Gavin and Mel Booth with the rare find from their huge backyard. Source: Instagram/@australiantruffle
An Aussie man has revealed the wild reason he is battling “boxing kangaroos” to protect a lucrative asset hidden beneath his soil.
Gavin Booth, co-owner of Australian Truffle Traders, discovered a rare white truffle colony under a crop of stone pine trees he’d planted during the pandemic – but now faces an unexpected rival for the find.
He told The Courier-Mail that in Europe it’s deer and sheep they have to race to get truffles, in Australia, it’s now “boxing kangaroos” who’ve developed the same taste for it as the world’s best chefs.
“Kangaroos seem to like them – we’ll have to get there before them,” he said. “The dog has shown us there are more in the ground, but they’re not quite ready yet. We don’t expect them to be properly ripe until mid-July.”
Gavin Booth with the truffles that were the size of both palms. Source: Instagram/@australiantruffle
Mr Booth this week dug up 1.5 kilograms of bianchetto white truffles – a rare variety prized for its pungent garlicky aroma and worth $3,000 a kilogram. It is the first time the variety has been found in Western Australia.
The fence, he concedes, may need attention. “If I close the gate it would probably help – the problem with fences is you lock animals in as well as out.”
He is already floating a new name for his discovery. “Maybe I should call them boxing truffles. Very cool, very exciting.”
The truffles themselves turned heads beyond the fenceline too, with Mr Booth confirming enquiries from all over the world. The first lot he found has now been sold, but there’s much more which will be showcased for the first time tonight at a shindig he’s hosting called the Truffle Kerfuffle in Manjimup.
He’s also hoping to get them to “a couple of nice restaurants in Perth and Sydney next.”
The size of the find stopped his Italian contacts cold, he said. “The truffles we got were averaging between 100 and 200 grams – typically in Europe they’re 30 to 50 grams, so they’re really quite large. Some of my Italian friends have hit me up like, ‘Wow, we’d be lucky to get one of those a year.’”
Gavin Booth with the rare truffles that have a garlicky aroma. Source: Instagram/@australiantruffle
Mr Booth has spent 20 years in the truffle business and has hunted the fungus across Oregon, Seattle, Hungary and Iraq. He describes the bianchetto as sitting among truffle royalty.
“The French black truffle and Italian white truffle are the king and queen – the bianchetto, or Cocchi as some call it, is one of the princes. There are 74 different types of truffles – could be more now because I read that book 20 years ago.”
Unlike the black truffle his business is primarily built on, the bianchetto is never cooked, he said – giving this journalist a quick cooking lesson.
“It’s almost like pecorino cheese. You don’t cook with it the way you would a black truffle – if you think of basil and put it on a pizza and cook it, you wonder if there’s basil there. But if you bruise it and add it after cooking, you get the full flavour. Same with this.”
His recommended preparation for pasta: “Cook your pasta, reserve a bit of water, get an egg yolk, whisk it through and grate the truffle on top.”
The discovery is a first for WA – and for Mr Booth personally, one of the highlights of his career. “Truffles are fickle to grow. You cannot rush them and you cannot force them – so to have some white ones finally appear feels like the land is letting us in on a secret,” he said.
The truffles are worth $3,000 a kilo. Source: Instagram/@australiantruffle
Australian Truffle Traders is currently in the middle of its black truffle harvest, which runs June through August.
“Ninety per cent of Australia’s truffle production comes from this one region,” Mr Booth said. “We export to some of the best restaurants in the world – packing up and heading to Charles de Gaulle.”
While Australia – and Manjimup in particular – is widely known as the southern hemisphere’s epicentre of the black Perigord truffle, producing around 80 per cent of all black truffles grown south of the equator, the bianchetto white variety had until now only been grown in a handful of places on the eastern seaboard.
The passion goes beyond truffles. “Look at mushrooms – before it was just button mushrooms in supermarkets, now there’s enoki, oysters, whole variety. I think that’s what we’re trying to achieve with truffles. There’s a whole world of fungus out there that’s really yummy.”
The commercial white truffle harvest is expected from mid-July – if the kangaroos can be kept at bay until then.
Australian Truffle Traders ‘right-hand gal Loz with Mel Booth and their rare find. Source: Instagram/@australiantruffle
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