It’s a white Oregon truffle and it has never had a good reputation.
But this little nugget is as aromatic as anything I’ve sniffed in Europe.
“Because no one had dogs,” he tells me.
Eric Wolfinger
“Truffle dogs were the key.”
Most truffle species grow on just a handful of tree species.
Squirrels, mice, foxes, pigs and bears all go crazy for the things.
Eric Wolfinger
Humans find them irresistible too.
Some said they had no smell.
Others said they were gross.
Eric Wolfinger
All agreed that they just didn’t have the same magic.
They were the cubic zirconia to the European diamonds.
Could a festival really survive for 14 years if its main ingredient sucked?
And so I ask Lefevre again how these truffles could have developed such a bad reputation.
Black truffles from Europe are widely propagated and go for $800 a pound.
Until recently, however, Oregon truffles fetched only $25 a pound.
Pigs were humanity’s original truffling partners.
Natural enthusiasts, they probably trained Europeans to hunt truffles as much as the Europeans trained them.
But pigs love truffles too much and too powerfully.
It’s difficult to stop a 400-pound porker from eating what it finds.
In the Pacific Northwest, however, there was no truffle-dog culture.
When hunters first began harvesting truffles a few decades ago, they used rakes.
The truffles grow beneath Douglas firs in loose soil near the surface, easy pickings for a determined raker.
And an unripe truffle has all the appeal of a raw potato.
Oregon truffles also have a shorter shelf life than their European counterparts10 days max.
And they need to be cleaned and refrigerated immediately or they will go bad even faster.
At $25 a pound, few rakers bothered to give them the extra love they needed.
And let me just say that a rotten truffle is foulness incarnate.
Lefevre suspected raking is what had put Oregon truffles in the doghouse.
And with that realization, the Oregon Truffle Festival was born.
It would feature rigorous quality control.
It would convince the unconvinced how delicious local truffles can be.
And it would be dog-centric.
“When you use a dog, you get better truffles,” Lefevre says.
“The aesthetics are better, the prices are better and it’s less work.
Besides, working with a dog in the forest is part of the mystique.
There’s just no reason not to use a dog.”
Chefs have noticed, and prices for dog-harvested truffles have risen to several hundred dollars per pound.
If anyone knows what to do with Northwest truffles, I figure, it’s Paley.
“Ooh, excellent,” he says, eyes dancing.
“These are really fresh!”
“I love that yeasty smell when you cut them,” he says.
“It’s like fresh dough.”
As they mature a little more, they develop the delightful funk of farmhouse cheese.
At the last minute, he grabs a microplane and showers everything with marbled truffle shavings.
When we finally sit down to eat, the table is a tapestry of colors, shapes and textures.
But maybe that’s fine.
Let it be an experience that can’t be had anywhere but here.
After all, how often do you get to sniff out a beautiful new cuisine?
This article originally appeared in EatingWell Magazine, April 2020.
