Mundaring Truffle Festival 30-31 July 2011 (Thoughts on food blogging discussion panel)

In Australia, black truffles successfully grow in Tasmania, Victoria and some parts of New South Wales, but Western Australia produces more black truffles than the rest of Australia combined. In Western Australia, the Manjimup-Pemberton area provides ideal breeding ground for truffles as the region is climatically similar to the parts of France where truffles are grown. With truffle production increasing year after year, there is lots of talk of Western Australia becoming the new truffle capital of the world.

The annual Mundaring Truffle Festival is held at Sculpture Park in Mundaring, Western Australia in the last weekend of July. The Mundaring Truffle Festival is a creation of renowned chef and truffle hunter Alain Fabregues and attracts national and international chefs, and WA’s top chefs and food personalities to offer a variety of learning and dining experiences revolving around truffles. This year some of the special guests included Stephanie Alexander, one of the world’s finest French chefs Philippe Mouchel and Malaysia’s flamboyant Food Ambassador, Chef Wan.

This year was my first time at the Mundaring Truffle Festival. The long table truffle lunches are one of the most popular events at the Mundaring Truffle Festival, where some of WA’s top chefs prepare a four-course meal with truffle themed dishes. The tickets to this event always sell out quickly. On Saturday the long table truffle lunch featured an all-female line up, with Sunday featuring an all-male line up. I had missed out on tickets to the long table truffle lunches but luckily, two weeks before the festival a fellow tweeter was unable to attend the long table truffle lunch on Sunday and offered his spare tickets to me and a fellow blogger Bon Viveur. I had originally planned to go to the Mundaring Truffle Festival on the Saturday as in the afternoon there was discussion panel scheduled on “Food Blogging and the Social Media” hosted by food journalist Max Veenhuyzen and featuring blogger turned editor of Spice magazine Anthony Georgeff, blogger of Abstract Gourmet Matt O’Donohue, restauranteur David Coomer and wine writer Peter Forrestal. As a food blogger, this panel was of great interest to me, especially in the context of recent articles published on food bloggers which have created quite a stir in the twitterverse and blogosphere. Scoring tickets to the long table lunch meant that I ended up spending my whole weekend at the Truffle Festival, making the trip to Mundaring on both the Saturday and Sunday.  But I can’t complain as it gave me an opportunity to fully appreciate everything that the festival had to offer.

Before the festival, my experience of truffle was quite limited. I had tried some truffle butter and truffle oil, and once had a plate of truffle risotto. I brought along my friend Nicola to the festival on Saturday and her experience of truffle was even more limited than mine.

After spending two days consuming a variety of sweet and savoury truffle products and dishes including truffle chicken ice-cream, truffle potato croquettes, truffle macarons, gnocchi and ravioli and mushroom truffle, wild mushroom and truffle pie, truffle risotto, truffled soup, chicken truffle parfait and truffle nutella, I became addicted to truffles. The aroma of truffles is intoxicating and I was completely blown away by how the addition of truffles enhanced and intensified the taste of dishes. They add a dimension of taste to a dish that is hard to describe. I think that my love of truffles also stems from the fact that I love many umami rich foods and truffles contain three different types of umami substances in the form of glutamate, inosinate and guanylate. It was the first time that I have ever felt the need to lick my plate clean to make sure that I had consumed every last bit of truffle because it was too good to go to waste.

There was a Food Piazza where a variety of truffle-themed dishes by some of Western Australia’s noted restaurants and chefs could be purchased for $5 to $20. I generally find the food offered at most food festivals a bit pedestrian, kind of like food court style food. When catering for a large number of people with limited facilities, the quality can suffer. The Mundaring Truffle Festival is different, all the food offered is quality. I guess when you are using such an expensive ingredient (truffles retail at around $3000 a kilo), you don’t want to waste it by making a half-arsed dish, you want to showcase it in all it’s glory and make people understand why it is considered such a gastronomic delight.

The first thing that we tried upon entry to the festival on Saturday was truffle butter hazelnut bread. A thick slice of soft white hazelnut bread with a generous spread of butter that contained bit of truffle and truffle oil was a great way to gently ease our senses into the magic of truffles. 

The truffle chicken ice cream was my favourite dish at the festival offered by Must. When I bumped into people that I knew, this was the dish that I would tell them that they had to try out. The ice cream is made with a chicken stock base and cream, egg yolks, slivers of truffle and dark chocolate shavings. I had read that Russell Blaikie spent three month perfecting the recipe, working to create a rich and creamy ice cream that would work with the earthy flavour of the truffles, with the addition of chicken stock and dark chocolate to round out the taste of the ice cream and provide savoury notes. It was unbelievably good.

The truffle macarons offered by Choux Café were also another highlight. There were a few other stalls selling truffle macarons including Jean Perre Sancho and Rochelle Andonis but I thought that the ones from Choux Café tasted the best. I enjoyed the subtlety of the truffle coming through the macaron and the shell was perfect. 

 

We also really enjoyed the selection of dishes offered by Incontro. We tried the truffled potato croquettes, and gnocchi ravioli and mushroom truffle. 

The exterior of the potato croquette was crisp but very light, and contained a cheesy potato filling infused with truffle flavour. There was also a generous grating of parmesan and truffles.  This was one of my favourite savoury dishes from the Food Piazza at the festival.

Linley Valley Pork and Mondo Butchers offered a great selection of meat and burger truffle themed dishes. 

The Loose Box Restaurant offered a number of truffle dishes including rillets, pate, soup, apple tart, brie for only $5 each!

Keeping warm in the cold wintery weather with some leek and truffle soup from the Loose Box.

The European Foods Marquee provided a great selection of truffle cheeses. 

As we walked around the festival tasting many different truffle products, I was amazed at the variety of truffle products on offer – oil, butter, vinegar, salsa, cheese, mustard and honey. I wondered how many different things you could possibly make with truffle…. what about nutella? Rochelle Andonis offered Truffella which was truffle infused chocolate and hazelnut. 

You can also buy a truffle inoculated tree for $40 and try your luck and growing truffles in your own backyard. Considering that truffles only grow in very specific climatic conditions it seemed a bit of a stretch to think that anyone can grow truffles, but Alain Fabregues has shown that truffles can be grown outside of the traditional truffle growing regions of Manjimup and Pemberton in Western Australia when he found one on his property in Toodyay this year.

We checked out the truffle dog demonstrations where we were shown how dogs are trained to search for truffles. The dogs are trained by infusing a toy (a towel) with the smell of truffles, and series of games and activities are played with the dogs so that they associate looking for truffles with fun and rewards. 

It was funny to see that when the dog found the truffle infused towel it refused to let go. See my video of it here.