The truffles are coming

A new crop of American dreamers are betting the farm on truffles, which Europeans have savored like sex for ages. But can the Yanks get the mysterious mushrooms to grow?

By Peter Alsop

Read more: Europe, North Carolina, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

Feb. 16, 2008 | Last spring, I stood in an orchard in eastern Tennessee with a man who cupped in his hands one of the earth's great treasures. It was black and coarse, about the size of a baby's fist, and covered in mud. The man, a farmer and scientist named Tom Michaels, lifted it to his nose, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He was kneeling before a hazelnut tree, among dozens of rows of hazelnuts and oaks, and his hands were wet from digging. The sun had fallen beyond the mountains and the hillside offered a quintessential Tennessee view -- bright red dirt roads, a fine mist in the valley, tobacco barns, blue hills in the distance. When Michaels opened his eyes, he was smiling. "Isn't it funny?" he said, glancing down at the lump in his grasp. "Everyone's after this thing and here it is and it looks just like a turd."

The "thing," in this case, was a French black truffle, "the black diamond," a mushroom revered in the circles of high cuisine. Dark and damp and sheathed in what look like tiny warts, it seemed an unlikely object of desire. Yet its scent, among the most powerful of any food, has long inspired a peculiar, almost irrational devotion. It is a paradoxical smell -- light and heavy, redolent of both flowers and decay -- that contains a hint of something neither nose nor tongue can at first name but which is, in the end, quietly evocative of nothing so much as sex. A sliver of truffle can transform a simple serving of pasta into something mysterious and carnal -- a meal for which, as chefs know, you might be willing to empty your wallet. As one woman told me, "If I had a piece of truffle in my mouth, I'd probably say yes to anything." Or as the Roman scholar Pliny put it nearly 2,000 years ago, "Better to suffer a wheat famine than a shortage of truffles." Such exuberance accounts for the odd fact that the mushroom in Michaels' hand -- at $800 a pound -- was worth more than the watch on his wrist.

Michaels slipped the truffle into a handkerchief in his pocket and together we ambled along between the orchard rows, the remnants of last year's leaves crunching underfoot. Beneath us, buried in the rich red soil, were untold numbers of black diamonds. Last January, six years after Michaels had planted this orchard, they had begun to appear -- a few of them surfacing like gems. Their emergence on this Tennessee hillside was a peculiar thing; until recently such truffles were only to be found in the chalky soils of the Mediterranean. But stranger still, if you consider the history of truffles, is that they could be coaxed into growing at all -- that they could, in fact, be farmed. For if the record of our encounters with food is one of ceaseless subjection -- we bend to our will the plants we like, we yoke the animals we favor -- truffles have long offered a stubborn exception. For most of recorded history, they've remained elusive, appearing suddenly in one place one year and then not again the next, a fickleness that led the Greek historian Plutarch to guess that they were the deposits of thunderbolts.

In the red clay of Tom Michaels' orchard was evidence of the taming of one of the last truly wild foods. And while Michaels is an American pioneer, a Johnny Appleseed of mushrooms, there are others like him -- a handful of people who've managed, against odds, to produce truffles on American soil. In doing so, they have stolen a cultural cornerstone of Europe -- a culinary birthright of the French and Italians, who worship the truffle like no other food. And the ranks of American truffle producers will soon swell. By some estimates there are now several hundred truffle orchards across the States (the numbers multiply yearly), with trees planted, awaiting their virgin crop. If the gods deign it, many of those truffles could begin to appear this winter, in places as far-flung from Europe as King, N.C., and Templeton, Calif., and Eugene, Ore.

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The town of Chuckey sits in the northeast corner of Tennessee, amid the dark valleys of the Smokies, and Tom Michaels lives just outside of the town center, beyond a boarded-up bank and an abandoned hardware store, in a one-story house set on a hill. When I arrived, he greeted me at his doorway, grinning. Nearing 60, with a gray mustache and gray beetling eyebrows, he had the build of a younger man -- thick forearms, a broad chest and a wide-set stance. Cats swirled about his legs. "I'm not a dog person," he said, eyeing them. "In terms of truffles, that might be a strategic blunder." Dogs, trained to detect the underground scent of ripe truffles, are fixtures on truffle farms (before dogs, trufflers used pigs), and without a beast of one sort or another, locating the mushrooms is maddeningly difficult. When truffles appeared suddenly on Michaels' property last winter, he paid a man to travel from Oregon with a truffle dog to help him harvest.

Michaels, whose father had been a button mushroom farmer in Illinois, earned a Ph.D. in mycology from Oregon State University, one of the epicenters of mushroom science in the United States. He then went on to run mushroom research and development for Dole Food. Mushrooms have long fascinated him, and truffles have been a decades-long obsession. "I've loved fungi all my life," he told me. "The bug bit me as a kid."

Truffles, of which there are at least 60 species (and perhaps many more; no one knows for sure), are uniquely priggish -- the mushroom equivalent of picky lovers. The black diamond, for instance, will only unite with particular trees (mainly oaks, hazelnuts and filberts) and, like other truffle species, it will only grow under highly specific conditions (extremely alkaline soil, cold winters and warm, wet summers). They refuse planting. You can take an acorn and deposit it in truffle-rich soil and in time, if you're lucky, the tree that grows there might come to host truffles. But if you take a truffle and bury it along the roots of an oak in virgin soil, in all likelihood nothing will come of your efforts. For most of human history truffles remained a foraged food because, without a means to reliably grow them, and so to alter their genes, we couldn't improve their predictability. Unlike wheat or maize, they couldn't be forced into domesticity.

In the early 1970s, the truffle at last relented. Led by mycologist Gerard Chevalier, a team of French scientists discovered a way to inoculate the roots of oak trees with the spores of the black diamond. Their technique, which they kept confidential, was to bathe the roots, under laboratory conditions of sterility, in a fertilized slurry of water and truffle spores. If enough spores took to a seedling's roots, then the seedling could be planted and in 10 or 15 years, under the right growing conditions, a truffle might fruit. Just as easily, it might not. The process was far from foolproof but it allowed, for the first time, a degree of control over the life of a truffle. Where once truffles were to be found only by hunting in the woods, now they could be farmed.

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