On The Scent

Vue de Monde chef Shannon Bennett wants to shake up the local truffle game, starting with his own prized patch.

Eight years ago I set out to plant my own truffle patch – a hedged English garden with pristine rows of oak trees separated by rows of rich lawn. That’s the image the local truffle trade sold me on, anyway. Meanwhile, my instincts were screaming that to achieve the success of Mother Nature, it would make more sense to replicate how truffles are produced in the wild.

I was told other things that ran counter to what I thought was common sense – needing herbicides to keep the weeds down for one thing, so that MJ, my Aussie shepherd, could better detect the pheromones truffles give off.

With more questions than answers, I decided to go my own way, banned all sprays on my patch and, lo and behold, I started to find truffles from year three instead of after the seven you’re told you usually have to wait. But as my truffle patch matured, the yield failed to grow. This bothered me. Each season yielded between 10 and 30 kilos of truffles, and for 500 trees that’s not much. At Vue de Monde, my restaurant on Collins Street in Melbourne, we use two kilos a week during the season, and on top of that there’s my other restaurants and the special one-off dinners we create each winter.