The Rush Is on for Oregon Truffles

Look, I’m not accusing Nicolas Cage or anybody else involved in the movie “Pig” of lying. But after a search around Oregon, I haven’t been able to find a single person who hunts the state’s wild truffles with a hog, as Mr. Cage did in the film.

Pigs will snarf as many truffles as they can, for one thing. They rip up the forest floor like cloven-hoofed bulldozers, which is why it’s been illegal to bring them on truffle hunts in Italy since the 1980s. And when a harvester is on the way to a secret truffle spot, they tend to give the game away.

“You put a 300-pound pig in the back of your Subaru and people know where you’re going,” said Deb Walker, a professional dog trainer, as she instructed about two dozen humans who had come to a farm outside Eugene this month to learn the art of working with canines to sniff out fussy, perishable, mysterious wild truffles. Around 2,000 dogs in the Pacific Northwest have graduated from similar courses over the past 20 years.

While many people are content simply to teach their dogs an exotic new trick, others have taken up truffle hunting as a serious hobby. A few hunters have turned it into a profitable side hustle during high season, which runs from October to May. Other harvesters, no one knows quite how many, comb the loamy soil under Douglas firs with long-fingered rakes instead of dogs.

Wild-mushroom brokers buy them at trading posts in the woods that can take on the atmosphere of mining camps in a gold rush. Chefs in Portland, Seattle and other cities are visited by people with dirt under their nails offering baskets, buckets and leather satchels loaded with small white truffles and big, knobby black ones at prices that can reach $800 a pound. Oregon truffles have been made into oil, cheese, chocolate, beer and vodka.

To some connoisseurs, truffles are as evocative of the region as morels and blackberries.

“The black truffle, after microplaning, is to me what ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, would taste like,” said Charles Ruff, the culinary director of the Oregon Truffle Festival, an annual series of events that celebrate both the state’s indigenous varieties and the European ones that are cultivated.

Yet the growing local passion for these native truffles isn’t widely shared outside the Pacific Northwest. Their beguiling, peculiar aromas almost never waft from dining rooms in other parts of the country.

“In my experience with fine-dining restaurants, there is very little to no demand for them,” said John Magazino, who buys and sells truffles for the Chefs’ Warehouse, a specialty-food wholesaler. “In 30 years of being in the world of truffles, I’ve yet to have a chef ask me for them.”

Urbani Truffles, one of the largest truffle suppliers in the world, sold Oregon truffles briefly in the 2010s, but hasn’t since.

Compared with the Périgord black truffle, Oregon’s “is not so powerful,” said Vittorio Giordano, the company’s vice president. “The consumers that are used to truffles, they have an idea of the aroma, and this one is very, very different.”

Picking Up the Scent

On the last day of February, accompanied by Charles Lefevre, who has done more than anyone to spread the word about Oregon truffles, I explored a cool, shady Douglas fir grove just outside Eugene. More accurately, Dr. Lefevre’s dogs, Dante and Luca, explored the grove, while he and I scrambled to keep up.

“If I take my eyes off him for a second, he’ll eat a truffle,” he said as he followed Dante through a thicket of downed branches.

Black and white truffles, the region’s two most commonly dug varieties, have been found as far south as Point Reyes in California and as far north as Vancouver Island in British Columbia, but Oregon is especially rich in their favorite habitat. Dr. Lefevre described the ideal hunting ground as former grassland where Douglas firs were planted 15 to 30 years ago. He can spot classic truffle terrain from the wheel of his car, but finds satellite images more useful.

“The modern truffle hunter starts from Google Earth,” he said.

His hunch about this grove of firs had been paying off nicely since January, when he signed a lease to the truffling rights with the farmer who owns the land. “Every time we’ve come in here we find about $5,000 worth of truffles,” Dr. Lefevre said. He donates most of them to the truffle festival, which he helped found; he makes his living inoculating tree seedlings with European truffle spores and selling them to people who want to start their own orchards.

Dante and Luca are Lagotto Romagnolos, a breed that specializes in finding truffles. (Trainers say that any dog with motivation can hunt truffles.)

Some recent forays had taken a toll on Dante’s hips. He’d been somewhat restored by acupuncture the other day, and the smell of the woods seemed to revive him completely. The minute he would start to snuffle at a spot of fluffy, loamy topsoil, Dr. Lefevre dropped to one knee beside him, trying to snatch the prize and stash it in a pouch he wore on his hip before it could enter Dante’s stomach. This pattern — the dog digs; the human dives — was repeated about twice a minute.

You can eat a truffle like an apple. It is what they were built for. They are the fruiting bodies of invisibly fine mycelial networks of fungi that grow among tree roots and contain spores that have to be carried to new sites in the guts of animals that feed on them.

Truffles are full of protein and carbohydrates. Most humans, though, are far less interested in their nutrient content than in their flavor, most of which is concentrated in an aroma so piercing that it compels mice, squirrels and dogs to root in the dirt.

I buried my face in a handful of whites Dante and Luca had found. My first impression was of ramps or garlic chives, then button mushrooms, but the overwhelming scent was a potent animal reek. They were only distantly reminiscent of the better-known Italian white variety, the most valuable truffles in the world.

The whites were so pungent that at times even I could tell when I was standing over a ripe cluster. The black truffles had a more diffuse aroma. I couldn’t catch it, but Dante could. He would zig and zag across the forest floor, shimmying and wiggling before stopping at a spot that might be 100 feet away.

“A little bit higher energy,” he said, eyeing Dante. “Having trouble finding it. This is black behavior.”

Holding my nose up to a dark, dirt-caked lump slightly smaller than a tennis ball that Dante had led us to, my first thought was ripe pawpaw, with its soft tropical flavors of pineapple and banana, plus a dusting of cocoa powder and a whiff of juice box.

A Périgord black truffle, with its flavors of black olives and dried mushrooms, wants to be baked into a potato gratin or roasted under the skin of a chicken. This truffle wanted to be dessert.

A Lure for Chefs

In his first 10 years with the truffle festival, Mr. Ruff said, “I thought it was my job to send our truffles out into the world.” Then, on a trip to Italy, he ate a dish a chef had made with the local white truffles that gave him a profound impression of place. “My thinking completely flipped upside down,” he said.

Since that moment, the festival has focused on helping chefs in the Pacific Northwest understand their truffles as deeply as French and Italian chefs understand theirs.

“It took me many years to get over the fact that they’re not the exact same thing” as the European truffles, said Elias Cairo, the owner of the salumi company Olympia Provisions, in Portland. “They’re their own flavor profile that represents this really cool pocket of forest in the United States.”

Mr. Cairo sometimes cures salami next to Oregon white truffles so they can soak up the aroma, in which he detects nutmeg, allspice and cloves. A hunter, Mr. Cairo finds that they also emit a musk that reminds him of game.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had a wild boar where it’s a little too stinky?” he asked. “I picture an older male animal that wants to breed, that’s got its pheromones fired up.” He understands that this may not be everybody’s cup of tea.

“The white is just so stinky-strong,” said Deb Meyer, a chef who owns Choux Pastries, in Beaverton. She meant it as a compliment. For an Oregon Truffle Festival dinner this year, Ms. Meyer infused that stinky strength into goat cheese that she sandwiched into airy little macarons.

Although the blacks are milder, they still turn heads when they are at their smelliest. “The aroma will kick you in the nose in a good way,” said Gabriel Rucker, the chef and owner of Le Pigeon, in Portland. On a recent flight, he took half a pound in his carry-on bag. “I pretty much truffled out the entire plane.”

Powerful as they are in their prime, Pacific Northwest truffles have a shorter life span than their European cousins. With frequent tending, they may survive a week, sometimes 10 days. They demand more attention than a Siamese cat.

“As soon as you find a truffle, it owns you,” said Ava Chapman, a truffle harvester in Portland who was one of Ms. Walker’s instructors at the dog-training seminar.

The Hunt Pays Off

Like many harvesters who work with dogs, Ms. Chapman believes that the reputation of Oregon truffles has been harmed by the use of rakes. While a dog zeros in on riper, more aromatic truffles, a rake is indiscriminate. In a matter of minutes, it can clear out every truffle growing under a tree. Some will be immature and odorless, others rotten. A few might be perfect.

The Oregon truffle trade is dominated by raked truffles, which are far more plentiful than the riper specimens turned up by dogs.

“If a chef wants them across the country, he’s going to get them from a supplier who bought raked truffles, and it doesn’t showcase the aroma of the truffle,” said Kristi Anderson, a retired court stenographer in Eugene who finds hers with the help of her dogs, Mia, Isa and Quinn.

Even a perfect truffle can let you down if it’s not carefully prepared. At various restaurants around Eugene that got their supply from harvesters who use dogs, I tried truffle fries, truffle pizza, truffle risotto and a truffled lobster. Although I could see the truffles, I couldn’t taste them.