White truffle find in Bunyip park

It is not unusual for nature to grab Amanda Allen’s attention when she walks through the Bunyip State Park everyday – but last week something special caught her eye.

Is it a truffle? Is it a large fungi? Amanda didn’t know what she had stumbled across on Tuesday but she was determined to find out.

Amanda was walking along Labertouche Creek Trk at Jindivick, a route she regularly walks as a Jindivick local, when she saw a large creamy, white mass that had a fungi appearance.

But, from her interest in botany, nature and the environment, she knew this was something different. So she spent the next 24 hours researching it.

A botanist confirmed Amanda’s find was white truffle – laccocephalum mylittae, commonly known as “native bread.”

Unlike the high value black and white truffles traditionally grown in France and Italy, Amanda’s find is a native truffle, known for growing with eucalyptus trees.

And unlike its cousins, this truffle known as “native bread” doesn’t have the epicurean or commercial value of black and white truffles.

Truffles are a mushroom that grows underground. They are a fungi but unlike the mushrooms that grow above ground and spread their spores on the wind to propagate, they have evolved to keep the spores inside a protective skin.

An internet search of the native bread truffle revealed it is a “large, edible – though not particularly tasty – fungus that grows in rainforest and eucalypt forests.”

It is a naturally occurring truffle and not harvested commercially.

Amanda was surprised by the size of the truffle, that although broken, the largest piece measured 23 centimetres long, which is much larger than traditional truffles. It weighed about three kilograms.

Amanda contacted a botanist at the Melbourne Royal Botanical Gardens who confirmed its species and provided her with some more background information.

He told her it had been known to grow to the size of a soccer ball and was edible when fresh, although admitting he did not know to the prepare the delicacy.

Amanda said she learned the tuber truffle often spread its spores following a bushfire, with the spores living and growing on the dead wood of trees.

The botanist told Amanda the size of the truffle indicated it had probably been living for decades underground.

He said they were a reasonably common truffle but rare to grow to this size.

Amanda was walking along an area of track that had recently been cleared and restored so she thinks a bulldozer or machinery probably disturbed the truffle, which became her lucky find.

“I love looking at anything to do with nature. I went straight home and looked at all my books.

“We often take photographs of all the fungi we see in the bush,” she said.

So what will Amanda do with the truffle? Not game enough to cook it, she thinks she will dry it out and keep it with her rock collection.