Underground Operators
Entrepreneurs are feverishly trying to domesticate Oregon’s wild truffles. Will it work?
Original published in Edible Portland in Winter 2014.
Photo by Sarah Henderson.
Two winters ago, I found myself with 40 people in raincoats, gators, and galoshes pouring out of a tour bus. It was cold and wet — the kind of Oregon weather I associate with the flu. We rushed through a mud pit to reach a grove of second-growth Douglas firs, their trunks spaced evenly beneath the canopy like the columns under a freeway overpass. Once in the woods, everyone darted in different directions and began dropping to their hands and knees to root in the ground like pigs. Then they kept jumping back up to race to the next place.
From the distance, I watched a group of twenty people donned head to toe in yellow rain suits, led by eager dogs, charge up the hill toward us like a search party. “The dogs,” someone to my left muttered anxiously. I stood completely transfixed, watching the commotion unfold.
This was a truffle hunt, orchestrated as part of the Oregon Truffle Festival. Now in its eighth year, the festival attracts gourmands, mycologists, and entrepreneurs from around the world to eat lavish meals and muck around in wet forests — with or without dogs. When I attended two years ago, I spent time with a journalist from Hong Kong on the tourism beat, who mistakenly wore felt Uggs into the wet forest; a retired military couple from North Carolina, who were sinking funds into a truffle orchard, gambling that these trees might grow a cash crop in five to twelve years; and Italian Professor Alessandra Zambonelli, a heavy hitter in the truffle world who has authored 70 articles and three books on the ecology and physiology of truffles.
Right up there with caviar and fois gras, truffles are one of the world’s most potent gourmet pleasures. Incredibly, one of the most expensive foods in the world is something we don’t even eat; truffles are used solely for their powerful, complex aroma, which people describe as orgasmic.
Like fine wine, each truffle has its own characteristic notes, all layered on top of musk and gasoline. The most famous truffles look like clods of dirt (French black Périgords, Tuber melanosporum, $800 per pound) or knobby roasting potatoes (Italian white d’Albas, Tuber magnatum, $1,500 per pound). Like all gourmet things, the snake oil salesmen have found a way to ape the real thing, in this case in the form of synthetic truffle oil manufactured in a laboratory. But the true connoisseurs only go for the fungus, whether taken from the wild or cultivated in an orchard.
Over a long weekend, the Oregon Truffle Festival sets different groups — from dog trainers to culinary tourists to entrepreneurs exploring the risky business of planting a truffle orchard — on distinct tracks, feeding them hourly doses of truffle delicacies and letting the potent aromas work everyone into a heady frenzy that ends with a grand banquet.
As the festival gets underway this January, there’s a new buzz in truffleland. After many years of unfruitful orchards, three Oregon truffle tree growers have harvested their first — albeit small — crop. That raises the possibility that the wildest essence of Northwest forests could be raised like pears and harvested at huge financial windfall — if this burgeoning industry proves reliably productive.
Charles LeFevre (pronounced le-fever) is the passionate, curly haired and goateed co-organizer of the truffle festival with his wife, Leslie Scott. His dedication to truffles is expansive. A mycologist by training, LeFevre runs New World Truffieres, a business in which he inoculates hazelnut and oak trees with ten different truffle species — five European and five native North American — essentially infiltrating the trees’ roots with truffle “roots” known as mycelia. He sells his trees in units of 50 or more for $20 to $22 per tree (most trees are sold in batches of 1,000 or more). Alongside lay truffle lovers, the festival also draws his previous and potential investors.
Two years ago, none of the 100-plus people who’d planted LeFevre’s truffle trees in Oregon had harvested a crop, although some had planted their trees ten years before. For all intents and purposes, the trees’ roots were still married to truffle mycelia, but they had yet to bear fruit.
But as of this year, three Oregon growers are producing small crops — too small for market, but large enough to hold promise for things to come. I spoke with Aaron Kennel — the only one willing to go on record — who harvested his first truffle this spring after nine years. “I never did give up hope,” he recollects. “I understood that there are a lot of orchards that take that long to begin producing, for whatever reason.” (He used his first truffle to train his dog.)
There are hundreds of truffle plot owners still waiting to reap their fortune, with potential gold nuggets gestating in the ground — they hope.
LeFevre is selling an intoxicating dream that has the potential to be highly lucrative. There is historic precedence in Europe and the Antipodes, which have cultivated truffle industries. But unlike buying into a franchise with years of sales records, truffle trees are still an enigma. It’s a gamble that depends on your willingness to actively care for your orchard and to hone your truffle hunting skills or train a truffle dog. (Historically, people used pigs, but that’s become less and less common because pigs are known to eat the truffles, destroy too much of the mycelia, and sometimes bite off people’s fingers.) Further outside your control are diseases, pests, weather, soil ecology, and countless other factors that remain shrouded in mystery.
Truffles are wild by nature. Most of the common foods we eat today were once wild, often in a form very different from what we’d recognize in the grocery store. Truffle tree inoculators like LeFevre are involved in a process of local domestication that we rarely see in our contemporary world, and with a very strange subject: tree-dependent fungi. In order for truffles to grow, they need every mechanism of an intricate ecosystem, of which we understand only a small portion. Inoculating a tree to grow truffles is an act of taming something wild.
Dan Luoma, a professor at Oregon State University who has the demeanor of a British inspector, is trying to unravel the role of native wild truffles in forest ecology in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon is a plentiful breeding ground for truffles, home to more than 350 species in 55 genera (or families).
Truffles fruit underground (hypogeously) and live in symbiotic interdependence with the roots of trees, which classifies them as mycorrhizal fungi. The tubers store water and minerals that they provide to the trees, and the trees in turn give the truffles sugar to feed on. One mycologist put it really plainly: If we didn’t have mycorrhizal fungi, we wouldn’t have trees here.
“The forest food web is interconnected,” Luoma explains, “and the breadth of diverse ecological interactions is one way to measure forest health.”
The truffles as we know them are at the sexual phase of their lifecycle, also known as the sporocarp (which sounds like what it is: a sack of spores). As they ripen underground, over six to nine months, their odor intensifies, acting like a musky cologne to attract small mammals. These animals dig them up, eat them, and spread their spores through their feces. Luoma points to flying squirrels, for whom truffles are the majority of their diets. Whenever they defecate, these flying squirrels spread their food source, while creating better soil conditions for the trees.
As we speak, people are harvesting wild native truffles in forestland along riverbanks that creates shade and habitat for salmon. They are harvesting truffles in forestland permanently set aside for carbon credits. Luoma believes there’s enormous potential for truffles to incentivize local forest landowners to adopt better forest management regimes with less clear cutting and more diverse plant species. “It should be of broad interest. What we don’t know is why the harvest is good in some areas and not in others. What’s the difference?” says Luoma. “We want to gather a network of research sites for the potential economic value to [forest] landowners.” He’s seeking more funding to continue this research.
Given the complexity of the ecosystem dynamics at play, it makes sense that the world of truffle inoculators is fraught with accusations and counter accusations of deceptiveness. One of the most prominent truffle growers in the United States — Garland Truffles in North Carolina, headed by Bill Garland who dubs himself the Truffle Czar — proudly claims: “We are the only supplier of truffle producing trees in the New World…. Our competition has only managed to produce one truffle in twice that time.”
It’s a jab that references a lawsuit Garland has been entangled in for years against another North Carolina truffle tree producer who he claims stole his inoculation techniques. (Kim Severson, writing for the New York Times in 2011, noted that neither is selling very productive trees.)
Back in Oregon, Dan Wheeler, another truffle expert and one-time president of the North American Truffling Society (who has a truffle named for him, Tuber Wheeleri), claims to have inoculated the first native truffles in a Douglas fir stand. He’s unconvinced that using European cultivation techniques and varieties will ever produce a sizable harvest in Oregon. His bets for success are on trees inoculated with native varieties.
“The problem with introducing non-native truffle species to Oregon is that we have a completely different soil pH than most of Europe,” says Wheeler. “There are a lot of people who think they don’t have to do anything except take the checks they get from truffles to the bank.”
“I don’t expect there to be a glut in the market in the next 20 to 30 years,” says truffle grower Kennel. “There’s always going to be a certain number [of growers] who aren’t really dedicated to managing the orchard, which is unfortunate because it skews the numbers around viability…. Most [serious growers] are waiting until there’s some verifiable numbers on production globally. And the thing about most farmers is that they don’t like taking risks.”
Meanwhile, like a flying squirrel broadcasting spores, LeFevre is distributing his truffle trees far and wide. He’s helped Cascade Pacific RC&D — the local arm of a national nonprofit authorized by Congress to create community-based conservation projects — plant a truffle orchard on Bonneville Power Utility farmland along the river. “I’m in conversation with Napa County,” LeFevre adds, “about riparian restoration projects in which you plant truffle trees.” His inoculated hazelnut and oak trees could provide a river buffer while holding the potential for supplementary income for landowners.
“When it is mature, it has aromas of chocolate, pineapple, and coconut: So imagine a Mounds bar that’s gotten too close to a morel mushroom.”
By LeFevre’s own estimates, “cultivated and native truffles produced in Oregon could annually exceed $200 million in direct sales income; counting secondary economic benefits, the value of the industry could exceed $1.5 billion.” These trees would be a long-term investment that stores wealth underground, in the soil itself.
And if Oregon-grown truffles do flood the market, is our food culture ready to welcome these fragrant tubers? Wheeler gets a dreamy note in his voice while reminiscing about his favorite variety, the Oregon black truffle (Leucangium carthusianum, $320 per pound), which is harvested from late December through March. “That is one good truffle. When it is mature, it has aromas of chocolate, pineapple, and coconut: So imagine a Mounds bar that’s gotten too close to a morel mushroom,” he says. When I tilt my head to the side, trying to imagine that curious marriage, he answers in a way that befits the ethereal topic at hand. “They cannot be described.”
Buried underground, propagated by rodents, harvested by people who historically hoard secrets, often sold on the black market; truffles exist in a world that is full of shadows and intrigue. What we seek from them is also fleeting and unbodied: their haunting aroma. They are one of the most precious and coveted foods in the world. What if the inoculators have already unlocked the keys to cultivation in our soil? They are operating beneath the surface, hidden from our eyes, but their efforts could shape Oregon’s agricultural economy. Maybe we’re about to embrace a thriving new industry. Now, it’s a waiting game.
