Thinking Allowed: The Most Expensive Food in the World

Yesterday we unearthed another of Canberra's hidden secrets: if you drive south for an hour on the Monaro Highway, and at Bredbo (pop. 169) turn left on Jerangle Road then right on Capananna Road, you'll eventually come across a trufferie. An enterprising Australian couple has planted $40,000 worth of French ilex and chestnut trees, and infected them all with tuber melanosporum (the Périgord black truffle bacterium). Turns out a morning of hunting and sampling truffles is a morning well spent.

This was our first Truffle Encounter, and it wasn't quite what we expected. Jakob had images of trailing a snuffling pig named Marcel as it rooted through a dark misty forest - instead, we followed a yapping poodle named Fahren around a barren, windy field with bare trees evenly planted in six rows. The field is really very barren - poor soil is ideal for truffles, since the trees depend on truffles to extract the scarce nutrients, and return the favour by supplying carbohydrates (symbiosis for the win!) At first, the soil was too harsh, but fifty tonnes of lime got the pH just right, and Richard's tender mulching has yielded healthy young trees.

We kept low hopes of actually finding any of these famously rare fungi, but we needn't have worried; Fahren is a poodle prodigy. Within a minute of delicately sniffing the air currents, she was pawing at the base of a chestnut (truffles always grow underground) and looking meaningfully at Barbara. Tamar volunteered in a flash, and was soon nose-to-mulch, carefully excavating the truffle with a soft brush and a trowel the size of a teaspoon. Barbara hovered anxiously, since any damage to the truffle halves its value. Soon Tamar had painstakingly exposed a small brown turd, smelling like a beetroot wrapped in an old sock, and worth $3000 per kilo. Everyone oohed and aahed, except Fahren who was busy wolfing down her bounty of shredded chicken.

We ended up with half a dozen black pebbly treasures, richly veined on the inside with white gleba (excellent Scrabble word). As Barbara rinsed them, a warm nutty scent filled the room. We got a crash course in Making the Most Out Of One's Truffle: first, toss it in a large jar with a dozen raw eggs for two days; next, stick it in a kilo of rice overnight; as an encore, plop it into a litre of heavy cream. Ta-dah! You've infused your food with magical scent, and are all set to make risotto and ice cream. The truffle itself has lost none of its potency, and can now be grated into your pasta or whatever.

Every dark bulb we held under our noses smelled better than the last one. The girls were given a too-small summer truffle to play with, so Tova of course ate the whole thing. It's impossible to feel more bourgeois than when your two-year-old has truffle on her chin and is grinning "me like it!"

PS the Great Pig-vs.-Dog Debate is really fascinating. Hogs have a natural advantage since truffles just happen to secrete androstenol, which as you know is the sex pheromone in boar saliva. But boars are none too gentle, and Italy banned their use in 1985 because of the high damage rate. Now trained truffle dogs, ranging from poodles to Himalayan sheepdogs, are in great demand.