The Oregon Truffle Festival is North America’s premier event
for truffle appreciation and education. Held every January in the Willamette
Valley, it attracts thousands of culinary travelers, chefs, growers, dog
trainers, scientists and journalists from all over the globe for a series of
dynamic and participatory events.
Dr. Charles Lefevre, internationally renowned Mycologist and
co-founder of The Oregon
Truffle Festival (Jan. 20-29), has worked with growers across North America
since 2000 to plant orchards of oak and hazelnut seedlings inoculated with
truffles through his company, New World
Truffieres. His first customer, Pat Long of Corvallis, Ore., unearthed the
first Perigord truffle (Tuber melanosporum) grown in Oregon in 2013.
Last week, Long’s first harvest of this winter season produced enough truffles
for a commercial sale to James Beard Award-nominated chef Matt Bennett of Sybaris Bistro in Albany, Ore., making
this the first sizable crop of Perigord truffles grown in the Pacific
Northwest. With twelve more weeks of harvests ahead in several Pacific
Northwest orchards, Dr. Lefevre anticipates the upcoming cultivated truffle
season to be the most productive yet.
Because one of the world’s most valuable culinary
ingredients are also highly perishable, truffles quickly lose their prized
aroma. The aim of cultivating truffles is to provide a source closer to the
consumer, so that diners can enjoy truffles at their peak ripeness as they do
in Europe where truffles have been historically abundant. Dr. Lefevre has had
more success in achieving this goal than any other truffle cultivator in North
America, as most of the cultivated truffles on the continent are being produced
by his customers. Oregon’s native foraged truffles, particularly Oregon Black
and Oregon Winter White truffles, are harvested and prepared by chefs in season
each year at the Oregon Truffle Festival in the Willamette Valley. This year,
the Oregon-grown Perigord truffles will be served alongside wild Oregon
truffles for the first time.
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| Truffles |
New World Truffieres is an established pioneer in truffle
cultivation in North America, as Dr. Charles Lefevre developed his own method
for inoculating host tree seedlings with truffle spores while still a graduate
student at Oregon State University in 2000. His trees were also the first to
produce cultivated Burgundy truffles (British Columbia, 2013) and Bianchetto
truffles (Idaho, 2012) in North America and the first to produce cultivated
Pecan truffles in the world. Each year since 2007, Dr. Lefevre has gathered
international truffle industry experts to share information, research and
advances in truffle science at the annual Truffle
Growers Forum at the Oregon Truffle Festival, in addition to promoting the
North American truffle industry and appreciation through the festival’s myriad
seminars, truffle hunts, truffle dog trainings, tastings and dinners featuring
some of the West Coast’s most renowned chefs (see the upcoming lineup here).
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| Truffle Dog Competition |
The Oregon Truffle Festival is also credited with
introducing the use of truffle dogs to the harvest of Oregon truffles by
recruiting dog trainers to develop the specialization, as there were no working
truffle dogs in the U.S. prior to the festival’s first training seminars in
2008. In 2015 the festival held the first Joriad™
North American Truffle Dog Championship, where spectators cheer for teams
of truffle dogs and trainers as they race to search for hidden truffle-scented
targets. Now approaching its third year, the Joriad™
remains a one-of-a-kind event in North America.
Photos courtesy: Oregon Truffle Festival
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