Meet the entrepreneur who is growing the pricey fungi in South Africa

Truffles: Those rare, wild and pungent fungi that look like fossilised brain and smell like sweat, raspberry and old cheese; that sell for $750 per kilo on a bad day; that are indiscernible until dug from the earth by desperate pigs; that have been worthy of culinary mention since the Book of Kings - those very truffles will soon be snuffled out of the earth at a plantation in Underberg, KwaZulu-Natal.

Three years ago, Donna Hornby became the first truffle farmer in the country. Now, together with Underberg farmer Duncan Little (who is responsible for the truffle tree nursery), her company, Truffles of Africa, sells truffle trees to farmers, miniature truffle trees to romantics and truffle oil to those with caviar tastes and chardonnay budgets.

What made Hornby, a lefty who has worked in the land reform and rural development sector for decades, turn to an elitist product like truffles?

It's a long story, she says, which begins 15 years ago when, in her quest to produce the best and most nourishing vegetables on the family smallholding, she bought two cows "for the manure". The manure was marvellous, says Hornby, but she had no idea how much a cow could eat and, although she loved the lifestyle, it soon became apparent that she was drinking the most expensive milk in the country.

When the cows calved, the family had to move. They chose an 8ha plot in Lions River and Hornby promptly bought a bull, a handful of sheep and a couple of pigs. The cost of feeding became astronomical. "Basically, we were working to feed the animals and I had to find a way to support their lifestyle. I was looking at milk by-products when my husband, Yves, suggested truffles. I thought he meant chocolate - I had never even heard of the fungus. I looked it up, realised you could potentially make a million rand per hectare and thought: 'That's my crop.'"

Hornby made contact with truffle farmers abroad and saw that, by chance, she had hooked in at the very moment that great interest was being shown in South Africa as a potential truffle-producing area. "There are huge areas of this country that have soil and weather conditions that make them viable," she says. She should know. In 2006 she led a European Union-funded study proving that parts of South Africa are suitable for truffle production and that a truffle industry would make a valuable contribution to export agriculture.

Truffle farming offers hope for rural communities, says Hornby. "I was finding the lack of progress in rural development frustrating. Truffles seemed to be an answer: if you plant 20 trees in a household and make sure the goats don't eat them, you only need half a kilogram a year to make R8000."

South Africans have only recently begun to show an interest in truffles. Three years ago, when Hornby said she was cultivating truffles, people would ask how it was possible to grow chocolate. Last year she began to get a flood of phone calls asking where to buy truffles. That's when she began producing truffle oil. It's not her prime business, rather a way of developing consumer consciousness about the product.

Truffle oil, as Hornby discovered after many futile attempts to infuse olive oil with fresh truffle, is typically a chemical compound - an essence - mixed with olive oil. "I was initially shocked that there was nothing natural about it but then I thought, so what? A huge amount of our food is chemical and as long as you don't pretend, it's fine. Few of us will ever be able to afford to eat truffle, so the oil should be mainstream. It's the brown bread version of the French loaf."

Don't use more than a teaspoon in a dish, advises Hornby; treat it like you would any other essence. "I sent some to friends in Johannesburg. The feedback was that it was the most overwhelming substance they had ever eaten and that it repeated on them all night. I discovered they had used a good half of the bottle to fry their eggs."

She uses it mostly in butter (and recommends basting a chicken with truffle butter), in mayonnaise with potatoes, in pasta and with fresh tomatoes. One of her favourite recipes is spaghetti with pecorino cheese, cayenne pepper and truffle oil. "Pull the pasta from the pot, mix a teaspoon of truffle oil with butter, mix it into the pasta, throw in cayenne pepper to taste and grate over a pile of cheese. It's heavenly with a tomato-rich salad - and it's as simple as that."

• Contact Truffles of Africa by phone on 072-538-1707; e-mail donnah@icon.co.za or visit www.trufflesofafrica.co.za