Special Magic Kitchen

For 10-15 years now the domestic truffle industry has been growing in the US. Farmers from North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, California, and Oregon are all venturing into the commercial farming of the expensive and highly-sought-after subterranean fungus.

Since the French learned in the late ’70s how to inoculate trees with spores to produce the famous black Périgord truffle, the industry has been inching forward worldwide. Spain, Australia, and New Zeland were early adapters and are ahead of the US in production, but the domestic truffle market is now finally coming online. In fact in the next few years, there will likely be a significant increase in truffle farms coming into production.

There are two main ‘truffle’ figures that have been gathering most of the attention as of late, and both are inspiring. The first is Frank Garland out of Hillsborough, NC who runs Garland Truffles. After reading about the French inoculation development in the Wall Street Journal in the 1970s, he visited France and embarked on his own process of inoculation, which remains secret under his trademark RFM process. Even the RFM acronym seems to be a secret.

Garland has been inoculating hazelnut (filbert) trees for years, and in 1992 after many years of trial and error, he became the first person to successfully grow French Périgord truffles in the Western Hemisphere. Now he has even found ways to shorten the time from seedling hazelnut tree to black fungal fruit. It used to be 6-10 years, but now he has pushed it down to 3-6 years.

Garland is secretive about his process, and even growers who buy his seedlings have to sign confidentiality agreements. A large part of his business involves inoculating hazelnut seedlings and selling them to potential truffle farmers, and to date he has sold over 150,000 seedlings. At one point 14 out of 15 commercial truffle farms in production in the US were using Garland’s seedlings, and I am sure the next batch of farms in the coming years will no doubt have similar lineage.

Garland has been featured on the Martha Stewart Show and in many publications, and Martha Stewart also did a feature on-location in North Carolina, which you can see below.

But 4.5 hours west on the border of North Carolina in Chuckey, Tennessee there is another major player in the domestic truffle industry. Tom Michaels is a true expert in every sense of the word. He received his Ph.D. studying truffles from Oregon State University which is a truffle hotbed in the US, he inoculates his own trees, owns his own farms, and sells his own truffles online.

As of late, Michaels has been garnering a lot of press, and in August 2009, the James Beard award-winning journalist Alan Richman wrote a great article on ‘Hillbilly Truffles’ in GQ magazine. It’s an entertaining and informative article that I would highly recommend.

Michaels’ company is called Tennessee Truffles, and from the website you can order his Tennessee French Périgord, but he also takes orders for Australian Périgord truffles when his are out of season. That is the nice thing about the globalization of truffles: when the northern hemisphere is out of season, the southern hemisphere is just coming into season.

This video below features Tom Michaels’ truffle operation and is taken from his website.

Tom Michaels – Tennessee Truffle from Derek Morgan on Vimeo.

There seems to be, however, a bit of a rivalry between these two great truffle growers. In Michaels’ video he mentions how his truffles were the first grown in the area, yet 4.5 hours away in 1992, the first commercially grown black French truffle was produced by Garland. And in a Salon article, Garland talked suspiciously of “the other guy” [Michaels] and even, according to the article, sent a cease-and-desist letter to him.

It is strange that a truffle revolution is happening in the US so close together, yet the two are working so separately. I guess this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Garland focuses on seedlings and spreading truffle farms, and Michaels just happens to be one of the most successful and knowledgeable producers in the country. He just may be a better force for getting truffles into restaurants and popularizing them. In fact an Italian restaurant I go to in central Minnesota will be featuring his truffles in December. I guess they each have their role in popularizing truffles in the US, and that is a good thing for us all.

Note: I will feature truffles in another post soon and will give online resources, recipes, and more information about this amazing fungus.