Truffles quite at home in NZ backyards

Truffles, the high-priced fungi for which gourmets pay big money, appear to have become naturalised in New Zealand.

Smallholders and other farmers have paid thousands of dollars for specially inoculated trees to grow in plantations, or "truffieres".

Some are still waiting, more than a decade later, for their trees to produce the fungi's fruiting bodies among their roots.

But a couple who live 10 minutes out of Invercargill are now digging white truffles out of their garden, says Marlborough restaurant director Michael Jemison.

He said truffles had turned feral in Southland, and there was potential for people to make serious money from the fungi, which sell for up to $1500 a kg. Mr Jemison said that lately he had found 50 truffles growing freely in Southland.

White truffles tend to grow around the roots of deciduous softwood trees such as willow, alder and poplar. Mr Jemison said truffles had also been found growing naturally near Lumsden.

But he emphasised that people who dug up fungi from the roots of trees should not try eating them until they had been identified by an expert, as the wrong type could be poisonous.

The season for truffles was January to mid-March and they would be found just below the surface.

New Zealand's main truffle plantation producing commercial crops is at Gisborne - Oaklands Truffiere, run by Alan Hall and Lynley Evans. They grow mainly the more valuable black perigord truffles.

Mr Jemison said he had cooked with the wild Southland truffles.

Samples had been confirmed as white truffles by Mr Hall.

Dr Ian Hall, who is Mr Hall's brother and a Crop and Food Research scientist, developed the technique to infect hazel and oak seedlings with the truffle fungi and Oaklands Truffiere planted its first 400 trees in 1988, their roots inoculated with spores of black truffles.

The first "fruit" harvested from the root zone in 1993 were black truffles, but in 1995, to the amazement of both men, they discovered white truffles, some the size of peas, others as big as golf balls, beneath oak and hazelnut trees.

One theory is that imported willow or poplar seedlings grown in the area left the white truffle spores in the ground.

Dr Hall has said the best production areas for truffles are likely to be Poverty Bay, Hawkes Bay and North Canterbury.

HortResearch research associate Dion Mundy said that while it was not unheard of, it was highly unlikely that the more expensive truffle variety, the perigord black truffle, would be growing wild at the bottom of people's gardens.

Numerous suspected truffles from the top of the South Island had been sent in to the Marlborough Research Centre for analysis during recent years, but none had yet proved to be the genuine item, Mr Mundy said.

"Some of them [the samples] have come from the correct conditions but they usually turn out to be just another fungi variety."

- NZPA