Why haven't American truffles taken root yet? (2024)

Every year, farms around the world successfully grow dozens of tons of truffles, the famously elusive and expensive mushrooms known for their intoxicating aromas. In America, truffle plantations have largely failed for seemingly mysterious reasons, but every few months another article appears suggesting that a new company has uncovered the secret of domestic truffle cultivation. Is the industry really in its infancy, as it seems, or not? A visit to a particular community in southern Oregon, where truffle fanatics have been developing their own American truffle culture since the 1970s, reveals another possibility: American truffles are still in their infancy.

At a private party in Eugene, Oregon earlier this year, the highlight of the evening arrived in the form of take-out pizzas and dozens of crispy white and black mushrooms, the two main colors in which truffles are cataloged. “Make it rain,” said the host, and the pizzas disappeared under the thick layer of freshly shaved native Oregon truffles.

“I really love Oregon truffles,” said one chef. “Think gasoline and pine needles.” Truffles contain an astonishing number of aromas, and the diesel aroma of Oregon white truffles isidentified by scientists; some even describe it as the smell of toluene, the water-insoluble liquid that makes glue a recreational inhalant. The intoxicating scent of musk, honey and something beyond language filled the room.

All around. At 2 a.m., someone lit a joint with Oregon truffles rolling in, and the conversation shifted to the obscurity of a truffle deal, whether meeting a truffle hunter at an after-hours bar or buying truffles from the trunk of a car, along the road. at a fraction of the actual market value. An image began to develop of hermit-like collectors: collectors who only come out of the forests to sell wild mushrooms and truffles from restaurant to restaurant.

The sheer amount of truffles at the party was staggering. Where did they all come from? And why didn't more American chefs use Oregon truffles instead of expensive imported Italian white truffles and French Perigord black truffles? The aroma of the Oregon truffle is different, but just as delicious.

"I heard they found a new type of truffle, the purple truffle," said a local maitre'd. “And have you heard of psychedelic truffles?” The line between reality and fiction began to blur, as is often the case with truffles, one of the most mysterious and least understood organisms on Earth. But the challenge was set. Thrown the meter. Were other parts of the country also as rich in truffles? Or was America somehow an anomaly: a large tract of land that couldn't support the bulbous mushrooms?

A native of Eugene and an avid collector, scientist Charles Lefevre offers a glimpse into Oregon's native truffle economy. Lefevre founded New World Truffieres, an Oregon-based supplier of trees inoculated with truffle spores, and he has a Ph.D. in forest mycology from Oregon State University. In 2001, he and a team of researchers published a study on Oregon's wild truffles that estimated annual yields were somewhere between two and 10 tons—a figure that Lefevre says still stands to this day. is accurate. The largest harvest of farmed truffles from a single orchard in American history was 200 pounds, so the quantities (and possibilities) are significant.

Of the hundreds of recorded species of truffles, about seven are used in cooking, and of these four grow wild in Oregon: the Oregon winter white truffle (Knol oregonense), Oregon spring white truffle (Tuber gibbosum), Oregon black truffle (Karteuser Leucangius), and Oregon brown truffle (Kalapuya brunnea). (As wild truffles are discovered in more and more places on the West Coast, a movement is trying to rename them something like the Western Truffle.) Local mushroom pickers and restaurants realized their value beginning in the 1970s, and Lefevre foraged after truffles. to graduate high school and trade his aromatic harvest for meals in Eugene's restaurants.

When truffles are harvested ripe, their aroma typically peaks and declines within a week, and they taste best the moment they are pulled from the ground. Freshness is therefore a crucial challenge in the distribution of truffles. That sensitivity is part of the reason why chefs and restaurants in the United States haven't embraced Oregon's wild truffles yet. Unlike in Europe, truffle collectors in Oregon traditionally did not use dogs or pigs to find truffles. Instead they used rakes. Unlike dogs, which will only find the ripest truffles, ripping harvests ripe, unripe and often unripe truffles indiscriminately (think of the difference between an unripe and a ripe tomato times ten). After enough under-ripe truffles were sold and shipped across the country, the Oregon truffle got a bad name, a name that persists to this day.

“[French] Perigords and [Italian] Albas are downright the tastiest truffles,” says chef Justin Woodward of Portland's Castagna restaurant. "They also undergo a rigorous selection, cleaning, sorting, grading, pricing and storage process. This is not always the case in many other areas where truffles are produced. Some turn out dirty, rotten and wet." Woodward says the experience has taught him to buy only the "right things."

Lefevre is currently taking steps to reverse this bad reputation – mainly through educational initiatives. He co-founded the Oregon Truffle Festival with his wife Leslie Scott in 2006, and the festival had an almost uncanny knack for obsessively drawing the truffle. This includes truffle dog trainers who invite foragers and hobbyists to bring their dogs to the festival for training.

Lefevra hopes that with enough education about the benefits of using truffle dogs, more combines will adopt the practice. “It's not that raking is wrong,” he says. "It's an outdated method." In dogs, truffle quality will be more stable and Oregon's wild truffle economy will continue to grow. It is also entirely possible that wild truffles would be discovered in more and more places in the United States if trained truffle dogs were adopted: a hunter, with the help of a dog, discovered truffles in the central Pacific parks . The largest cities in the Northwest.

The use of truffle dogs has already helped improve the quality of Oregon truffles: grated truffles can cost as low as $40 per bushel. pound, while dog-found varieties currently sell for $600 and $800 per pound. lb. Another contributor to the price increase is the growing truffle culture created by Lefevre and his team, as it connects casual truffle fans firsthand with American wild truffles.

But with few truffle dog trainers and local truffles to use during training, the process moves at a snail's pace.

That brings us to the second hopein American truffles: farmed truffles, a black eye in American agricultural history. While France has harvested hundreds of tons of cultivated black Perigord truffles since the 19th century—peaking in the late 1800s, when France recorded a harvest of 1,000 tons—American scientists and farmers have recorded almost exclusively failures.

No one knows exactly why truffles are struggling to take root in America, but Lefevre has several suspicions. “North America has a wide variety of environments,” he says. “Each region has a unique set of problems… While competing vegetation is a problem for truffles everywhere, hazelnut blight is caused by a pathogen that kills certain species of hazelnut trees native to the East Coast and Midwest [although it is beginning to spread to the West]. Gophers are a problem throughout the West, and slugs are a problem in Oregon and Washington." But farmers have made some progress since the truffle's introduction in the late 1970s, and this year's domestic truffle harvest is indeed showing strong signs of progress.

To understand what this year's harvest means, it's important to understand the history of American truffle breeding. According to a 1994Wall Street Journalarticle, William Griner's farm in Mendocino County, California, grew America's first cultivated truffle in 1987. Like most truffle growers, Griner has never released exact yield figures, but Lefevre says an insider once described the orchard as overcrowded. This is supported by the fact that a group of European truffle researchers made a trip to the farm in 1996. Griner was perhaps the most successful truffle farmer in American history, Lefevre says, producing consistent crops until his death in 2008. The plantation was simply abandoned, possibly because it was surrounded by the area's famed marijuana farms.

Only one other American truffle farm seems to have been around as long as Griner: Garland Truffles, owned by Franklin and Betty Garland in Hillsborough, North Carolina. The company says it harvested about 50 pounds of cultivated Perigord truffles per year on its farm between 1993 and 2004. “We have the paperwork and invoices to prove it,” says Franklin Garland, who says the truffles have sold for between $300 and $500. per . Eastern filbert blight eventually devastated the orchard, and although Garland has replanted, he says the 2016 winter harvest was only three truffles.

Two other truffle success stories showed that American farmers may have cracked the code, and they both come from Tennessee. Tom Michaels - who, like Lefevre and many truffle experts, received his PhD. at Oregon State University – was credited with growing the largest recorded commercial harvest in U.S. history in the 2008-2009 season: 200 pounds of Perigord truffles. But Michaels says the hazelnut borer attacked his orchard near Chuckey the following year, and the orchard stopped producing much in 2013.

Also in East Tennessee, Tom Leonard was successful in getting huge yields from a small orchard. With just 50 trees he had an annual harvest of up to 30 pounds of Perigord truffles. But unfortunately, his orchard was also decimated by the hazelnut mite, along with most of the East Coast's most promising truffle farms.

They appear to be the four biggest success stories in the history of American truffle farming, with an estimated 20 farms reporting growing at least one truffle. While articles on the internet herald the staggering success of these crops and the birth of an industry, the fact is that most of the success stories have been one and done.

Reinforces the need to create a viable truffle growing industry in the United States: In other countries where truffle cultivation has only recently been introduced, such as Spain, Chile and Australia, crops have been successful. Truffle & Wine Co. in Western Australia harvested its first truffle in 2003 and today has almost 40 kilometers of truffle trees and reliably produces several tons of crops a year worth millions of dollars. With Perigords currently costing $600 to $900 per pound on the global market, the new crop is going gangbusters.

Considering the price tagScientists, farmers and truffle hobbyists, of course, continue to try to grow truffles in the United States. The major players supplying truffles today are Garland Truffles, American Truffle Company, Virginia Truffles, Mycorrhiza Biotech and New World Truffieres, Inc., Lefevre's Oregon-based company. Of these companies, New World Truffieres and Mycorrhiza Biotech are the only ones reporting notable harvests this year. These crops are notable not only because they are among the only success stories of the past decade, but also because they seem to predictably double in size every year. They offer a thread of hope for those in the industry, as well as anyone who wants to eat truffles at their peak.

Perhaps the biggest success story is Pat Long, Lefevre's first customer. He planted his orchard in the early 2000s, and this winter he grew the largest crop of Perigord truffles in Oregon history: a whopping six to nine pounds (this is an approximation; Long won't reveal the actual weight). James Beard Award-nominated chef Matt Bennett bought the entire harvest and served it over two nights at his restaurant, Sybaris Bistro, in Albany, Oregon.

Long's orchard appears to have been predictably a doubling of crop size the past three years. This includes Simon Cartwright, who has been consistently producing Perigord crops in Oregon since 2014. Paul Beckman in Idaho, another New World Truffieres customer, is successfully growing Italian bianchetto truffles (Knoldborchii Vittadini), with a harvest of approximately 300 truffles in the 2016-2017 season, according to Lefevre. And while he wasn't in the U.S., Chris Petres' farm on Vancouver Island, B.C. is reporting substantial harvests that have doubled annually for the past three years. This year he harvested about half a pound of truffles a week for months.

Meanwhile, the Mycorrhiza Biotech company in Gibsonville, NC, had its first successful harvest on founder Nancy Rosborough's family farm. She and her team grafted loblolly pine trees using a patent-pending technique, and she estimates the harvest yielded about four pounds of bianchetto truffles.

Given the history of domestic truffle cultivation, avid eaters and chefs can look at these harvests in two ways. Cynics can say with credulity that these truffle farms are just the latest in a long line of immediate successes. Optimists might say it shows the slow but consistent progress of a new industry.

Lefevre offers a more scientific perspective. “The fact that truffle science is still young does not mean that there is an element of dumb luck or magic in truffle breeding,” he says. "It's more predictable than that. We need professional farmers who take this seriously. The industry will grow at the rate more serious farmers get involved, and when 50 hectares in Australia starts making $5 million a year, the caravan will begin.”

Mattie John Bamanis editor of Eater Portland and a culinary travel writer focusing on the Pacific Northwest and Europe.Vance Clompis an illustrator and cartoonist who lives on a small farm in Oregon.
Editor:Erin DeJesus
Factchecker: Dawn Mobley