A heady aroma rises from the bag of truffles at Simon Johnson (12-14 Saint David Street, Fitzroy VIC 3065 +61 3 9486 9456)
This may seem extravagant but frame it within the cost of eating out. In Melbourne, in most decent restaurants, a main costs $30 to $40. It is difficult to find more than a handful of wines under $40. And a starter will cost somewhere around $15 to $20, give or take a dollar. That’s about $100 already.
So when I saw the sign below it wasn’t difficult to resist:
“A decadent truffle main course will cost as little as $40–$50. Go on on treat yourself!!!”
It was towards the end of my assignment reporting on the Foodies’ Bus Tour of Melbourne. I was up for celebrating the end of reviewing for The Age Good Food Guide and the Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide. The last few weeks I struggled through it with a terrible chest infection and tiredness that I couldn’t shake. I just wanted to stay home and eat something superb.
Plus I was on the hunt for something interesting for Weekend Herb Blogging, invented by the Queen of the South Beach Diet Kalyn, and hosted this week by Ellie at Kitchen Wench in Melbourne.
22 grams and $53 later (with the tour’s 10 per cent discount) I had my single chunk of truffle sealed – Tuber melanosporum, or black Perigord truffle, to be precise – in a small bag with some rice. That works out at about $2650 a kilo. The West Australian truffle itself was about half the size of an egg, with (the presumably manky) bits carved off. It looks like a dry dog’s nose in texture.
Store truffles with eggs which will absorb the aroma.
Soon the whole world is going to hear a lot more about this pungent little numbers. Adventurous Australian agriculturalists have been inoculating hazel and oak roots for years now. There are over 130 truffle farms in Australia with the first Australian truffle found in Tasmania in 1999 on the property of Tasmanian truffle farmer Tim Terry, five years after he planted his first trees. On the mainland, the first truffle was found at the Wine & Truffle Co’s Hazel Hill farm in 2003.
Since 1999 the Australian government has pumped $1 million into the industry in the form of grants to perfect the inoculation techniques which will help improve yields.
Last Truffle season – they grow in Autumn and winter – I spoke to Dr Nicholas Malajczuk (for this story here published in The Australian) the resident truffle expert at The Wine & Truffle Co, based near Manjimup in Western Australia – the very place my own truffle came from. Dr Malajczuk, says: “Yields are quite variable. It’s related to climate, the soil conditions and so forth. That’s one of the things we’ve been working on.”
Now the Australian industry is coming of age and Terry’s and Dr Malajczuk’s plantations are exporting to the world. Last year at The Wine & Truffle Co’s Hazel Hill Farm in Western Australia, more than 100kg of the fungi was harvested from a 21ha plantation of 13,000 hazel and oak trees. Figures are flaky, but truffle growth in Australia appears to be exponential: in 2004 Hazel Hill yielded 4kg and in 2005 26kg.
To put this in perspective, and these figures are just as flaky, worldwide between 50 and 100 tonnes of truffles are produced, mainly in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. In a bad year, production can fall to less than 10 tonnes.
As with many exotic foods the attraction is sexual. Traditionally truffles are sniffed out by female pigs because the truffle smell mimics a sexy pheromone excreted by male pigs, a sulphurous compound known as 2,4-dithiapentane (if I remember my university studies the two and the four indicating the position of the sulphur bonds) . Now dogs, which are easily trained and won’t eat the truffles, are used. And this is why I’m training these two just on the off chance we find some.
Incidentally, 2,4-dithiapentane is also the chemical in synthesised form that is found in that vilest of concotions, truffle oil, which bears little respemblance to the actual product and in my book has little use for anything but sexing-up pigs. Tins and bottled of truffles should also be added to this category. Their texture and essence bears no relation to the fresh product.
You don’t have to believe me on this subject. Bourdain, when he was last in town, told me:
“What is vile and disgusting and the single most overused ingredient in the repertoire of chefs is Truffle Oil. It must be stopped.”
RECIPE: Scrambled eggs
Overnight, I left the truffle in a bowl with five eggs. the aim being that they absorb some of the aroma, which is far more subtle and complex than the 2,4 compound alone. How simple can it be? Simply crack the eggs into a heavy pan. Add a splash of milk, a knob of butter and salt and pepper and stir continously over a low heat before spooning out onto a toasted slice of Baker D Chirico sourdough.
Then simply pimp it up!. Shave the truffles over the scrambled egg with a microplane.
The flavour was stunning and stayed on my back palate for about three hours. Yes, this was an extravagant experiment. But in my mind it was worth every penny. In fact, I keep getting flashbacks to the flavour memory.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I read that article about truffle oil and I was absolutely horrified - so many recipes call for truffle oil. I remember hearing reading a rant from chef who was going nuts about the use/obsession of truffle oil in restaurants and since then I’ve never been keen on the stuff (and after reading the article, I’m even less keen). Hopefully with the truffle industry beginning to blossom in Australia, we’ll see more of the real deal rather than chemical concoctions!
(Btw, those eggs look divine! Very nicely scrambled indeed)
Wow, I am realizing I know nothing about truffles. I’d definitely splurge for the chance to try them. The eggs with the shaved truffles look just divine.
Ellie, solidarity! I’ll be back to talk about cooking scrambled eggs as part of my molecular experiements. This time though the technique was overshone by the pimping and they were very nice.
Kalyn, you could probably buy them online although you’d want, I suspect, to DHL it over so it won’t spoil. It was wonderful and it is great to have all these farms springing up here.
Your eggs do look divine.
I love that you’re training the dogs! haha!
Paz
If you can inoculate truffle spore onto tree roots, why hasn’t some bright spark inoculated porcini spore onto some oak trees? I reckon there would be very ready market (Me!) for fresh porcinis.
Neil, I;m in there with you. Do you fancy going into business on this one? Last Porcini i bought in London cost $25.
Sorry mate, I’d eat all the profits.
Well at least I’ll have my first customer.
If you can package ‘em quick enough, I’ll buy them before Neil can take his first chomp.
So that’s two customers. Paz, I’m retraining the dogs with Porcini.
‘Traditionally truffles are sniffed out by female pigs because the truffle smell mimics a sexy pheromone excreted by male pigs.’ Truffle hounds need more training to detect the scent but are easier to restrain from eating the find. What interests me about this is to ask what evolutionary benefit the truffle gets from attracting female pigs to eat it. Is something of the truffle passed in the urine or faeces of the sow which helps fertilise more truffles? If so, pigs ought to be a third feature of the symbiosis between trees and truffles. Also, do the sows who detect and eat the truffles have a more successful relationship with boars? Is it that boars find the sows sexier (another evolutionary benefit)? Or is it that sows think truffles are better than sex?
Carlo, I was at a dinner recently with heston Blumenthal’s scientist Dr Peter Barham. He said that many people can’t even smell the trufle aroma and women can smell it more than men so I’m not sure that the male pigs will be attracted to them. But obviously the more truffly smelling male pigs have a jolly old time. That’s a good point about the fertilisation of the truffles something to look at. But for now I’m rubbing a bit of truffle behind the ear - and keeping away from farms.