TRUFFLES GROW IN THE NC HEARTLAND
A cross-section of a French black Perigordtruffle reveals a marbled countenance with a texture somewhere between a nut and an apple.
Father and son John and Tom Osborne from Wilmington consider the truffle as a long-term investment. INSET: The brulee of barren earth around this filbert tree indicates subterranean fungal activity.
Garland Truffles 3020 Ode Turner Road, Hillsborough 919.732.3041; w w w.garlandtruffles.com
What you’ve experienced is a taste of the French black Perigord truffle, those noble fungi, mystical and rare. They flower in darkness. They flourish in secrecy. They are one of the most valuable commodities in the world, commanding $800 a pound or $100 an ounce on the open market. A good one, uncooked, combines the deep flavor of a nut and the crispness of an apple. But good black winter truffles are like nothing else. like nothing else.
They are rare because for centuries the only place they grew was the Perigord region in the southwest of France, among the roots of oaks in the alkaline, limestone-rich soil.
They are coveted because the metaphysical things they can do to a dish are undeniable.
But here in Franklin Garland’s Hillsborough living room, you can’t escape them. He’s passing out photos of them, casting the image of the French black Perigord truffle onto a projection screen — dark and foreboding, like shrunken heads or giant, vile berries. On his glass-topped coffee table, next to a framed dollar bill that’s been folded to look like a mushroom, sits a pound of good butter laced heavily with the fungus; a dollop smeared on a slice of fine baguette induces an approximation of bliss. And there’s another couple of them over yonder on the kitchen counter, waiting to be diced and folded into a sauce, dropped into an omelet.
Garland’s got French black Perigord truffles coming out of his ears, in a manner of speaking. And if you listen to the pitch long enough, you start to think that you can too — all you’ll need is some land in a sympathetic growing climate, enough agricultural savvy to maintain a crop and a few trees capable of supporting the fungi, which it just so happens Garland can sell you for a reasonable price.
It’s possible, he’ll tell you, because he’s done it — is, in fact, doing it right here in the North Carolina heartland. It took almost 15 years of trial and error, but Franklin Garland has captured magic in the red clay soil.
The truffle is a fungus, like a mushroom, except it grows underground.
There are infinite varieties, and all of them are edible, but not all truffles are created equally. There are white truffles and black truffles, truffles indigenous to North America and Asia, fragrant truffles, mild truffles and truffles that don’t taste like much of anything at all. The Chinese black truffle, for example, is one Garland calls an “imposter” and “a scourge.” The flavor is nonexistent, which is why they go for about $15 an ounce. The French black Perigord truffle, which Garland has successfully cultivated, has gone for about $800 a pound, or $100 an ounce, for about five years now.
All truffles benefit from a symbiotic relationship with trees, more specifically the roots of certain trees that can survive in soil with a high alkaline content and mild — but not too mild — winters.
The way it works in nature is that a truffle is consumed by an animal, which drops the spoor as waste. Some of the spoor eventually makes it down through the soil to the tree roots where it germinates and begins to grow.
The truffle metabolizes minerals from the nutrient-poor soil and feeds it to the tree. The tree in turn supplies a rich store of polysaccharides during the dormant phase of its cycle upon which the fungus feeds.
Humans have been cultivating truffles for about 200 years, but they’ve been prized as a delicacy throughout our history, written about by poets and philosophers, depicted in art and song for centuries. The ancient Greeks believed they were the product of lightning striking the ground, creating this bit of delicious fruit from soil and heat. The Roman Catholic Church thought them evil, black and scary looking, emerging from the earth with their tantalizing funk. French revolutionaries rebelled for, among other reasons, access to what they called the “diamond of the table.”
In the old days they hunted them with pigs — humans and wild boars are the only animals known to ingest them, and pigs have an olfactory sense keen enough to detect them where they grow.
Garland tells the tale in his living room, Power Point images clicking off on the projection screen.
Truffles, he says, are reputed to be an aphrodisiac, sharing a similar scent profile to a pheremone exuded by wild male boars and also to an ingredient in our own saliva.
“We’re so tuned out to our own body odors that we’re not aware of it,” he says.
The flavor is said to awaken something primal in our psyches, he says, something sexual, and its effect lingers long enough that sometimes you can still taste truffles days after eating them. He’s not buying into the legend, though.
“If you take someone out to dinner and you buy them truffles, you better get lucky afterwards,” he says. “A two-karat diamond ring is an aphrodisiac too.”
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Franklin Garland “wines and dines” guests to his truffle orchard with truffle omeletes and asparags with truffled Hollandaise sauce.
Garland’s living room opens into his kitchen, a working foor-preparation laboratory where the world’s finest ingredient is always on the menu. On one counter, a microscope reveals the mycorrhizae stage of fungal development, where the burgeoning truffle looks, Garland says, like a little corn dog.
Atop a butcher-block island at the center of this room sits a few Perigord truffles diced down into a pile; Garland whips eggs and pours them into three castiron skillets that go on the stovetop. His wife Betty pops corks on champagne and red wine, pours them out.
Six agritourists gather at the edge of the room: a couple writers, a tagalong and three genuine leads — investors with land, vision and enough disposable income, at least, to spring $300 for a look at this business opportunity.
The math is there: In France they’re getting up to 200 pounds of truffles per orchard acre per year. Here in the mid-Atlantic region of North America — Garland says truffles are currently growing from Georgia to Pennsylvania — acres are producing slightly less, but that in a small Mebane orchard he has already broken the 200 pounds per acre mark.
Garland sells the trees — already inoculated with the fungus and immune from tree rot — for about $20 per, but his proven method for truffle cultivation runs a bit more: $10,000, or free with a 250-tree order.
John and Tom Osborne, a father and son from Wilmington, seriously consider the proposition. They have some family land that was used for cotton back in the 1700s, maybe four acres, and they see potential in the truffle market, though they’re also mulling another proposition, for shellfish.
Garland’s proof is in the omelet, or maybe the truffled hollandaise sauce, or perhaps the truffle ice cream. But even those with taste buds dumb as doorknobs can appreciate Garland’s place in truffle history: He was the first to successfully cultivate French black Perigord truffles in North America.
The story goes way back to 1978, when Garland began experimenting on his Hillsborough land with filbert and oak trees from France. The trees went into the ground during the waning days of the Carter administration, and grew through eight years of Reagan and a few with Bush 41, and still no truffles.
Garland says that the French truffle companies he dealt with were less than forthcoming about the specificities of growing the fungus. He had a major breakthrough around 1990, when he scraped the dirt off truffles from France and analyzed it for mineral content and pH balance. In 1992, he produced the very first commercially grown North American truffle crop for sale on an already booming market.
“We used to sell all our truffles to Emeril [Lagasse],” Garland says. Betty handles the business end, selling product to restaurants and purveyors the world over, as well as to truffle brokers in New York City who Betty says will “take 1,000 pounds a week if we can get them.”
“The market price is still commanded by Europe,” Garland says. “It’s still in its infancy here.”
The omeletes get filled with truffles, cheese and cream, get quartered and plated with bunches of asparagus, graced with the truffled hollandaise. Amid much clinking of china and cutlery, plates empty at the lunch table and the guests sit back and take in the fungal buzz while Garland recounts the joys of the truffle hunt.
He doesn’t use pigs because, he says, dogs do the job just fine. Train them with fresh truffles, he says, which have a more potent smell, and use the word “truffles” a lot. After the dog gets the smell, put one inside a paper sack and hide it in the orchard. When the dog finds it, he says, “reward him with something he only gets when he finds truffles.”
Garland says Labs do a good job, and he used a standard poodle for years.
When his dogs got too old for the hunt he trained a neighbor’s dog, a beagle
named Peedee, to sniff truffles out. The hunts for winter truffles begin some time in December, he says, and it’s the most exciting part of the venture.
He recalls the thrill of pulling an eight-ounce truffle from the ground. “It’s like finding a piece of gold out there.”
After polishing off a round of truffle ice cream popsicles with gusto, the crew piles into cars and heads west to Mebane, where under Garland’s tutelage gentleman farmer Charles Bradley is gradually transforming his field into a truffle orchard.
Truffle dogs scamper amongst the oaks and filberts as Bradley and Garland squat by the trunks of trees and study the soil.
Garland points out the brulee, the ring of barren earth that surrounds each tree, evidence of subterranean activity a couple inches down. Truffles leach all nutrients from the soil, to the detriment of anything else that tries to take hold.
The Roman Catholic Church used the brulee as evidence that truffles were the fruit of the devil, but to Garland it is the one tangible clue in what is otherwise an act of faith.
After taming the French black Perigord truffle, Garland has set his sites on even more elusive game: the Italian white truffle, which has been cultivated successfully in the Italian Piedmont and can go for as high as $200 an ounce.
In European restaurants, he says, waiters will grate some over your dinner for 10 Euro a pass.
He’s thinking they’ll grow on olive trees, so he’s got some in his greenhouse getting ready for spring.
“I’m giving it a shot,” he says. He points out promising truffle grounds to Bradley as the two walk the grounds; Peedee noses at the tree trunks and occasionally crunches a filbert.
Like Garland, Bradley lets the tiny, succulent acorn-like nuts fall to the ground.
“You get 80 cents a pound for them, 800 for the truffles,” Garland explains.
“They fall to the ground.”
Once a year, he says, he and Betty will gather a bushel or so and make Christmas gifts of them.
“The filberts I give away,” Garland says. “The truffles I keep.”
TRUFFLED WHITE BEANS
Ingredients:
= 2/3 pound shelled cannellini beans = salt = 3 ounces black truffles, scrubbed =1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil =1/2 pound pancetta =pepper
Directions:
Cook the beans for five minutes in a pot of boiling water. Drain. Cover with cold water, add salt, return to gentle boil and cook until nearly tender, about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, grate 2/3 of the truffles. Drain the beans, reserving half of the cooking water. Add the olive oil, grated truffles, pancetta and pepper. Cook 10 minutes or until tender. Slice the remaining truffles with a truffle slicer. Serve the beans hot, garnished with the truffle slices. Serves four.
AT FIRST, THE TASTE IS SUBTLE, WOODSY AND NUT-LIKE. WORK IT IN YOUR MOUTH A BIT AND THE FLAVOR BLOOMS, RIPENS LIKE A PERFECT PLUM OR A FINE EAR OF CORN. YOU FEEL IT IN YOUR SINUS CAVITY — STILL SUBTLE, MORE OF AN ESSENCE THEN A FLAVOR — AND DEEP IN YOUR MEDULLA OBLONGATA AT THE BASE OF YOUR BRAIN. THE TASTE EFFUSES INTO SOMETHING TRANSCENDENT, A FEELING OF WELL BEING, AN AFTERGLOW. AND IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE INGESTING THEM YOU MIGHT JUST LOOK AT YOUR HOST AND SAY, “WHAT THE HELL WAS IN THOSE EGGS?”
