Yes, You Can Grow American Truffles — and They’re Just As Good As Imported Truffles

Truffles are everywhere. That’s what I hear over and over from chefs, foragers, and cultivators across the country. Certainly there’s the ubiquity of imported truffles on the market, luxuries from France or Italy like those lusciously pungent Albas, Perigords, and Burgundies commanding hundreds of dollars per ounce. But outside of the restaurant, both cultivated and native American truffles are just under our noses.

Pecan truffles (Tuber Iyonii) are little brown truffles found in pecan orchards and near the roots of certain species of oak, hazelnut, and hickory trees stretching from central Mexico to southeastern Canada. There are multiple varieties of Oregon truffles, both white and black. Long-nosed dogs are being trained to hunt these precious nuggets all over North America. Chefs like Jeremy Umansky of Larder in Cleveland are even finding truffles in Ohio. Native truffles are popping up on menus in season, late fall into early spring.

“When did you find out there were truffles on the property?” I ask Amanda Humphrey, Maker’s Mark’s Advocacy and Experience manager at Star Hill Farm, the distillery’s estate in Loretto, Kentucky. In 2022, the team sent a Lagotto truffle dog out with its owner. “We were like, we’re not going to find anything out here. This is a joke.” But the dog found native truffles of the pecan variety, which the Maker’s Mark has dubbed the Kentucky Winter White Truffle, though it still lacks a scientific name, “It’s a lot lighter than the Perigord,” Humphrey reports. “You get earthy umami and an Epoisses note.” 

Star Hill Farm concentrates on cultivating indigenous American truffles by inoculating oak and hazelnut trees. These truffles are used in the onsite restaurant and of course, in Maker’s Mark bourbon. Truffles are grated into butter which is then used to fat wash bourbon. Truffles found with blemishes are used as training truffles for their truffle dog, Star, who can find 15 to 20 ounces of truffles within a space of 45 minutes to two hours in season. “They can get scent exhaustion,” Humphrey explains.

“Native truffles are going to explode over here,” she predicts. “This is the first time I’m seeing them get the same market price per gram as a Perigord.”

Almost any dog can be taught to hunt for truffles. I call Alana McGee, the founder of The Truffle Dog Company, which teaches people how to hunt truffles with their dogs. “Even Chihuahuas?” I inquired. 

“I love the littles. They can totally do it,” she laughs. “You’d be surprised.” 

I made a mental note to pitch another article to my editor about training my Chihuahua, Coconut, to hunt for truffles with McGee. [Editor’s note: Approved.] Her company also sells truffles and takes people out to truffle hunt in the Pacific Northwest, “like they do in Italy.” She works with farmers to cultivate European species of truffles and timber companies to keep their forests working and giving family timber farms another stream of income. 

“Truffles are a viable forest item to sell,” she says. “It also turns out that farmers are often getting more tourism dollars from truffles than the raw products themselves.”

McGee has been in the truffle business for 16 years and is on the committee of NATGA (The National American Truffle Growers Association) that determines the grading system for American truffles, which was released late last year. The association is young, and grading is voluntary. They created a rubric so chefs and home consumers can understand what they’re getting, and help determine truffle prices. “I equate it to the California wine industry in the 1930s” McGee says.

How are chefs using American truffles?

“I kind of hate truffles as a concept,” says chef Patrick Alfiero of Philadelphia’s Heavy Metal Sausage Co. “I like them as an industry. I like that it’s supporting foragers but spending $3200 on truffles is so stupid to me. But I like American truffles and Appalachian truffles because they’re from here.” Pecan truffles were his first experience with a local product, but he recalls, “It was underwhelming because I was comparing it to a Burgundy truffle. I think you can’t compare any of this stuff. You have to enjoy it for what it is.”

Amy Brandwein of Washington D.C. restaurant Centrolina uses pecan truffles and cultivated black truffles from Virginia, shaving them on everything from pasta to appetizers, salads, and sauces. Sometimes she’ll get French ones but mostly, she uses local ones, she tells me. Native truffles came into her world only three years ago, brought by a forager who hunts them up and down the east coast. “The first one I had was a pecan truffle. It smelled like a very intense mushroom,” she recalls. “Then my forager brought me black truffles and I was blown away by the quality.” 

Brandwein fell in love with cultivated American truffles. “It’s the same strain as Perigord, different provenance. American truffles have a much longer shelf life. They’ve been picked a few days before you see them. They can be very, very intense.” She encourages consumers to think about the truffles they might be getting from France. 

“When were they found, harvested, vacuum-packed and flown across an ocean?” Brandwein wonders. “How long were they sitting in a warehouse? Whereas the fragrance and quality on the American truffle is unmatched.” In America’s burgeoning truffle industry, few if any make such long journeys. 

At Joon in Vienna, Virginia, chef Chris Morgan has a Persian mushroom stew on the menu called Khoresht Gharch, a braise of chicken, oyster, and cremini mushrooms with garlic, onion, chicken stock, lemon and saffron. Morgan worked with local farmers to source truffles to shave onto the dish. Now that truffle season is over, Joon’s guests will now be shaving Umbrian truffles onto their stew. Morgan isn’t simply adding truffles to upcharge customers, “There are truffles that grow in Iran. This is a dish you’ll see with mild mushrooms growing in northwestern Iran. Truffles growing there, too. Mushroom cultivation has skyrocketed in the last forty years in Iran.” 

In season and in America, Morgan is devoted to the company Virginia Truffles. “There’s been a large movement since 2015 to start cultivating truffles [in Virginia],” he tells me. “But you’ll still find the ones grown in France or Italy pack the most punch. I think because it’s new growth in the US. Europe has a leg up on us. Think about wine, it’s been centuries. Here, it’s a growing art form — not to say we’re not letting nature do most of the work, but there are ways we can improve.” 

How do you make a tree make truffles? And how do you explain how different chefs have different impressions of the same truffles?

I tracked down Olivia Taylor of Virginia Truffles who works as the farm and business manager of the company her parents started as a nursery to sell trees to produce truffles. “In Virginia, the area is pretty similar to the Perigord region of France, but we get a little bit colder. Our soil is a little different, too,” she tells me. 

Over the years, Taylor decided the nursery wasn’t a big moneymaker as it was losing more than it was making, she shifted the business to truffle sales and agrotourism. “I have three dogs trained to hunt truffles. And two that are decorative.” Her primary truffle dog, Nadine, gets loose while we’re chatting on the phone and escapes through a gate, causing momentary panic. 

Once all five dogs have been wrangled, Taylor gives me a scientific history lesson in inoculating trees to create truffles. Her parents started inoculating in 2007 but the company only found their first truffle in 2018. It takes a lot of patience. “The fungus that produces the truffle lives in the roots of the tree. When the trees are really young, you introduce the fungus to their roots, and you hope they develop a symbiotic relationship,” she explains. “You can dip the baby tree roots into a fungus milkshake. Inside each truffle are spores and when you expose the roots to that genetic material, it will germinate. After checking on the growth under a microscope in a year and a half, and then plant the tree, in five to six years, it should produce truffles.”

The truffles have to remain attached to the tree for nourishment, through a threadlike piece of fungus. “Like spiderweb thin,” says Taylor. “If the truffle is underground and got detached for some reason, it would start to go bad.”

Truffles found in different parts of Taylor’s orchard have different flavor characteristics. “The taste of the truffles are determined by the bacteria in the soil. They vary from sections of the orchard. One section of the orchard you’ll get a truffle that smells like whiskey and another you’ll get one that’s like fruit or chocolate,” says Taylor.

What do American truffles taste like, really?

“There’s a lot of variance in the flavor profile of native truffles,” says Jeremy Umansky. When he first tried American truffles, he says, “A friend of a friend said ‘Hey, I got some West Coast truffles. They smell like garlic and pineapples.’ It’s like tasting a mushroom. You can eat a white button, a chanterelle, a morel — they’re all different. They’re fascinating. It’s like growing a mushroom underground like a potato.” 

McGee sends me a black truffle from the Pacific Northwest. It’s the size of my fist and it weighs a staggering six ounces. “Our native black truffles are better infused into things,” he says. “They pair well with seafood or anything with fat or alcohol will absorb it. We infuse native black truffle into avocados.”

“What?” I ask.

“I usually cut an avocado open and put it in the fridge with the truffle. The truffle just shares headspace with whatever you’re trying to infuse.” She also tells me that you can infuse raw eggs in their shells. 

“Truffles lose aroma every day. It’s not like you’re stealing the aroma by infusing. It burns off, the longer you have it. Let the truffle do the work for you. It’s just sitting there giving off aroma. You may as well capture it,” she says.

I take McGee’s advice and pop my truffle into a sealed plastic container with eggs overnight. But the truffle is so luxurious looking, velvety black with a speckled hen brown and white interior, that I have to share it. My husband and I invite two friends over for dinner and we go wild, shaving the truffle over mushroom toast, incorporating it into pasta and butter.

We’re in a race to consume the truffle, since McGee has also cautioned, “The thing with our native wild truffles is that they don’t hold well. Like specialty produce or Rainier cherries. Our native species are pretty fragile.” This is also why they’re so infrequently exported. They aren’t produced or found in a volume that’s worth exporting and the industry isn’t there yet.

Why should you use American truffles?

The first native truffle I ever tried was procured by Vincent Finazzo of Philadelphia’s Riverwards Produce and it was from the Pacific Northwest. “Those were very small, as big as acorns but dark and hard, almost like nutmeg,” he recalls. “I can’t get them anymore. The person I used to get them from doesn’t look for them anymore. That’s fascinating to me. It’s happening more and more in the specialty food world.” 

Finazzo isn’t talking about the dearth of the truffles themselves, but rather the producers who don’t have heirs to their businesses. “This is just how fragile specialty food is.” 

In Washington D.C,’s Oyster Oyster, 2022 Food & Wine Best New Chef Rob Rubba runs a kitchen focused on plants and dedicated to sourcing locally. “We don’t have A5 Wagyu or caviar. And we’d have to import truffles. But then, having truffles available locally through our foragers meant we could add something precious to our menus,” he tells me. 

“At the restaurant we use the term ‘false luxuries.’ Are these things — wagyu, caviar, truffles — luxurious because we’ve been told they are? We’re told they are unique. But every fancy restaurant has them at this point. Everyone can get Petrossian caviar. Everyone can get truffles, and an A5 [waygu steak].” 

Rubba rethought what luxury meant and decided, “It’s those things special to a season. It’s working closely with our farmers and them growing something just for the restaurant, and us getting it at peak season. Each night, for each guest, is its own special luxurious experience, like a live performance.” 

Luxury doesn’t have to be dependent on things that are imported, he says. “Someone on the other side of the world would be like that’s really cool.” 

Rubba tried his first American truffle in early 2020, which was also, you guessed it, a pecan truffle. “We would shave them on pizzas. I wanted to preserve them. They were so unique. They had such character and a peaty aroma. They were smoky and earthy at the same time. It wasn’t white truffle, it wasn’t black truffle.”

There are chefs devoted to sourcing locally who make specific exceptions for European truffles. “The world thinks truffle is all white truffle,” says says chef Randy Rucker from Philadelphia’s River Twice. “If I’m going to veer outside of our designated sourcing area of a 250 to 300 mile radius I’m going to go for the big stuff. If I’m shaving truffles on a guest’s plate for a $60 markup, no matter what the cost is on my end, I feel like the guest wants the Alba.”

Rucker is notorious in Philly for his generous portions of caviar and truffles on his otherwise mid-Atlantic-focused dishes. When it comes to truffles, less pungent varieties incite comments from guests like, “Oh it’s not as aromatic as I’ve had in the past.” Rucker has some tricks up his sleeves for enhancing truffle aromas, like grating them over hot chawanmushi. “Steam helps the aromatic value of the truffle,” he finds.

So what did I do with that six-ounce native black truffle from the Pacific Northwest?

The truffle from McGee emits a strong whiskey aroma when I open its padded envelope. “Do not store them over rice! It dries them out,” warns her accompanying note, along with, “This one was found by my German shepherd, Cowboy.” 

After a night in a sealed container with raw eggs, it’s time to eat the actual truffle. As I lay slices over soft eggs, I smell petrichor and wet forest. Pinching my nose to block some of the fragrance, it tastes like chestnut. I shave it over arugula and squash ravioli. For dessert, I shave it over cheese. It adds texture and an almost indescribable fresh funk to everything. The following day, I soft-scramble the infused raw eggs for breakfast. They taste like I cooked them in truffle oil.