Articles

Trends piece: Consider the truffle

By Jeanne Calitz, 8 December 2025

Truffles are hot news, not only a fresh ingredient, but as a luxurious, decadent flavour used for all manner of snacks and sauces. And lately, this sought-after ingredient is being grown on our own shores

Consider the truffle: it’s elusive, a bit odd-looking, quite fragile, and rather expensive. Yet not for nothing is this fascinating fungus, also known as “black gold”, one of the trending ingredients of 2025. It’s popping up on menus in restaurants and in truffle-flavoured snacks in supermarkets everywhere.

“Yes, truffles are a big trend,” affirms Abigail Donnelly, food director of TASTE magazine. “Truffle-flavoured crisps, truffle aïoli, truffle salt to garnish, truffle butter … Locally I’ve seen truffle café au lait sauce – The Pot Luck Club always has one on the menu and I tasted one at Protegé in Stellenbosch not too long ago. I had truffle oil on vanilla ice cream and panettone recently in Italy, which was amazing.”

The rise of the truffle in South Africa

The truffle’s not as ubiquitous on our shores, since it’s predominantly grown in Europe. The European winter truffle is highly sought after and sells for crazy prices: the price of fresh truffles in France over the last four weeks has averaged between US$1 380 and US$1 475 per kg. (This translates to an average of R24 267 per kg or R2 426 per 100 g.)

And yet, in recent times, the truffle has started popping up in South Africa, too. There’s the wild Kalahari truffle, which is indigenous to SA and a relative of the European truffle. And then there’s the so-called winter truffle (tuber melanosporum), which is produced by Woodford Truffles in Cape Town and Willowdale Truffles in the southern Drakensberg, the latter under the helm of farmer and owner Max Bastard.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Willowdale Truffles (@willowdale_truffles)

“We’ve been at this process for 15 years,” explains Max. “We were one of the original farms in South Africa to go out on a limb and try this, and it’s been a steep learning curve.” One of the things that make the truffle so elusive – and expensive – is the fact that the production is so complicated. “It’s a very complex crop,” Max says.

At Willowdale, they had to start from scratch. First, they had to get the soil right. Then, saplings were produced in a nursery environment to grow the trees with which the fungus eventually forms a symbiotic relationship. Willowdale uses oak trees. “The saplings are inoculated with the fungus, and only when they’re two years old are they transferred to the orchard. And then you wait for them to start producing, which takes another 8 to 10 years!” This, then, is the reason for the truffle’s high price. That, and the fact that truffles grow below ground – you can’t forage for them as you would with any old mushroom. Max has a pack of well-trained dogs that sniff out the locations of ripe truffles, with each truffle being harvested by hand.

What does a truffle taste like?

When asked to describe the aroma or flavour of a truffle, Max is loath to narrow it down. “It’s such a delicate and complex aroma, it’s incredibly difficult to pinpoint. It’s not like garlic, where you put it in a dish, and bang, it’s there. The aroma varies considerably – it doesn’t only come from the truffle, but also the bacterial community in the soil that surrounds the truffle. I can’t describe it in any way but to say it smells like truffle, there’s nothing else like it,” he laughs. (The words most often used to describe the winter truffle, however, are earthy, nutty and woodsy.)

Truffle cream pasta recipe

How to use truffles in cooking

When it comes to the kitchen, Max believes truffles partner best with dairy. “The lactic acid in the dairy breaks down the spore and helps to release the flavour.” He stresses that it’s a very delicate product: “It doesn’t like being overcooked or overheated.” His advice would be to add it towards the end of the process – for example when you’re making a sauce or a pasta. “Add the truffle right at the end and allow it to warm up slowly.”

You’d think that the truffle, with its earthy character and hints of umami, would only gel with savoury dishes, but Max is emphatic that it works surprisingly well in sweet dishes. Once again, he recommends that you bring some dairy to the table. “It works really well with vanilla. I like to grate the truffle into cream and leave it in the fridge for 24 hours to infuse. The cream really absorbs all those flavours. And then you use that to make ice cream.”

If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on a proper truffle, Max has some guidelines.

“Truffles are all about freshness,” he says. “We harvest to order. The orders come in, we harvest over the weekend, pack on Mondays and by early Tuesday morning the truffles are at the airport. If they’re headed for Cape Town, they’ll be there within a few hours, if they’re going to London, they’ll touch down within 20 hours.” The key is to use them as soon as possible after harvesting. Max says that correctly harvested truffles can be stored in the fridge for up to 10 days – but they start losing much of that unique truffle character.

And how to detect whether it’s ripe? “It comes down to the colour. It should have a deep, purple-black interior with clearly defined white veins that run through it, and of course, a decent aroma.”