time off

Forget potatoes—there’s something new (yet ancient) growing underfoot in the U.S.

Katrina Wilhelm can’t quite remember what sparked her interest in becoming a truffle farmer. “It was either an article, or some sort of news caption, or a dog show. It occurred to me: What could be better than digging in the dirt with your dog? I’m a gardener, love to garden, love digging in the dirt, and I love my dog. For me, this is bliss.”

Wilhelm has plenty of dirt to dig in these days. This winter, she’ll plant 2,000 inoculated hazelnut trees on her 10-acre farm in Santa Rosa, Calif. She expects her truffière—the French word for truffle orchard—to start producing Black Périgord truffles in three years. The Black Périgord Truffle is named after the Périgord region in France. Until recently, production has been exclusively European.

Though the U.S. is still far from becoming a major truffle producer—it’s the largest consumer of the ugly beauties, but lags far behind in churning them out—Wilhelm isn’t alone in her determination to conquer the Black Périgord truffle biz.

“Right now, I think we’re just at the turning point from the innovators to the early adopters,” says Charles Lefevre, PhD, owner of New World Truffières (truffletree.com) and a partner in the Oregon Truffle Festival. “We’re seeing a change from people who do it purely as a hobby to more people approaching it as a commercial enterprise.”

Though he’s still running the numbers, Lefevre says it looks like the “net return on a truffle orchard is around $30,000 per acre per year, after paying all the costs,” so it doesn’t take a whole lot of room to get into the truffle game.

The most successful grower in the U.S. is the owner of Tennessee Truffle (tennesseetruffle.com). Tom Michaels—another well-known PhD in the American truffle world—produced the first commercial quantities of American-grown Black Périgord truffles in 2007, and he is currently looking for investors to expand his acreage. Lefevre says Michaels’ truffles command a $200 per pound premium because they’re fresh and local.

But are U.S. chefs ready for homegrown truffles? When they imagine domestic production, most tend to think only of the black or white Oregon truffles, but their interest has been piqued. “I think chefs are waiting to see how readily available they’ll be,” says Chris Siverson, executive chef of New York City restaurants Bridgewaters and Twenty Four Fifth. “I think it’s something that’s going to grow over the next couple of years.”
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JENNA SCHNUER is a freelance writer in New York.