Growing truffles is no trifling matter
An East Tennessee horticulturist has succeeded
in growing truffles.
By Molly O'Neill
New York Times
March 7,
2007
CHUCKEY, Tenn. -- The town of Chuckey is located on the
upside of the Nolichucky River valley in an eastern jut of Tennessee about 20
miles from the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the North Carolina border.
The East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad used to stop in the town to pick up
grain and tobacco, but the red brick station, built in 1906, is long since
abandoned. Many of the farms have given way to middle-income housing and the
workers among the town's 800 or so residents tend to punch the clock at the
Wal-Mart Distribution Center or in factories that make gift wrap, automotive
parts or lawnmowers.
Chuckey is not the sort of place one expects to find the holy grail of the
food-loving world. But on the edge of town, perched on a south-facing slope
overlooking the birthplace of Davy Crockett, an orchard of 350 hazelnut trees
has begun to sprout Perigord truffles, the fragrant black fungi that can send
epicures, as well as routing pigs and dogs, into fits of frenzied greed.
Although unexpected, the Tennessee truffles were not unplanned. Tom Michaels,
a 59-year-old plant pathologist, pianist and Scrabble tournament competitor,
sprouted the hazelnut trees from seeds. He inoculated their roots with Tuber
melanosporum, the Perigord truffle, before setting them in his backyard
seven years ago.
He resisted dreams of a truffle bonanza as assiduously as he limed his soil
and trimmed his trees. Michaels had, after all, grown up on a mushroom farm west
of Chicago and had written his thesis on the difficulty of the in-vitro
cultivation and growth of T. melanosporum.
He knew that millions of dollars have been lost since the 1970s in the
attempt to cultivate truffles in the United States. Some of the failures were
spectacular. One multimillion-dollar orchard in Hext, Texas, is now being
managed as a game preserve.
When, on the morning of Jan. 3, he noticed patches of the tawny Tennessee
soil bubbling up like blistered asphalt in his orchard, however, Michaels lost
his circumspection. "I was jumping around yelling 'Eureka!' " he said. And that
was before he saw the size of the bulbs, before he felt them and smelled them
and tasted them, before one of his truffles had found its way into chef Boulud's
kitchen in Manhattan, before the chef had confirmed the grower's suspicion.
"This is it," Boulud said. "The first time in America. This Tennessee truffle
is the real thing."
Only then did Michaels realize that up to 150 pounds of world class truffles
could be ripening in the ground behind his modest three-bedroom ranch, and that
he had neither dog nor pig to sniff them out before they withered and
disappeared.
"Growing truffles is not like growing tomatoes," he said. "You don't just
plant them one day and know that a certain number of days later they will
fruit."
In fact, to grow truffles is to govern an intricate culture of plant and
fungus life, as well as environmental conditions, not all of which are known and
most of which are hidden underground.
Tending a truffle orchard is as much of an art as it is a science and it is,
most of all, an act of faith -- it typically takes six to 12 years for the fungi
to form truffles in the earth. Mystery and scarcity are part of the truffle's
allure.
According to James M. Trappe, a professor emeritus of mycology at Oregon
State University and the co-author of the forthcoming "Trees, Truffles and
Beasts: How Forests Function" (Rutgers University Press), there are about 60
species of true truffles, the subterranean fungi that attach to a plant's roots
and issue long tendrils that gather nutrition for the plant and use the
carbohydrates that the plant returns to eventually form the "fruit" we call
truffles -- but only a dozen are prized in the kitchen.
Most fungi sprout a stem and cap that contain reproductive spores. The
truffle does not. The truffle is a "sack of spores," explained Trappe, and while
other mushrooms need nothing but a rustling wind to loosen and spread their
seed, the subterranean bulb needs to be digested and excreted by an animal. In
order to attract rodents and marsupials, the truffle, like a tiny underground
perfume factory, produces up to 50 different chemicals that combine to create a
scent powerful enough to penetrate up to 3 feet of earth.
"Some smell like cheese, some like garlic, some like fruit, some like sewer
gas," Trappe said. The aroma of T. melanosporum, generally a mixture of
musk and fruit and forest floor, and the earthy, garlicky Tuber magnatum,
or Italian white truffle, are the most prized.
The Burgundy truffle, which thrives in a cooler climate and is currently
being tested by Johann Brunn at the University of Missouri, and the white Oregon
truffle also have a pronounced aroma. The summer truffle and the pecan truffle
from the American South are milder.
Truffles occur naturally, but the most prized ones have been disappearing
since the late 19th century. By all accounts, current Perigord truffle
production is only about 5 percent of what it was back then. Until recently,
they resisted all attempts at controlled cultivation.
French scientists, Trappe said, patented a technique for inoculating the
roots of traditional host trees -- the hazelnut and three different varieties of
oak -- with truffle spores. The result was seedlings that could be planted in
any hospitable soil. In the late 1970s, orchards were planted in northern
California, and in 1980, Franklin Garland, a greenhouse owner from Hillsborough,
N.C., bought some of the French-inoculated trees and planted them outside his
hometown.
Meanwhile, at Oregon State University, Tom Michaels was completing his
doctorate, running field trials of truffle cultivation research. Michaels worked
in mushroom research for six years before starting his own button mushroom farm.
He sold it in 1992 to follow his wife, a physician, to Tennessee, where she had
accepted a position. He had intended to be Mr. Mom, he said, but his plans
changed after he drove across the mountains to North Carolina's Piedmont
district to visit Garland.
"He only had a couple truffles," Michaels said. "He had significant 'brule,'
" -- the circle of burned vegetation around the base of trees that is the
classic signature of the presence of the truffle fungus. "As soon as I saw that,
my truffle light went on."
His doctoral research had demonstrated that truffles prefer warm, dry
summers; cool, wet winters; and alkaline soil like that of eastern Tennessee. He
knew that T. melanosporum's natural enemies are the dozens of other fungi
eager to colonize the roots of hazelnut or oak trees. The limestone soil in his
backyard, he figured, was similar to the soil of the Perigord region, to which
T. melanosporum -- but not necessarily its competitors -- had, over
millennia, adapted. After several years of experimenting with different ground
covers and fertilizers, he put in his first orchard in 2000. By this January,
when his first crop appeared, Michaels had three separate plots of land with
about 2,500 trees in cultivation.
Michaels is the first domestic truffle farmer to produce commercial
quantities of truffles of a quality that commands top dollar ($50 an ounce, $800
a pound). But he is not the only one panning for black gold. There are, said
Charles K. Lefevre, the owner of New World Truffieres in Eugene, Ore., about 300
promising orchards on American soil. "The same sort of people you find growing
grapes in California are starting to plant truffle orchards," said Lefevre,
whose company last year supplied about 13,000 inoculated trees to about 50
hopeful growers.
In Hillsborough, Garland's nursery, Garland Truffles, supplies a similar
quantity of inoculated trees. With a $235,000 grant from the North Carolina
Tobacco Trust Fund, which supports research that may benefit former tobacco
farmers, Garland has also supplied 45 of those farmers with trees. If even a
small number of these orchards succeed, truffles will be more plentiful and
their prices may begin to drop.
But while the science of truffle cultivation has improved, the secret of
coaxing Perigord truffles from the earth remains tucked in an unlikely corner.
"Take a right at the House of Hidden Treasures," Michaels instructs visitors
to Chuckey, "then follow that road past some mobile homes. I'm the last driveway
on the right."
