; drinking San Pel and tempranillo; talking Adria and Ducasse. And it would seem perfectly normal (in the food and wine world, that is).
But here's something that is not normal.
It's mid morning, mid winter. In the surrounding bush, bellbirds, kookaburras and crows squawk and carry on. A cow moos. A gentle plume of smoke rises from where a few old logs have been burned off, a small herd of Black Angus beasties standing around it for warmth like Aussie men at a barbecue. It is bucolic Australia writ large.
But nearby, a group of men and women is wandering up and down neat rows of small oak and hazelnut trees, planted within an electrically-fenced plot annexed from the main paddock. We are an odd lot, and look it; a restaurateur, a couple of chefs, a few from the media and a couple of guys who are clearly in charge. One is a farmer, and dressed like a bloke who works the land; the other you'd more likely label "grazier": Williams boots and corduroys, grey polo neck sweater, designer stubble and haircut, trowel in hand.
They work as a team recreating this antipodean version of a time-honoured European tradition - the truffle hunt - at Hoddles Creek, about an hour's drive from Pellegrini's. Traditionally, a pig or dog snuffled through the undergrowth of forests in the Perigord region of France or Umbria in Northern Italy, scratching the soil furtively when the pungent scent of truffle was detected beneath the surface around the roots of wild oaks and hazelnuts. American author Jeffrey Steingarten's account of traditional truffle hunting in Italian forests, from The Man Who Ate Everything, is about the best thing I've ever read about food.
In the Australian version, however, a grazier with a plot of spare land and an urge for new challenges and maybe a quick fortune buys trees pre-inoculated with the spores of the truffle, plants them and waits. And if he or she is lucky, some time in the next five years or so he finds a truffle or two and gets really excited, because they are great things and chefs will pay good money for them.
For Greg Kerr, who grows grapes and produces wine under his family property's name - Tibooburra - it's a romantic gesture that may, or may not, ever produce returns that justify the exercise commercially. But until that is known, he has the warm fuzzy feeling of being the first Victorian to successfully cultivate black truffles - he found Victoria's first this time last year - and as far as he knows, Tibooburra remains the only property where truffles can actually be found in season (winter).
There is a third member of this team, and she is possibly the most critical. Where once the pig's fine sense of smell was relied upon for truffling in a trufferie (that's the official, tres Euro name of this little plot) here it is a mongrel bitch (no insult intended) named Billie, much-loved result of an unplanned nocturnal union between a black labrador and a kelpie. How Australian is that?
And Billie wanders up and down the rows of trees like a sniffer dog around a boogie board bag until she gets a whiff of truffle beneath the surface. When she does, she starts scratching the soil madly before her handler, the farmer, calls her off and rewards her. That's when the grazier gets down on his knees and starts investigating.
If he's unlucky, it may be a false dawn or merely the scent of truffle oil used during Billie's training. But - and here I have to say to any sceptics out there "mine eyes have seen the glory" - if he's fortunate, he'll scrape around until he finds the edge of a black, irregularly-shaped fungal node with the powerful whiff of beetroot and molasses. A minute or so later, he'll be holding a truffle.
In an hour wandering the trufferie, Kerr and his overly excited assistants pulled truffles weighing a total of 570 grams from the red Aussie soil of Hoddles Creek, a couple of hundred metres from where he grows pinot noir, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, shiraz and merlot, another great European agricultural tradition Australia has embraced a little over-enthusiastically in recent years (given the wine grape glut and all that).
And if you're lucky, and feeling flush, you may wander into a restaurant selling Australian truffle-enhanced dishes over the next month or so. What's great about having them in winter is that the European food we devour this time of year complements the smell of truffle so perfectly. Hitherto, it's all been more or less counter-cyclical.
All Kerr's go to South Yarra's Botanical (because they sell his beef and wine too) but truffles from Western Australia, where they have been cultivated in some considerable volume in the past few years, have infiltrated Australia's top-end restaurants at - I have to warn you - around $2500-3000 per kilo. Or about 1450 EURO if you prefer to think of it that way. Risotto con tartufo nero? Don't mind if I do.
From a collection of John’s food writing 2005-2008.
Follow John Lethlean and Necia Wilden on Twitter as they eat and drink their way around Australia
Regions
- Yarra Valley (Wine) (VIC)
- Yarra Valley, Dandenongs and the Ranges (VIC)
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