Onthehunt fortruffles

Ballandean growers look forward to harvesting ‘diamonds of the kitchen’ on their family farm

When someone mentions black truffles, Michelin Star restaurants spring to mind along with images of other highend ingredients like saffron, caviar and abalone.

After all, French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called truffles the “diamond of the kitchen”.

But for Barry the bull arab, truffles are merely a means to an end: his favourite meal.

The pig dog turned truffle hunter only gets chicken fillets pan fried in olive oil with salt and pepper as a reward for finding ripe truffles buried in the soil at The Folly Truffles during truffle season.

The truffle farm, known as a truffiere, near Ballandean, has been a long-held dream for Mike and Judy Egerton which their son and daughter-in-law, Ben and Maple, are now helping them achieve.

Black truffles are the aromatic fruiting body of a fungus grown on the roots of trees as a result of the symbiotic relationship between certain species of ectomycorrhizal fungi and the host tree.

While truffles have been grown in Europe for centuries, since the first truffles were harvested here in the late 1990s Australia has unexpectedly emerged as the world’s fourth biggest producer of Perigords, the much sought after truffle commonly known as the French black.

They sell for around $2500/kg due to the time and complexity required to grow them, the relatively small harvest and the need for refrigerated transport to maximise the short shelf life of 10-14 days.

The high price point is balanced out by the tiny amount needed to enjoy their taste, with their strong scent permeating just about every other food stored in the fridge with them.

It’s a far cry from the life Maple Egerton pictured for herself when she met her now husband, Ben, while they were studying music at the Queensland Conservatorium. But she wouldn’t change it for the world.

“We were running cattle at our Deepwater property but came to The Folly in 2011, and in 2016 it was all hands on deck with Mike and Judy and our kids, Felix and Polly, helping us plant our first 450 French Oak trees,” she explains.

“We’ve embraced everything (truffle farming’s) thrown at us because we’re a team and we are really fortunate Mike and Judy have provided financial backing and are out from Toowoomba every weekend mowing and helping with anything which needs to be done.

“Along the way, Ben and I have worked out our strengths and developed our roles based on that.

“He’s good at growing truffles and I focus on marketing and agritourism.

“I work as a music teacher part time so it’s a big juggle between that and the bookwork, to selling truffles to chefs, to running farm tours giving people that whole paddock to plate experience, but so far we’re making it work!”

And education is as much a part of the Egertons’ remit as growing the truffles themselves.

Maple admits she went into the venture unsure if she even liked truffles because the synthetic truffle flavouring she’d tried in the past was far too overpowering for her taste.

“I’m not overly patient so it was a long wait between planting the trees and harvesting our first truffles, but thankfully, I discovered I enjoyed the real thing,” she says.

“It’s been a learning journey working out the best way to use them in cooking ever since.

“We attract people from those who’ve never tasted truffle, to those who’ve had a bad experience with it, through to people who’ve truffle hunted in France and Italy and are surprised to not only have the opportunity here, but to find Australian truffles are as good as any grown overseas.”

Weather dependent, truffle season starts in June with a normal season being eight-to-10 weeks and up to 12 weeks in an outstanding year. Truffles only reach a stable yield 10 to 14 years after the trees are planted, so the Egertons don’t expect their truffiere to hit peak production until 2026.

Ben and Maple planted 1800 trees in 2019 and 2020 on a nearby former tomato and chilli farm that they coown with Mike and Judy and Ben’s other siblings, and they hope this truffiere will produce 450kg a season by 2030.

Meanwhile this season’s prospects are good if the amount of time Ben, Maple, Felix and Polly have spent covering exposed truffles back over with soil in recent months is anything to go by. They’re hoping harvest will be double last year’s, with Maple explaining the truffle tours have been their most reliable income thus far with the unusually wet weather reducing the amount of saleable truffles the past few years. But there is much to be done between now and achieving peak production.

As with any new industry, creating awareness of the product and how to best use it is a time-consuming task.

Maple says the price can put people off using truffles, as they worry about wastage, so it’s about educating both chefs and consumers in how to select the perfect truffle and use it.

She became the first Queensland representative on the Australian Truffle Industry Association in 2021, and she and Ben recently hosted about 20 Queensland truffle growers from 10 truffle farms for an event at The Folly to connect growers and share information.

“I’d seen how the Granite Belt wine growers achieve success through working collaboratively so despite truffles having a reputation as being secretive, we thought the same approach could only help everyone. “We’ve only been successful due to the knowledge and research from Australia and overseas and we want to be transparent about this. Rather than looking for a bigger slice of the pie, we want to make the pie bigger so every truffle grower can share in it and we can cement the success of this burgeoning industry together.”