Food + Drink

"Roots to Riches"

By Lucy Burningham

Published in Portland Monthly, October 2007

On a blustery spring day, a short, serious-looking man with a neatly trimmed goatee and frizzy brown hair pauses at the edge of a boggy field just outside Eugene, scrupulously surveying the horizon. Were someone to catch sight of him standing there, dwarfed by the countryside, he'd appear quite out of place, like a big-city boy who'd lost his way at lunchtime. Checking to make sure no one does see him, he shifts his gaze from a field of horses to a pickup truck passing on the road, then—satisfied that he's alone—he stuffs his fists into the pockets of his leather bomber jacket, bends his head toward the ground and presses forward against the bitter wind, his shoes sinking into the marshy soil with every step.

After passing a weathered barn, he stops at a simple wooden outbuilding hidden out of direct sight from the road. The shelter is wholly unremarkable, built as though it were an afterthought. But an exterior that belies the treasure hidden inside is exactly what he wants. For if all goes as planned, the plants that silently thrive within could deplete the bank accounts of Saudi Arabian oil engineers, New York magazine editors and Oregon grass seed farmers who long to possess them. The man shoots one more glance over his shoulder, then disappears through the door.

His name is Charles Lefevre—"Le Fever," he sometimes tells new acquaintances when they attempt to pronounce it as his French ancestors did before they came to America. And the thousands of seedlings that sprout in pots inside his "growing laboratory" are worth enough to Lefevre that he would do anything to protect them, even deny their whereabouts to trusted friends and family.

Beneath the soil filling each pot, Lefevre has inoculated each oak or hazelnut seedling's still young, developing roots with a rare fungus called Tuber melanosporum. Once the trees--which serve as symbiotic hosts to the fungi--are planted in the earth, it is Lefevre's hope that the fungi will spread, creating a subterranean network of filaments that may some day produce the knobby, pungent, aphrodisiacal delicacy known as the Perigord truffle, a much-sought-after culinary gem native to the southwestern Perigord region of France. When ripe, the golf-ball-sized truffles--which the French affectionately call "black diamonds"--excrete an unworldly yet earthy scent and flavor for which chefs and diners the world over are willing to pay up to $1,500 per pound. At the famous three-star French restaurant L'Auberge de L'Ill, for instance, a whole Perigord truffle coated in foie gras, wrapped in pastry, deep-fried and served in a dark sauce made of more black truffles recently went for 125 euros. Today, that's about $170 for an appetizer.

"There's something magical about truffles," Lefevre sometimes tells prospective clients. "After you've been around them, you start to smell them when they're not there. They haunt you, and you don't know if you're having a flashback or if it's real, but you crave them like nothing else. The time will come when you will have a truffle that will change your life."

Captivated by the mystique of the Perigord as well as other varieties, Lefevre has dedicated his professional career to cultivating the precious fungi. His business, New World Truffieres, which sells seedlings inoculated with various types of truffle-producing fungi (from Perigord to Oregon black truffles to the white Italian variety), consists of two employees; an office in Eugene packed with piles of papers, computers, microscopes, nests of wires, phones and a lemon tree (he likes the scent); and two top-secret growing areas.

The site he's visiting today is owned by one of Lefevre's clients, who has already planted a truffle tree farm toward the back of the lot. In exchange for rent, the hopeful truffle farmer granted Lefevre space for his "laboratory," which this month holds 5,000 seedlings recently ordered by a single client, an ambitious Idaho developer with lofty plans to build a winery, boutique hotel and a truffle grove outside of Boise.

New World Truffieres is one of only two companies that sell truffle trees in the United States, and while Lefevre won't reveal how many trees he's sold since he hung his shingle in 2000, he does admit that this year customers ordered a total of 25,000 trees so far--three times the number purchased in all of 2006. His customers pay between $20 and $105 (depending on the truffle fungus and the age of the seedling) for each inoculated oak, hazelnut or other variety of tree, a seemingly miniscule amount, but his most serious customers purchase anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of trees, and that price doesn't include the high cost of establishing a truffle grove. Thus far, however, none of the trees he's inoculated has yielded a single truffle--not the trees planted in Korea, Canada, Texas, Maine or anywhere in between. Yet with little demonstrable evidence that Lefevre can deliver what he's promised, the truffle obsessed continue to call on him, pocketbooks in hand.

"The trees will produce," he tells anyone who asks. "They will."

A 41-year-old Oregon native, Lefevre never thought he'd work with truffles--or people, for that matter. Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, the youngest of eight children, he dreamed of becoming an astronomer, a solitary path inspired by his father, Harlan Lefevre, a physics professor at the University of Oregon. His mother, Ruth, a homemaker with a master's degree in geography and an avid reader, influenced him in other ways, teaching him the value of an inquisitive mind.

When he was 9, Lefevre went to the local drug store with a dollar in his pocket. Instead of gravitating toward the candy aisle, he discovered sleeves of petri dishes for 50 cents each. Drawn by the sense that something magical happened inside them, he bought two. Later, in a tree house, he and a friend carefully placed mushrooms they'd picked in the forest inside the dishes.

"I experienced a moment of letdown when nothing magic happened," Lefevre remembers. "I didn't know the proper incantation. I didn't know the formula." At least, not yet.

As a freshman at Reed College, Lefevre took math and physics courses, but quickly discovered that black holes and mathematical formulas weren't nearly as interesting as spawning fish, rare birds and, most of all, things that grew in the dirt. Lefevre eventually dropped out of Reed and earned a bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of Oregon, where he studied under professor George Carroll, a mycologist on faculty.

During his time at the U of O, Lefevre supplemented his entertainment budget by harvesting wild morels along with the black and white truffles native to Oregon (genetically different species from the Perigord variety; see "Native Diamonds," at right). "I have always been happily and willingly captivated by the mystique of the rare, elusive, enigmatic, ephemeral but valuable mushrooms," he says. "I imagine it's a bit like studying leprechauns. They are fascinating in themselves, but there is also a pot of gold hidden somewhere."

It seemed only natural, then, to pursue a PhD in forest ecology at Oregon State University, where he began studying the matsutake, a mushroom highly valued in Japan that, even more so than the truffle, resists easy cultivation.

As a graduate student, Lefevre traveled to Uppsala, Sweden, in 1998 to give a presentation on the matsutake at an academic conference. Forced to sit at a table of Frenchmen because the American table was full, he unknowingly took his place next to Jean-Marc Olivier and Gerard Chevalier, both of them scientists and leaders of the modern truffle cultivation movement. In the 1970s, Chevalier had developed a highly successful inoculation technique that has inspired all truffle cultivation since--a feat so awe-inspiring to the French, who were used to foraging for the delicacies in the wild, that when strangers encounter Chevalier on the street, they ask for his autograph.

Traveling in France a year later, Lefevre visited Chevalier on a whim and found his avocation. "Even though I had no intention of working with truffles at the time, he let slip one of those little details that told me everything I needed to know, should I ever attempt to inoculate trees with truffles." Upon his return to Oregon, Lefevre began inoculating seedlings with Tuber melanosporum, the Perigord fungus.

Inoculating a tree with truffle fungi can be a financially risky, complex, time-consuming and somewhat unpredictable endeavor. Nonetheless, since the 1970s "truffle farms" or truffieres have cropped up across Europe, and more recently, Australia and New Zealand. Many have succeeded in producing truffles, even if Lefevre and others in the truffle industry like to claim that the secret is hard to come by.