The rise of the Southern truffle?

White bianchetto truffles harvested at Burwell Farms

When you think of truffle country, perhaps you envision Europe—France, Spain, Italy. It in the not-so-distant future, though, you may think of the U.S. Southeast. Already, North Carolina is home to the country’s top-producing truffle farm, and its president thinks that the region will benefit as this new crop booms.

Truffles symbolize culinary luxury, and their rich and earthy fragrance is a biological adaptation. Like mushrooms, a truffle is the fruiting body of a fungus, a capsule full of spores; unlike mushrooms, truffles never rise from the ground, at least not of their own volition. To spread those spores, then, the truffle evolved a heady stink. “Every visual disadvantage that truffles face—being entombed in soil, difficult to spot once unearthed, and visually unappealing once spotted—they make up for with smell,” Merlin Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life.¹

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Some of the world’s most desirable truffles are foraged in the wild, typically with dogs carefully trained to seek the stink but not eat the fungus. That’s a romantic-sounding process, but what’s less often advertised is how it’s increasingly a rarity; more and more truffles coming out of Europe are cultivated—and they taste the same, says Jeffrey Coker, the president of North Carolinan’s Burwell Farms. Here in the U.S., though, truffle farming has been, in the words of one truffle journalist, “a 20-year train wreck.” Burwell Farms, which is located in the Piedmont region, seems to be the one business that has cracked the code. Coker is coy about the science that’s helped his farm master truffle raising, but he’s not trying to stake out a monopoly. Indeed, Burwell Farms sells truffle-inoculated pine saplings, in the hopes that more landowners will start producing more truffles, building up a more robust market. As things stand now, he says, the farm is unable to keep up with demand.

I’ve been fascinated with fungi since reading Entangled Life: here is a kingdom that upends our standard notions of biology. Fungi are closely associated with plants—indeed, there is no known plant that can live without fungi—but are more closely genetically related to animals. Biology, the study of living things, has grown into ecology, the relationship between those things. And the study of fungi has revealed whole new kinds of relationships.

Indeed, relationships are part of why the Southeast may become such a hotspot for truffle production. A truffle farmer must grow not just truffles, but also the trees that host them. And the white bianchetto truffle² that Burwell Farms is growing thrives on pine trees, loblolly pines in particular, which grow profusely across the Southeast.³ For most of the year, the truffle exists as a network of mycelia that intertwines with the tree roots, living in partnership: the fungus supplies nutrients to the tree, which in turn grants the fungus sugars. Part of the process at Burwell Farms is making the trees just stressed enough to need that partnership; too happy a tree can survive on its own, stifling the fungal growth.

That means there’s the potential that truffle farming can make growing trees on otherwise marginal land not just possible but profitable. The inoculated pine trees are growing faster than trees grown for timber, Coker says, though it would be foolhardy to harvest them: the truffles are worth far more than the wood. And Coker notes that don’t apply fertilizer, which would be counterproductive. Burwell Farms, I note, is located on former tobacco and cotton land; while for security reasons the truffle orchards are heavily fenced, somewhat undercutting their usefulness as a forest, still this means a substantial increase in biodiversity.⁴

At the end of of our conversation, as in all interviews, I asked Coker if there was anything else he wanted to add. He noted that European truffles are steeped in tradition: The truffles are hunted with certain dog breeds. They’re dug up with specific tools. There are strict expectations about how the truffle is served. “Traditions are cool, but they're really limiting,” he says, which is why he’s excited that so many of his American customers are, like Burwell Farms itself, experimentalists: By bringing a new crop to an old place, there’s the chance to develop whole new culinary traditions.

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🍄 Further into fungi: I can’t recommend Entangled Life highly enough. I first learned of Burwell Farms through this great piece in Ambrook Research. Turns out that my friends at Gastropod have covered the farm, too, as has Rowan Jacobsen in Smithsonian. (Jacobsen also has a book about truffles.)

If you’re committed to foraging truffles, you may want to check out another piece by Jacobsen in Outside magazine. He considers Tuber canaliculatum, the Appalachian truffle, the world’s potential “next culinary star.” As the name implies, the species grows in, among other regions, Appalachia, at least as far as Maryland. “Seek out flat or low-lying areas,” Jacobsen notes. “Gravel roads. High pH.”

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Recommended reading

Is Aramark ruining our national parks? Since their beginnings more than 150 years ago, national parks have been bound up with corporate hospitality—a democratic experiment to allow the public access to nature but also a scheme to make wealthy men rich. Bloomberg has an excellent deep dive into the problems of one concessionaire at Yellowstone. (I don’t know much about the concessionaires at our big Southern parks, Everglades and Great Smoky, but if you’ve got any hot tips I’m open.)

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The Great River coverage

The latest coverage on The Great River includes two separate episodes of Memphis’s WYPL Book Talk and my appearance with Rooted Magazine’s book club.

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Southern roundup

🌀 Debby came ashore twice in the South last week, first as a hurricane and then as a storm, bringing floating cocaine and threats of flooded pig waste (New York Times). ☢️ Galveston’s waters are tainted with vibrio (Houston Chronicle). 🐊 It seems there’s a constant battle over Southern swamps. This month, E&E News turns its eye toward the ongoing tensions in the Atchafalaya. In Mississippi, meanwhile, public comment on the contentious Yazoo Pumps is open until August 27 (Vicksburg Post). 🛢 In Arkansas, where there’s an emerging boom in lithium extraction, some landowners think that the proposed land lease rates are too low (Arkansas Times). 🏟 Can the Olympics come to the South? Quietly, Charlotte is hoping so. 🐟 Chesapeake Bay osprey are struggling, perhaps for lack of forage fish (Bay Journal). 🚴🏾 Tennessee debuts new cycling trails that emphasize its rural communities (Tennesseean).

1. This strategy targets various species, so don’t expect every truffle to smell delightful. Sheldrake notes that one North American species stinks of “sewer gas” or “baby diarrhea”—odors apparently delightful to canine seekers, but not so much to human chefs.

2. I have not tasted the truffles, but the journalist Rowan Jacobsen notes that “if the black winter is the Rolls-Royce of truffles, all silky luxury, and the white is the Lamborghini, a sexy rush, the bianchetto is more like the BMW—it doesn’t deliver the erotic crescendo of the white, but it still possesses most of the pheromonal zip at a much lower price.”

3. Coker also suggested that early truffle cultivation focused on California, introducing European species into relatively familiar-feeling ecosystems. That seems like a beneficial thing, but Coker thinks that because the California ecosystems were so similar to European habitat the European truffles were outcompeted by native species. On Burwell Farms, he intentionally shifts the soil acidity—shifting the competitive balance. “Now I can give my truffle a shot,” Coker says. (Not that other fungi are wiped up, he adds, “but it's just tilting the competitive balance, just enough that our truffle can make a living.)

4. Coker told me that white bianchetto truffles should be able to thrive on varied species of pine; he has not tested longleaf pines specifically, but I can’t help but envision a re-wilded longleaf forest on public lands, where foragers could collect introduced truffles. Of course, the economic incentives of establishing such a forest are nil.