Story and Photos by Barbara Bellinger
The dog snuffles along with his nose adhered to the ground. The overhanging canopy of the large Douglas fir conceals his efforts from a couple walking by on the adjacent road. He slowly crisscrosses the carpet of needles, searching for a particular scent. “He’s got it now,” murmurs the lanky redhead near the tree trunk. At that moment, the one-year-old pup makes a sharp 90-degree turn, springs forward, and begins digging.
“That’s the spot,” says Deb Walker, owner and trainer of Tucker, a Standard Poodle. Tucker has found the second of two truffles that Bob Walker hid earlier in the morning.  Bob and Deb Walker of Roseburg, Oregon train dogs to find mushrooms; not the white button mushroom most commonly seen in grocery stores, but the Oregon truffle–lusted after for its pungent aroma and flavorful character.
The Walkers not only train dogs to find truffles, but they take Tucker out to hunt for Oregon’s black and white truffles for themselves. They are part of a growing society in the United States that aim to capitalize on this $2,000 per pound gourmand treat.
By 2030, truffle growers hope for a flourishing culinary truffle industry. By that time, global demand for Oregon truffles could exceed or equal Oregon’s $200 million wine industry. Truffle aficionados intend to bring profit and create jobs in Oregon by growing and selling truffles to gourmet restaurants and food retail establishments and by promoting tourism through truffle hunting expeditions.
Charles Lefevre, a stout man with a brown mustache and goatee, is the owner of New World Truffieres, a truffle cultivation business. Lefevre has been actively cultivating not only the growth of truffles throughout the United States, but also the revitalization of the reputation of the Oregon truffle.
“Their reputation was in the gutter,” Lefevre says. “Even to this day, major food publications still won’t write about Oregon truffles.”
Gourmet chefs turned up their noses and boycotted Oregon truffles altogether in 1989. Prices plummeted and ceased to respond to supply. Supply exceeded demand, and the harvesting of truffles for the commercial market ceased.
Oregon truffles gained a bad reputation for quality due to poor harvesting techniques. In the past, truffles have been harvested with a rake, which does not distinguish between ripe and immature truffles. In turn, the truffles on the market from Oregon were immature and lacked flavor, substance, and aroma.
Truffles have no aroma until they are ripe and ready to be harvested. The Oregon truffle has four species, two of which are abundant and have two growing seasons: winter (January/February) and spring (May/June).
Outside of those two time frames, according to Lefevre, the truffles have “less flavor than tofu” and are generally worthless. One can also distinguish a ripe truffle by looking at its interior; it’s darker when mature.
The Oregon white truffles look like aged skulls mottled with dark pits, like cream-colored lava rocks or a loofa sponge. The scent of each truffle evokes the earthy undertones of an old forest. The powerful, tingly scent has been described as an aphrodisiac and tantalizes the senses.
Lefevre, and others like him, hopes to cultivate and renew relationships with epicurean chefs by revitalizing the reputation of Oregon truffles. One method they are using is one that has been used in France since the 17^th century: the use of animals to find perfectly ripe truffles. In France they use pigs; in the U.S., dogs trained to hunt truffles have become popular with truffle hunters.
Although Lefevre has experienced resistance from truffle hunters accustomed to using rakes, he is pushing ahead with educating hunters on the value of using dogs. Lefevre has spent the past seven years recruiting dog trainers. Now, an abundance of dogs are being trained and a few are working. When harvested with the rake, Lefevre could buy truffles at $15/lb direct from local harvesters; however, the hunters using dogs are charging $500/lb and chefs are paying the price.
The difference between using a rake or a dog is that the nose knows. Immature truffles have no scent, thus the dog does not “point” to an immature truffle. The dogs are trained to sniff out the pungent aroma that emanates from ripe truffles. Therefore, the hunter harvests only mature truffles and leaves the unripe truffle in the ground for it to reach its maturation point.
However, the rake cannot differentiate by scent and, instead, the harvester rakes up the entire crop; ruining the premature truffles for the sake of a few ripe ones. The raking technique has also led to earlier harvests of truffles due to the competitive nature of the hunt.
Although truffle connoisseurs in the U.S. have begun training and using dogs, the fight still exists to get out there first. The first person to get out into the woods harvests the most truffles, thus, the earlier the hunter the “better” the rewards. However, in most cases, the truffles have not reached maturation because the race to get to the truffles has led to harvesting them out of season.
People have started hunting truffles in the woods as early as Thanksgiving. These “young” truffles are meek, unassuming fungi when compared with the “older” perfectly mature truffles of January and February. According to Lefevre, 90% of truffles harvested at Thanksgiving are thrown away.
“If you pick all of the truffles at one moment, most of them will be green. That is why we need to use dogs. People will realize that being first doesn’t reward them. Some people can do great jobs with rakes–it can be done. However, it is too easy to not do it well,” Lefevre says.
The early hunting season also occurs because restaurateurs are looking to stock up on truffles for the holidays. This demand led to the inevitable decline in popularity and perceived value of the Oregon truffles, as, due to early harvesting, they held no merit to the senses.
Lefevre makes his living on the European truffles. He sells seedlings whose roots he has inoculated with French truffles.One of his clients is Simon and Linnet Cartwright. The Cartwrights live in Cottage Grove, OR and have purchased Oak and Filbert seedlings inoculated with the Black Perigord from Lefevre since 2009.
“We’re not professionals by any stretch of the imagination, but if you’re not serious about it, you might as well just throw the money away. We’re serious hobby farmers,” Simon says.
The Cartwright’s truffiere (truffle farm) has seedlings ranging from one year to three years old. Truffle trees start producing anywhere from between three to ten years, depending on who you talk to.
“You could put five experts in a room and get six opinions and none of them could be valid or all of them could be valid. It’s brilliant. It’s chaos,” Simon says.
During the truffle festival this past January, Simon and Linnet witnessed this firsthand when five experts from the festival visited their farm.
“Four of them were like, ‘Oh, you’re going to get truffle’ and the Spanish guy was walking around saying, ‘There’s no way you’re going to get truffle here,’” Simon says.
By the time their trees start producing truffles, if the truffle growth stays on target, the Cartwrights will have invested more than $65,000 in their truffiere.
“I often joke that we’re going to either have a working truffiere or the world’s most expensive firewood,” Simon says.
Education is a key component of Lefevre’s plan for the truffle industry in Oregon. He and his wife, Leslie, started the Oregon Truffle Fair, held annually in Eugene since 2006. Each year foodies, chefs, and wine and truffle connoisseurs gather to munch on Oregon and European truffles coupled with pinot noirs from the Willamette Valley. The festival has a variety of educational events, dog training excursions, fine dining, and taste tests.
One reason the black and white Oregon truffles have been “reviled was that they were weak…unreliable,” Lefevre says. However, according to Lefevre, the scent of Oregon truffles, “way overpowers its European cousins.”
A method used at the Oregon Truffle Fair to demonstrate the competitiveness in taste and scent of the Oregon truffles to the European truffles is a blind taste test. Since the inception of the Fair, the Oregon truffle has won in four separate tests.
“There’s a race to become the next Napa outside of Europe,” Lefevre says. “It’s Oregon’s to lose. We have native truffles. No one else does.”
 
 
 

Gallery • 3 Photos

The Nose Knows