BY DON ROOT
The Oregon Truffle Festival Celebrates Everyone’s Favorite Fungus Three terrific, truffle-filled weekends coming in January
T
HEY’RE STRANGELY NEITHER PLANTS NOR ANIMALS, BUT AS EVERY CHEF KNOWS, FUNGI ARE INDISPENSABLE PARTNERS IN THE KITCHEN. The mushrooms in your spaghetti sauce? Fungi. The yeast in your bread? Fungi. The bleu in your bleu cheese? You guessed it. And in the culinary realm, one fungus stands out, exalted above all others: the truffle. Top European specimens of this flavor-packed delicacy routinely fetch around $4,500 per pound. In January, truffle fans will celebrate the undisputed Dom Perignon of the fungus world at the 11th annual Oregon Truffle Festival, which offers three weekends of events in and outside of Eugene. It’s a veritable “Truffle Summit,” acknowledging our region’s increasingly lofty place in World Truffledom. Some 40 distinguished chefs from the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia will be participating, and a host of guest truffle experts will be on hand. Festival co-founder Dr. Charles Lefevre is a Eugene mycologist and owner of New World Truffieres, Inc., which helps farmers nationwide grow truffles on their land. According to Lefevre, the idea for the festival took root around 2002. “The reputation of Oregon truffles at the time was that of an inferior and inexpensive alternative to European truffles,” he says, “but I question whether anyone had ever really compared them directly. I had French black and Italian white truffles in the refrigerator, and I was also harvesting native Oregon truffles recreationally. When we compared the European and Oregon truffles side by side, the Oregon truffles fared far better than their price and reputation suggested.” Lefevre and former Oregon Country Fair General Manager Leslie Scott inaugurated the Oregon Truffle Festival in 2006, hoping to lift the reputation of Oregon truffles into the global pantheon of culinary delicacies. “If the tenfold increase in prices for top quality Oregon truffles is any indication, I believe we’ve succeeded,” he says. “Today Oregon produces about 5 percent of the world’s truffle supply, and Oregon truffles command prices higher than all but the two most famous European species.” 26
D E C E M B E R
2 0 1 5
|
J A N U A R Y
2 0 1 6
■
L A N E M O N T H L Y . C O M
So just what is a truffle? Richer, earthier-tasting cousins of mushrooms, truffles are the fruit of various fungi (usually in the genus Tuber) that live in a beneficial symbiosis with the roots of certain trees. “They differ from mushrooms only in that they depend on animals eating them to disperse their spores,” explains Lefevre. “Because their spores are not dispersed in the wind, truffles usually don’t bother to emerge from the earth, relying instead on powerful, attractive aromas to guide animals to them.” Ripe truffles (the ones you want) emit a distinct, delicious smell. Our weak human noses can’t pick up the scent emanating from underground, but animals can. European truffle hunters traditionally used pigs to find the buried treasure. But there’s a problem: When the pigs find the truffles, they eat them. (Can you blame them?) “While pigs are still used by a few people to harvest truffles,” says Lefevre, “by far the majority of truffle hunters use trained dogs. Dogs are less likely to eat the truffles, they have more stamina, and they’re easier to get into your car.” Lefevre says dogs have played an instrumental role in the development of Oregon’s truffle industry. “There were no working truffle dogs in the western U.S. when we started the festival, but promoting the use of dogs to harvest truffles was among our principal goals,” he says. “Dogs can only detect a truffle if it is ripe and aromatic, which represents a form of quality screening. They only select the best.” Which brings us to the Oregon Truffle Festival’s first weekend: The Joriad Truffle Dog Championship, Jan. 16–17, tests the olfactory skills of amateur trufflehunting canines from around the country. It begins with preliminary rounds at Lane County Fairgrounds on Saturday, followed by a hunt in the woods on Sunday. The winner is crowned that afternoon at a gala awards ceremony—complete with food and wine pairings—at Willamette Valley Vineyards in Turner. The following weekend, Jan. 22–24, the festival moves north to the NewbergYamhill area, where program highlights include a truffle hunt, an advanced Photo: John Valls