The lives of truffles

When Rodney Dunn and his family left Sydney in 2007, in search of the simple life and on a quest for flavour, they landed in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley and established The Agrarian Kitchen. The farm-based cooking school allows Dunn to indulge his passion for food by growing fruit and vegetables, raising pigs, milking goats and keeping honey bees.

It was in Tasmania that Dunn first encountered the Perigord black truffle, sparking a love affair that continues to this day. ‘Since the inception of The Agrarian Kitchen we have celebrated truffle season every winter,’ he writes in the introduction to The Truffle Cookbook. ‘It is an honour and a privilege to delve into this mystical and elusive ingredient, steeped in an aura so overpowering that it dissuades most people from ever tackling it in the kitchen.’

So how much do you know about this most luxurious of delicacies? Straight from The Truffle Cookbook, here’s a snapshot of the surprising lives of these complex nuggets.

The truffle is the fruiting body of a subterranean fungus. Its name comes from the Latin word ‘tuber’, meaning swelling or lump. Although truffles are closely related to mushrooms they have developed a specialised habit: they form relationships with host trees called mycorrhiza, a symbiotic mutually beneficial arrangement. The truffle, which cannot photosynthesise, gets sugars from the tree and in exchange the tree uses the superior system of the truffles’ hyphae (fine fungal filaments) to extract water and nutrients from the soil. The hyphae allow the tree to explore between a hundred and a thousand times the amount of soil possible with its own roots. There is even evidence to suggest that the mycorrhizal network formed underground also acts as a tree telecommunication network, allowing information to be passed between trees… the original trunk call!

Because they form underground truffles are protected from the prevailing weather, be it frost or wind, which prevents them from drying out. The trade off for this is that instead of having their spores carried in the wind, truffles are reliant on animals to dig them up and eat them to carry their spores to different parts of the forest. This is why truffles need a strong pungent odour when ripe. In order to ensure the spores are ingested the truffle has an extra trick up its sleeve: it is only after chewing the truffle that the lipid-based membrane is broken to unlock the flavour.

Unlock truffle more secrets and recipes in Rodney Dunn’s The Truffle Cookbook.