We booked a truffle hunt experience at Ganymede Truffles (near Goulburn in the Southern Tablelands) for last Saturday. The hunts take place only during harvest time in late winter, so sometimes you need a bit of luck with the weather... which clearly, we got.

You go out with the owners and their truffle dog, you learn all the ins and outs of truffle farming, and you get a meal at the end of it.

That sentence wildly understates the experience.

First, the countryside is beautiful, especially if you're lucky enough to get the sort of weather we did.

Next, you get an appreciation of why farmed truffles cost as much as they do. The process of finding them and getting them is manually intensive and can't be automated. Once the truffle dog has sniffed one out, a human must get down on their knees with a butter knife to scrape at the soil and smell the dirt to confirm the truffle's presence and, if there is one there and it is harvestable, dig it out. Also, no matter how well you farm the truffles, some will have been spoilt by nature so not every one harvested will be usable. And that doesn't count the mowing and snipping and cultivating that's needed between seasons.

The black truffles come from spores attached to the roots of oak and hazelnut trees in a symbiotic relationship. The farm has about a thousand such trees on the property, though not all yield truffles and not all at the same time. White truffles haven't been successfully grown outside the Alba region in Piemonte, Italia, but some "semi-white" versions have been.

When I say, "you get a meal", it would be more accurate to say that your tastebuds are blasted into gastronomic paradise for an hour. Start with locally sourced olives, some of the tastiest I've ever had, along with sourdough bread and extra virgin olive oil. Next up artichoke soup with Chantilly cream and truffle. This is followed by a grazing board of locally sourced cold meats, breadsticks, truffle honey, truffle infused cheese and a truffle burrata. The main course was pumpkin lasagne with truffle infused bechamel sauce and a walnut and pear salad.

For dessert it was a Basque cheesecake (made with eggs that were infused for a couple of days with truffles) and panna cotta, made with cream which was, again, truffle infused, and shaved truffle over the top. Before coming here one may think that the combination of sweet food and truffles would not work. You are disabused of that notion rapidly.

At some point I'll probably put up a gallery of some shots of the day since it's impossible to capture all aspects of it in a single shot, though there's just one problem. I had the 8mm Fisheye attached to the front of my camera for "on the road" shots, intending to swap it with my standard 12-40 walk around for the farm. But I reached into my bag, and... the 12-40 wasn't there. I assumed that I had left it at home and was cursing myself. The Fisheye is a fine lens, but not really suited to this sort of outing.

I cursed far more when I found out that the 12-40 had rolled out of the camera bag and was sitting on the back seat of the car the whole time.