My Time as a Truffle Evangelist
Australian black truffle season, my go-to home dishes, and the inevitable "dumb shit"
Image: Sarah Hewer (courtesy of Australian Truffle Traders)
If you know me, you may remember my years as a truffle evangelist, preaching the good word of Australian grown black truffles. On a mission to convert those who didn’t truly feel the allure, riled by those of the mind that they are overrated, or fixated solely on price. Yes, I was a little, extra.
“The truffles aren’t that good this year,” I’d hear from people who should know better – chefs and food journalists. As a blanket statement it doesn’t stack up. It would often be an early season remark, a time when truffles aren’t expected to be as aromatic as those later in the season. Cultivated in Australia on the west coast, over in the east, and down in Tasmania, thousands of miles apart, there’s obviously going to be geographic variation. I mean you even get variation within regions. Chefs who know their shit will map out the season for you, the regions they’ll source from and when. I’d take their considered opinion, my own, and that of truffle growers as to specific pockets of country but blanket statements are, I’d say, worthless.
I bring all this up as we’re just into the new season and I’m fighting the urge, notwithstanding this newsletter, to relapse into my tub-thumping ways. These days I’m mostly at peace with the fact that it’s not an ingredient for everyone. Tastes vary, as does the will to splash out on an admittedly pricey ingredient. Market price changes but you’re looking at upward of AUD$2 a gram as a retail customer.
I’m still firmly of the opinion that it’s an extraordinary ingredient, and worth the money. You don’t have to be an evangelist to agree on that. Black truffle cultivation is a long game. You don’t just throw some inoculated oak and hazel trees in the ground and et voila, rich pickings.
There’s site selection and preparation, planting patterns, labour, land and lifecycles in the mix, as well as a calendar of ongoing upkeep, and of course the star turn, the dogs that hunt them (no, not pigs). So, there is the value, and that’s before they’ve been cleaned, graded, packed and shipped.
I was in my most earnest phase of truffle evangelism during my four years with Truffle Kerfuffle, Australian Truffle Festival (between 2015-2018); the last three years of which I was event co-director.
We’d find talent each year who were a dab hand with an ingredient that’s known as much for aroma as anything else; chefs who were as interested in playing with a shit-ton of truffle as they were a fat fee. There were no fat fees on the budget we had.
Radio interviews where I rattled off every last talking point without pause (a nightmare I’m told for presenters) became a truffle season standard, as did the odd feeling of press interviews (being on the other side), and there’s some best forgotten TV appearances. Live to the nation on Weekend Sunrise with less than an hour of sleep in the bank, not recommended. There’s also the year a Russian news crew appeared asking questions as opaque as “truffle, tell me why.”
Truffle Kerfuffle is, barring pandemics, held annually (and in fact, it’s happening this coming weekend – shameless plug) in Manjimup down in the south west of Western Australia, a region producing upward of 70% of the southern hemisphere’s winter black truffle. Much of it is exported, revered and awaited by chefs across the globe; a winter ingredient that finds a place on the summer menus of often Michelin-starred kitchens in the northern hemisphere.
More on that in coming weeks when I’ll be exploring black truffle in more depth, delving into an archive of chef and grower interviews and going deeper on an ingredient that for me is more than just its price tag. There’ll be Australian based chefs like Peter Gilmore, Analiese Gregory, Mark Best and Danielle Alvarez, as well as London based names like Brett Graham, Clare Smyth, Jeremy Chan and Pierre Koffmann.
Image: Sarah Hewer ( Gavin Booth, Australian Truffle Traders & Clare Smyth, Core / Oncore)
There is a common theme with chefs who know the ingredient well, and that’s their understanding of it as an ingredient, and how it’s best treated and matched. With all that thought of how best to celebrate it – and it is an ingredient that is celebrated - the annual round of dumb shit to do with a truffle (mainly on social media) irks me.
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