(undergrowth crackling)
- These organisms are magnificent.
(lively music)
They make themselves taste as good as possible
and smell as good as they possibly can.
It's really in their interest
for us to come find and eat them.
- [Narrator] Every year in Oregon,
foragers are pulled into damp forests
by an organism that has a peculiar hold on the human mind.
(dramatic music)
- There's a sexiness to it, I guess.
You don't know why it's something that you want
because it's a really unknown aroma and-
- It's all about pheromones. - Yep.
(dramatic music)
- A lot of people compare the aroma to ozone,
a rare upper atmosphere gas that's formed
when lightning strikes the ground.
- It has the aroma of chocolate, coffee,
tobacco, black currant,
a little bit of earthiness.
But for the most part, it's really fruity.
- They're magical, absolutely magical.
And they're really working on you.
They're really trying to get you to eat that truffle.
(low fading music)
(chuckling) Okay, sit.
Good job, good job.
Good job.
- [Narrator] Meet Dante.
- [Charles] Nice work, Dante.
- [Narrator] And that's Charles,
truffle scientist and cultivation consultant.
He trained Dante since he was a puppy to help find truffles.
- My dogs love truffles.
They eat more truffles than any person that I've ever met.
The thing is there are so many truffles
that they gorge themselves every time we go in the woods.
- [Narrator] There are over 300 species
of truffle in Oregon.
But what are they?
First of all, they're not just a food.
They're a lot of things.
They're the fruit of a fungus, like mushrooms,
but that have evolved to grow underground.
And most importantly, truffles are masters of symbiosis.
- Maybe some people think of fungi
as parasites and pathogens
but a tremendous number of them actually
work in mutualistic, beneficial associations
with their hosts.
In the case of our native Oregon truffles,
they're all associated with Douglas fir trees.
- [Narrator] On the surface,
we see individual trees and plants.
But underground is a complex,
hidden network of collaboration.
And the truffle is right in the middle of the action.
(twinkling music)
The tree uses the sun's energy to create sugars,
some of which pass through its roots
to a vast network of fungal threads.
Those are called mycelia
and those permeate the soil.
In return, the mycelial networks collect
nutrients from the soil, like phosphorous,
to give them to the tree.
The truffle and other fungi facilitate this exchange.
It's kind of like a banking system in a city.
It's a relationship between plants and fungi
that exists all over the world.
But truffles thrive in only a few places,
like Oregon.
All those Douglas firs?
That's prime truffle habitat.
- [Charles] Dante, come!
- [Narrator] But trees are only part of the equation.
A mushroom that grows underground
needs help to spread its spores.
With a lot of challenges to overcome,
the truffles have to be smart about it.
(lively music)
- It's cold, it's wet.
Animals are busy and there really aren't that many
animals around to come eat them.
- [Narrator] The truffles release chemicals
into the air that animals find irresistible.
- They are very compelling (chuckling)
and the animals can detect them
at phenomenally low concentrations that actually
are below the level of conscious detection.
So it can manipulate the behavior of the animal
without the animal even being aware of it.
- [Narrator] See those dark areas?
Those are spores.
And from the truffles' perspective,
they're the point.
As the truffle matures,
the aromas it produces attract animals
to eat, digest,
and distribute its spores.
And there's one animal in particular
that goes to great lengths to help the truffle.
- When the truffle season starts,
I can't wait until the first truffle
walks in through the door of our restaurant.
And to be able to smell it for the first time that year
opens up new possibilities.
All of a sudden you kinda start conjuring up these ideas
and these dishes just start coming to mind.
- Our native Oregon black truffle
is famous for its tropical fruit types of aromas.
As the truffle matures, the aromas change though
and will produce more savory notes.
The Oregon white truffles,
they're almost harder to describe.
The experience of the Oregon white truffles in food,
to me, is electricity.
It adds a zing, a certain magic.
(mystical music)
[Narrator] Chefs around the world love truffles.
And Northwest chefs, well, they love Oregon truffles.
- So when I make the truffle vinegarette,
I roughly chop the truffles and mix them together
with a little bit of salt and a tiny bit of thyme
and some sort of an allium.
That really just amplifies that aroma.
When you dress the salad with it,
it really just like sends waves through this whole salad
of like this truffle.
Fantastic.
Yeah, it's-
I don't have enough words in the vocabulary
to describe the joy.
- [Crystal] The Europeans do.
In the old countries, it's high cuisine.
And truffle fans pay accordingly.
A pound of the Italian white truffles
goes for more than $3,000.
Oregon varieties can fetch up to $800 a pound.
That puts truffles in league
with some of the most expensive foods in the world.
But the true truffle experience,
well it's far more down to earth.
- So omelets, (chuckling) pasta,
those are the classic ways to serve truffles.
- [Narrator] Charles co-founded
the Oregon Truffle Festival in 2006
as a way to celebrate and promote Oregon truffles
among local chefs.
And every year food makers turn these fungi
into new delights.
- We birthed this idea of Cooperativa
to chase the closeness, intimacy, and audience
that we crave over food.
And so for us truffle season was like,
oh this is what we do.
This is how we celebrate ingredients.
We have a perfect little container for that
to host an ideal of-the-moment ingredient.
- We've made it with pasta,
we've made it with the honey
that you can then have with the cheese.
It becomes more accessible for you at home.
Not just, you know, wrapping a beautiful rabbit
with white truffles and some sort of stuffing
that you're gonna have one time.
- Also delicious. (Sarah chuckles)
(lively music)
- [Narrator] And here's an idea,
Oregon white truffles
infused into Oregon hazelnuts,
infused into beer.
(epiphanous music)
Peak Oregon.
(dramatic music)
Or is it peak fungi?
This beer is the product of two fungi
that are masters at getting animals to do their bidding,
truffles and yeast.
- You know, humans by baking and brewing beer
and making food with fermentation and certain yeast strains,
have spread those yeast cultures around the world.
In a way truffles are kind of similar in that way,
the mania for them, the love for them.
So I think it's fascinating that this fungi
that on a molecular level is so compelling to people
that we're gonna carry the story around,
we're gonna wander through forests,
we're gonna try to figure out ways to try to harness it,
celebrate it, capture it, and share it.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Humans domesticated yeast
as well as other organisms thousands of years ago,
but truffles play by their own rules.
- What else do you need me to carry in?
- I think this is it. - That's it?
I'm gonna go grab some roots.
- [Narrator] Truffles have been farmed in Europe,
but here in Oregon, they're still wild.
Charles hopes to change that.
- I actually went to college to study exactly
what I am now doing,
studying mycology at the University of Oregon
with the intention of trying to figure out
how to grow things like chanterelles and porcinis.
And while I was a graduate student,
the person who became my first customer
asked me to inoculate trees
with the French black truffles.
So this tree is very well colonized.
You can find truffle mycorrhizae throughout the root system.
- [Narrator] Farming truffles means creating the conditions
where both the host tree and the fungus can thrive
and encouraging truffle mycorrhiza to take hold.
- Myco means fungus, and rhiza means root.
So it's a symbiotic organ that's part fungus, part root.
Under a microscope, a truffle mycorrhiza
looks kind of like a corndog.
- [Narrator] With Charles' help,
those corndogs went to town on Pat Long's tree roots.
- The results in my first try were not
what I would expect these days,
but it was evidently good enough
because Pat's orchard is now among the most productive
truffle orchards in the country.
It definitely worked.
- [Narrator] Productive French
black truffle orchard, that is.
Oregon truffles have so far proven difficult to cultivate.
- Oh, I would love to cultivate the native species.
I've been working on it for 25 years.
And it's hard.
That first step of inoculating the seedlings can be done,
we can do it, but we can't do it cost effectively.
We have to grow 10 trees for every one
that actually has the truffle mycorrhizae.
- [Narrator] But the opportunity could be huge.
North America is poised to become the largest market
for fresh truffles on the planet,
with Oregon right at the forefront.
- In the sense that say, Wisconsin is identified with cheese
and Idaho with potatoes,
the brand of truffles is sort of Oregon's to lose.
(dramatic music)
- This little lump of earth,
it's more than a mushroom.
- No one element can stand alone.
- [Narrator] The truffle needs the tree,
and the tree needs the truffle.
- [Anna] It's collaboration,
it's cooperation.
It's coming together.
- [Narrator] The truffle also needs the dog,
and the dog needs the human.
- In nature, this is the way everything happens.
Everything feeds something else
or should for it to work properly.
- [Narrator] And if we humans want the truffle,
we need the dog,
and the tree,
and the sun and the rain,
and the vast web of connections that we don't see
but that makes life in the Northwest superabundant.
(lively music)
(undergrowth crackling)