The Oregon Truffle Festival starts Friday and features some of Oregon’s most esteemed chefs, well known mycologists and connoisseurs within the specialized industry.
However, if you are thinking Godiva, think again. This festival doesn’t focus on corner store chocolate bon bons, but rather, a rare fungi that develops underground and has been foraged since antiquity. Prices can vary greatly, but these delicacies can run as much as $7,000 a pound, and the expense of the event reflects that.
The Oregon Truffle Festival begins at the Valley River Inn and includes a Truffle Dog Training Seminar, Growers’ Forum and Grand Truffle Dinner.
Tickets for some of the events go for as much as $1,000 a piece, with tickets for the Grand Event Dinner costing $160. All the events are hosted by chefs from Oregon, mycologists and a renowned chef from the south of France.
The high price of truffles is not without justification. If you were to open a jar containing a truffle or, better yet, shave a few slices onto an egg or pasta, the room would immediately become infused with the rich aroma. The uniqueness of the flavor and the fungi’s pungency leads chefs and cooks to use it sparingly.
A less expensive event is happening Sunday. The Oregon Truffle Marketplace costs $15. For a small fee, guests can taste truffles, artisan foods and take in a lecture series on the truffles’ history.
In French, “terroir” translates to “sense of place,” and it’s a concept that rules European
cuisine, as well as the developing cuisine within the state of Oregon. Truffles have been an integral part of Western cuisine for centuries.
In northern Italy, where the white Alba truffle is indigenous, hogs were traditionally used while foraging in the woods to locate the underground fungi. In more modern times, dogs have been trained and used for the same purpose.
Oregon has truffles indigenous to the region. Oregon white and black truffles grow in symbiosis with the Douglas fir tree. They attach onto the roots of the trees to form a mutual biological existence, appearing under the forest floors of the Willamette and the coast range valleys. And while the local varieties are not as pungent in flavor or quite as dense or expensive as European species, Rocky Maselli, a national representative for Slow Food USA and executive chef at Marché restaurant, said they pair amazingly well with Willamette Valley wines.
“If you were in Bordeaux, you would be eating black truffles, confit, and fois gras and drinking Bordeaux wine,” Maselli said. “Next weekend we’ll be dining on some of the best cuisine in the state, using local ingredients and shaving Oregon white and black truffles over everything.”
Maselli said that climate, soil make-up and topography dictate a large part of the flavor of anything that is produced in the region. That flavor is an extension of the place itself, its people and can be pieced together with other flavors from the region with relative ease
and success.
Maselli stressed how much events like these can build and solidify tradition, saying, “For me, the fun part is that we can build that history and that tradition around that ingredient.”
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