A commercial crop of European white asparagus has sprouted for the first time in Australia on a small family farm near Brighton in southern Tasmania.
And top chefs from Sydney restaurants have shown an interest in putting the vegetable on the menus at their high-end establishments.
Richard Weston first tasted white asparagus on an agricultural study tour of the Netherlands in 2012.
The distinctly sweeter, earthy flavour compelled him to bring the European vegetable back home to Australia.
"I wondered why could something be so popular and so in demand in Europe and yet Australians weren't entertaining the thought," Mr Weston said.
"Something that always stuck with me was that in Germany, each man, woman and child roughly consumes 20 kilos of white asparagus — there are 85 million people in Germany."
Trial and error
Mr Weston dabbled with the European variety of white asparagus for about six years before he teamed up with friend and business partner Tom Barham.
"Richard said we had to have a conversation about the soil at my property, and then the adventure of Tasmanian white asparagus was born," Mr Barham said.
"It was the soil structure that we have here, the sandy loam that we're fortunate to have, and the drainage is good.
"The conditions are similar to Europe, where they grow."
Speedy spring veggie
Typically asparagus is grown in Australia from September to March, with 95 per cent of the crop produced in Victoria.
However, white asparagus has a much shorter harvest period — just four weeks in Tasmania — and it grows at a phenomenal rate.
"The roots can go down to 1.5 metres with a spread of 1.5 metres. We're finding that already," Mr Weston said.
He is harvesting about 200 kilograms of asparagus a day and expects to produce between 8,000kg and 14,000kg in the coming weeks.
Each asparagus spear is dug out by hand, put in an ice slurry, hosed down and cooled in a store room.
"The beautiful thing with asparagus is it's incredibly salt resistant, it's incredibly drought resistant, and it's also very flood resistant," Mr Weston said.
"The other advantage is we don't have a lot of the diseases that they have in Europe, so we're not having that problem.
"Our grades are looking really good."
Chefs taking notice
The pair are thrilled top chefs want to get their hands on the asparagus.
Peter Gilmore, executive chef at Quay Restaurant and Bennelong Sydney, is one of them.
Mr Gilmore recently visited the farm to check in on the harvest and was impressed with the product.
"The big thing for me is you can really taste the soil and the sweet terroir of the land in the asparagus," he said.
"It's about a five-minute boiling or blanching time in salted water and that makes the asparagus really tender and texture-wise, great to eat."
And it is not just Australian chefs eyeing off the vegetable.
Two weeks into the harvest, Mr Weston's crop is already heading off to buyers in Japan, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
So how does it stay white?
The asparagus has to grow more than a third of a metre through the soil on mounded beds, and then a special kind of plastic covers the rows to protect the tip of the spear when it pokes through.
This dark environment prevents it from producing chlorophyll, which is the naturally occurring chemical that turns the vegetable green.
