::: TASTES OF TASMANIA

Culinary black gold

Part II | Cooper then gets on his hands and knees and puts his nose to where Bill was scratching. He raises his head with a face-cracking smile and invites us to smell the soil. And there it is, that unmistakable, haunting, overpowering aroma of fresh truffle.

Cooper dusts away the surface dirt and starts probing and digging with his fingers and pocket knife, carefully exposing the fungi’s black, crusted surface. A little more digging and he exclaims “My God, this is the biggest we’ve ever found”.

And, for me, the excitement of … smelling the only fresh truffles available anywhere in the world at that moment, is indescribable

Now the aroma perfumes the air, clearly smelled from metres away. A little more digging, the truffle moves under Cooper’s fingers and he lovingly lifts it from the ground. Disconcertedly, it breaks in two as he does so. Then we realize it’s not the biggest, but two separate truffles growing cheek to jowl, each about 80g, the size of a small, closed fist. And, for me, the excitement of holding these in your hand, putting them to your nose, inhaling their heady aroma and realizing that they’ll never smell better than they do right now, straight out of the ground, and that we’re holding and smelling the only fresh truffles available anywhere in the world at that moment, is indescribable.

Cooper fills in the hole and brings two of the youngest dogs, still in training, to snuffle and scratch at the spot, the dirt still smelling strongly of truffle. Then Ocki goes mad a few rows over, and another beauty is unearthed. Tim Pak Poy is on the phone again, and relaxes a little when told that yes, he will have truffles for his truffle dinner.

He’s relieved and delighted when later we tell him we’ve found five large truffles plus a few smaller ones, 400g in all, more than enough for his whole menu and they’ll be at his door in the morning, only 24 hours out of the ground.

Cooper and his team pack up, ready to move on to another trufferie down the road. They’ll return here each week now until late August, running the dogs and harvesting more truffles as they come to ripeness. Cooper and Garvey have put 12 years of intensive research into their cultivation...but much of the truffle’s mystery, of its whys and hows, remains, and optimism is still the vital ingredient.

But I couldn’t help feeling, in the cold of a Tuesday morning, that we were holding in our hands the early fruits of an exciting new industry. ¶

PART I | PART II