From SBS Food
The hunt is on! Ed Charles joins Victorian truffle farmers as they seek out the heady aromas of this most mysterious funghi.
Spice, is two weeks from pup, but the two year old Australian Shepherd, whose pedigree name is Mazasuka Star Struck, wants to do the job she was trained for. That is to sniff out the tuber melanosporum or black Perigord truffle, an exotic fungi that lives symbiotically with the roots of oak and hazelnut trees and currently costs about $2,750 a kilo in the shops.
We’re not in the Dordogne region of France, where growing and harvesting of truffles has always been shrouded in mystery and secrecy but sold openly in local market squares. We are but ten minutes out from the Melbourne suburb of Pakenham.
Drago (or Charlie) and Ivka Javor, who moved to Australia from Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s, are nervous about revealing their location in case people get ideas and try to steal the truffles. “If they try it once they won’t try it again,” Drago says. “I won’t shoot them or anything…”
We’re with a group of young chefs, many of whom have never worked with truffles let alone hunted for them. Later in the week the public is invited as part of an Australian Truffle Growers Association information day.
Spice’s owner, neighbour Sue Brimacombe, trained the mum-to-be for a month with some cotton wool soaked in truffle oil. The oil contains androstenol, a musky chemical which is found in the saliva of boars (and in small quantities in human sweat glands) and drives female pigs, the traditional truffle hunters, crazy.
Nowadays in France dogs are used because they won’t eat the truffles or scuff a car’s upholstery. Brimacombe says that dogs are also easy to train.
Spice is led to the five year old plantation of 220 trees, a mix of traditional and evergreen oaks and hazelnut. She sniffs at the base of the several trees before scratching the earth to indicate a possible truffle before receiving a treat.
Ivka kneels on an old pillow and scrapes the ground with a plain dessert spoon. She plants her nose into the soil and inhales deeply. She scrapes further and reveals the first marble-sized truffles of the day.
Brimacombe rewards Spice who is on to the next tree focussing on the task in hand with Ivka following behind. More fruits are unearthed before Spice sniffs out what looks like a whopper. Ivka again kneels on her pillow and inhales the earth, inviting the visiting chefs one by one to plant their faces in the soil and inhale the musky odour. A knobbled piece of something, almost the size of a tennis ball, is dug out with the spoon. It weighs, with dirt, about 140 grams before being washed, worth about $350 on the open market.
It is secured safely in a jar with others and will be carefully washed. This says Drago will further enhance its complex musky odours.
The story of the Javors is typical of many truffle growers in Australia. The plantation is five years old. After adding tonnes of lime to neutralise their acidic soil, 2007 was their first albeit small harvest of truffles.
A few hundred kilometres away in the Otways, Heather and Bruce Ride planted their inoculated trees six years ago. The only difference is that they’ve taken the traditional route and use their pink and black spotted pig Mademoiselle for the hunt. She’s a natural who not only wants to find the truffles but dig them out and eat them.
Fortunately the Ride’s have intercepted the truffles and shared them with neighbours and chef George Biron, from the Sunnybrae Restaurant and Cooking School in Birregurra. So entranced has Biron become by their edible gold that this year he plants his own orchard as many have in any of the cooler climate zones from NSW, Canberra, Victoria, Tasmania and WA.
The Australian Truffle Growers Association predicts the democratisation of truffles with Australia doing for truffles than it did to the stuffy world of French wine. Already the truffle harvest is more than doubling each year as more plantations come on steam. This year the harvest is expected to be between 1.5 and 2 tonnes, compared to about 800kg in 2007. By 2103 Australia could be harvesting five to ten tonnes of the black gold while in 2007 the French harvest was thought to be 15 tonnes.
Biron has an even better vision. “In 10 tears or maybe earlier I can see farmers’ markets with a little corner where voluminously overcoated ladies and gentlemen huddle in small groups exchanging little parcels of bliss for whatever currency is king at the time,” he says.
For now most of us will have to settle for truffle hunts with friendly farmers or commercial tours which are available in WA and Tasmania, currently the two largest truffle producing states.