A kilo and a half of white truffle was unearthed at Australian Truffle Traders’ Manjimup farm on Tuesday morning, and the family who grew it believe it is the first white truffle ever harvested in Western Australia.
The truffles are bianchetto, scientifically known as Tuber borchii, and they grew from stone pine trees that the Booth family planted only a few years ago. Until now, the bianchetto had been cultivated overseas and in a handful of spots on Australia’s eastern seaboard, never in the west.
“We weren’t expecting this when we went out truffle hunting yesterday morning,” said Gavin Booth, who owns the business with his wife, Mel. “We are thrilled to find a white truffle from trees we planted only a few years ago.”
A gamble that took root
The Booths planted 500 stone pine trees — the Italian conifer Pinus pinea — across two sites in 2022, with no guarantee the bianchetto would ever form in Western Australian conditions. Manjimup and the wider Southern Forests are the Southern Hemisphere’s heartland for the black Périgord truffle, producing roughly 80 per cent of all black truffles grown south of the equator. White was uncharted ground.
Booth is careful about what this find is, and what it isn’t. “I want to be clear that this is the bianchetto, the white truffle you can grow. It is not the Alba white that has never been able to be farmed,” he said. The famed Italian Alba truffle, Tuber magnatum, commands extraordinary prices precisely because every attempt to farm it anywhere in the world has failed. The bianchetto is its more affordable, cultivable cousin, fetching a price similar to that of black truffle — up to $3,000 a kilo at retail.
A different delicacy in the kitchen
Where Manjimup’s black truffle is prized for a heady, earthy, umami aroma, the bianchetto goes somewhere else entirely. “It is all garlic and onion, pungent and savoury with the bianchetto,” Booth said. “It is the kind of aroma that fills a kitchen the moment you walk in the door with one in your pocket.”
The interest was near-instant. Within hours of the Booths posting their find to social media, Booth said he was hearing from chefs as far afield as Sydney and San Francisco. As one of the two largest growers and aggregators of black truffles in the Southern Hemisphere, the business already has the kitchens and distribution networks to move a new product fast. And a cultivable white truffle gives those chefs, retailers, and home cooks something the region has never been able to put in front of them before.
For now, the next step is to take the dogs back into the orchard and see what else is down there. “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,” Booth said. He raised the possibility of a “white truffle hunt” experience guests could book by the end of the season, though his immediate focus is offering the find to the farm’s best customers first.
