On an ordinary morning in Manjimup, the ground handed Gavin Booth something nobody in Western Australia has held before.
This week, Booth’s family business, Australian Truffle Traders, pulled 1.5 kilograms of white truffles from the soil of their Southern Forests farm. They are bianchetto, Tuber borchii, and as far as the Booths can tell, the first white truffles ever harvested in the state.
It is worth pausing on how unlikely that sentence is. Until now, the bianchetto has grown only overseas and in a few pockets of Australia’s eastern seaboard. The truffle forms on the roots of stone pine, the Italian conifer Pinus pinea, and it had never once shown itself in Western Australian ground. The Booths planted 500 of those pines across two sites in 2022, knowing full well the white truffle might never come. Three winters on, it has.
“We weren’t expecting this when we went out truffle hunting yesterday morning,” Booth tells me on a call earlier this morning. “We are thrilled to find a white truffle from trees we planted only a few years ago.”
To understand why a kilo and a half of fungus is worth this much fuss, it helps to start somewhere else entirely. A few years ago, on the seventh floor of the Four Seasons Tokyo at Marunouchi, I sat down to dinner at Sézanne.
The printed menu there is not quite what you expect. When it arrives, there are no dishes listed. What chef Daniel Calvert presented instead was a list of twelve ingredients, each one sitting beside the precise Japanese region where it was grown, caught or raised. Eleven of them did, anyway. It is one of the most confident moves in fine dining: trust the provenance, and the provenance will tell you everything you need to know about the meal ahead.
Photo Credit: Sarah Hewer
We had already spotted Leeuwin Estate Art Series on the wine list before the menu arrived, which produced its own satisfaction. But that was only the warm-up to the surprise that came next.
The twelfth ingredient on that menu was not from Japan. It was Manjimup black truffle.
I am not sure I have felt more unexpectedly proud of Western Australia in any other setting. Not at a gallery opening, not watching someone from Perth accept an award somewhere. There was something about the economy of it. Just Manjimup, listed without ceremony alongside the best ingredients Japan had to offer that season, determined by one of the hottest chefs in the world.
The story behind that listing is remarkable. Western Australia’s truffle industry is barely three decades old, born from a recognition that Manjimup’s cool winters, ancient Karri loam soils and reliable rainfall bore a credible resemblance to the terroir of France’s Dordogne. Australia is now the fourth-largest truffle producer in the world, exporting to more than 60 countries.
The industry’s structural genius is timing. The WA season runs from June to late August, precisely when the European harvest has finished. That counter-seasonal window is now a permanent feature in the procurement calendars of some of the world’s most demanding kitchens. Caprice at the Four Seasons Hong Kong, a three Michelin-starred room, imports Manjimup truffles for its summer menu with deliveries arriving within two days of harvest. Truffle Hill supplies the USA, the UK, Europe and extensively throughout Asia, with their truffles reaching the kitchens of Thomas Keller in the United States, Björn Frantzén in Stockholm and Julien Royer in Singapore. Great Southern Truffles exports to Japan, the Middle East and Thailand.
That is the established order: black truffle from this small corner of the South West, prized in three Michelin-starred rooms across the world. Which is exactly what makes the white one matter.
Manjimup does not need the introduction, but here it is anyway. The town and the wider Southern Forests sub-region are the Southern Hemisphere’s heartland of the black Périgord, Tuber melanosporum, the source of roughly 80 per cent of all black truffles grown below the equator. This is country that already knows what it is famous for. What the Booths have found is a second act on the same soil.
Booth is careful, almost insistent, about what this is and what it is not.
“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 says. “This means a true white truffle can grow here, in Manjimup, on the same country that made our black truffles famous.”
The distinction is the whole story. The bianchetto is the cultivable cousin of the legendary Italian Alba truffle, Tuber magnatum, the white that has humbled every grower who ever tried to farm it and continues to fetch eye-watering sums at auction precisely because it cannot be tamed. The bianchetto, by contrast, can be coaxed into orchard soil. That does not make it cheap. It commands up to $3,000 a kilo at retail, level pegging with the region’s black truffle.
Photo Credit: Vasse Felix WAGFG Truffle Dinner
The two could not smell more different. Where the black Périgord trades in the heady, earthy, umami register that chefs build whole dishes around, the bianchetto arrives with its elbows out.
“It is all garlic and onion, pungent and savoury with the bianchetto,” Booth says. “It is the kind of aroma that fills a kitchen the moment you walk in the door with one in your pocket.”
That nose travels. Within hours of the family posting the find to social media, the messages started.
“I had interest from chefs from Sydney to San Francisco,” Booth says. “I expect there’ll be some demand for these white beauties.”
He is right to expect it. Australian Truffle Traders is one of the two largest growers and aggregators of black truffle in the Southern Hemisphere, which means a home-grown white truffle does something more than make a nice headline. It widens what this corner of the country can put in front of chefs, retailers and home cooks, and it does so without the days-long journey that imported white truffle has to survive before it reaches a plate.
What Sézanne reminded me, sitting in one of the best restaurants in Asia, was that a single ingredient, if it is good enough, can cross an ocean and hold its place on a menu alongside the best a country has to offer. Manjimup black truffles did exactly that, and Western Australia should know it. The bianchetto is the same story told forward: ground that took three decades to prove itself to the world, now proving it can grow something new.
Photo Credit: Sarah Hewer