Rodney Dunn’s Truffle Cookbook symbolises a growing industry
Rodney Dunn spearheads Australia’s rapidly growing international truffle industry. Now he’s done a cookbook.
The first time Rodney Dunn laid eyes on a truffle was when he was a young apprentice working in the Sydney restaurant of legendary Japanese chef Tetsuya Wakuda, in 1997. It was love at first sniff.
“I remember they came in straight from the airport and there was much excitement in the kitchen,” he tells The Australian’s WISH magazine. “It was a shipment of white truffles and the aroma was incredibly pungent. The scent and flavour of truffle is unmistakeable — alluring and intoxicating, and once you have developed a taste for them it’s quite like an addiction.”
Almost 20 years later and Dunn is an expert in the field. He has just produced the nation’s first recipe book specialising in truffles, The Truffle Cookbook (Penguin), is about to judge the country’s first truffle award at the Australian Food Awards and will be speaking on the subject as part of the Truffle Festival in Canberra at the end of this month (the talk is called “Scents and Sensibilities”). The local truffle industry has also gone from strength to strength in the past two decades — Australia is now the fourth biggest producer of black truffles behind France, Spain and Italy.
“It has come a long way in a relatively short period of time,” Dunn says. “Increasing amounts of truffle-inoculated trees [which grow the fungi underground on their roots] have matured and are producing increasing quantities of truffles.
“The best truffles are the freshest, therefore a truffle only days or hours out of the ground locally is going to be the best truffle.”
Dunn has not had an ordinary career in the industry. He started off as a chef but soon decided to pursue a career in the food media. He started cooking for photo shoots, began writing recipes, worked as television food researcher and then was made food editor at Australian Gourmet Traveller magazine.
He blames his next career move — opening a cooking school and farm just outside of Hobart — on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, host of the River Cottage program about chef running a small farm and kitchen garden. “Watching River Cottage lit a desire to grow my own ingredients, a desire that a small apartment in the inner west of Sydney could not satiate,” he says.
The Agrarian Kitchen (“we set about creating a food paradise”) has been going for nine years, has expanded to several hectares and now Dunn and his wife produce everything from apples to quinces, cumquats to goats and guinea fowl. Next is a cafe and a store in the nearby town of New Norfolk.
And in the meantime he is cherishing the short season of truffles and exploring any way he can use them in recipes — his cookbook has a whole chapter on sweet things. “The oddest recipes to most will be in the dessert chapter, but for me it is the most exciting,” Dunn says. “Black truffle manifests itself in desserts in a vanilla/cocoa flavour. I just love the truffle ice-cream rolled in crushed chocolate biscuit, which looks like a freshly unearthed truffle.”