These organisms are magnificent.

They make themselves taste as good as possible and smell as good as they possibly can.

It's really in their interest for us to come find and eat them.

NARRATOR: Every year in Oregon, foragers are pulled into damp forests by an organism that has a peculiar hold on the human mind.

There's a sexiness to it, I guess.

You don't know why it's something that you want because it's really unknown aroma.

It's all about pheromones.

Yup.

A lot of people compare the aroma to ozone, a rare upper atmosphere gas that's formed when lightning strikes the ground.

It has the aroma of chocolate, coffee, tobacco, black currant, a little bit of earthiness, but for the most part, it's really fruity.

They're magical, absolutely magical.

And they're really working on you.

They're really trying to get you to eat that truffle.

CHARLES: [laughs] Okay, sit, good job.

Good job, good job.

NARRATOR: Meet Dante.

Nice work, Dante.

NARRATOR: And that's Charles, truffle scientist and cultivation consultant.

He trained Dante since he was a puppy to help find truffles.

My dogs love truffles, they eat more truffles than any person I've ever met.

But the thing is there are so many truffles that they gorge themselves every time we go in the woods.

NARRATOR: There are over 300 species of truffle in Oregon, but what are they?

First of all, they're not just a food.

They're a lot of things.

They're the fruit of a fungus, like mushrooms but that have evolved to grow underground.

And most importantly, truffles are masters of symbiosis.

Maybe some people think of fungi as parasites and pathogens, but a tremendous number of them actually work in mutualistic, beneficial associations with their hosts.

In the case of our native Oregon truffles they're all associated with Douglas Fir trees NARRATOR: On the surface, we see individual trees and plants.

But underground, is a complex hidden network of collaboration.

And the truffle is right in the middle of the action.

The tree uses the sun's energy to create sugars.

Some of which pass through its roots to a vast network of fungal threads.

Those are called mycelia and those permeate the soil.

In return, the mycelial networks collect nutrients from the soil like phosphorus to give them to the tree.

The truffle and other fungi facilitate this exchange.

It's kind of like a banking system in a city.

It's a relationship between plants and fungi that exists all over the world.

But truffles thrive in only a few places, like Oregon.

All those Douglas Firs, that's prime truffle habitat.

But trees are only part of the equation.

A mushroom that grows underground needs help to spread its spores.

With a lot of challenges to overcome, the truffles have to be smart about it.

It's cold, it's wet, animals are busy and there really aren't that many animals around to come eat them.

NARRATOR: The truffles release chemicals into the air that animals find irresistible.

They are very compelling and the animals can detect them at phenomenally low concentrations that are actually below the level of conscious detection.

So it can manipulate the behavior of the animal without the animal even being aware of it.

NARRATOR: See those dark areas?

Those are spores.

And from the truffle's perspective, they're the point.

As the truffle matures, the aromas it produces attract animals to eat, digest and distribute its spores.

And there's one animal in particular that goes to great lengths to help the truffle.

When the truffle season starts, I can't wait until the first truffle walks in through the door of our restaurant.

And to be able to smell it for the first time that year opens up new possibilities.

All of a sudden you kind of start conjuring up these ideas and these dishes just start coming to mind.

Our native Oregon black truffle is famous for its tropical fruit types of aromas.

As the truffle matures, the aromas change though, and will produce more savory notes.

The Oregon white truffles, they're almost harder to describe.

It's the experience of the Oregon white truffles in food to me, is electricity.

It adds a zing, a certain magic.

NARRATOR: Chefs around the world love truffles.

And Northwest chefs, well, they love Oregon truffles.

So when I make the truffle vinegarette, I roughly chop the truffles and mix them together with a little bit of salt and a tiny bit of thyme and some sort of an allium that really just amplifies that aroma.

When you dress the salad with it, it really just like sends waves through this whole salad of like this truffle.

Fantastic, yeah, it's I don't have enough words in the vocabulary to describe the joy.

NARRATOR: The Europeans do.

In the old countries, it's high cuisine.

And truffle fans pay accordingly.

A pound of the Italian white truffles goes for more than $3,000.

Oregon varieties can fetch up to $800 a pound.

That puts truffles in league with some of the most expensive foods in the world.

But the true truffle experience, well it's far more down to earth.

So omelets, pasta, those are the classic ways to serve truffles.

NARRATOR: Charles co-founded the Oregon Truffle Festival in 2006 as a way to celebrate and promote Oregon truffles among local chefs.

And every year food makers turn these fungi into new delights.

We birthed this idea of Cooperativa to chase the closeness, intimacy and audience that we crave over food.

And so for us, truffle season was like, oh this is what we do.

This is how we celebrate ingredients.

We have a perfect little container for that to host an ideal of the moment ingredient.

We've made it with pasta.

We've made it with the honey that you can then have with the cheese.

It becomes more accessible for you at home, not just, you know, wrapping a beautiful rabbit with white truffles and some sort of stuffing that you're going to have one time.

Also delicious.

NARRATOR: And here's an idea.

Oregon white truffles, infused into Oregon hazelnuts, infused into beer.

Peak Oregon.

Or is it peak fungi?

This beer is the product of two fungi that are masters at getting animals to do their bidding.

Truffles and yeast.

You know, humans by baking and brewing beer and making food with fermentation and certain yeast strains have spread those yeast cultures around the world.

In a way truffles are kind of similar in that way the mania for them, the love for them.

So I think it's fascinating that this fungi, on a molecular level is so compelling to people that we're going to carry the story around, we're going to wander through forests, we're going to try to figure out ways to try to harness it, celebrate it, capture it, and share it.

NARRATOR: Humans domesticated yeast, as well as other organisms thousands of years ago.

But truffles play by their own rules.

What else do you need me to carry in?

I think this is it.

That's it?

I'm going to go grab some roots.

NARRATOR: Truffles have been farmed in Europe, but here in Oregon, they're still wild.

Charles hopes to change that.

I actually went to college to study exactly what I am now doing.

Studying mycology at the University of Oregon, with the intention of trying to figure out how to grow things like chanterelles and porcinis.

And while I was a graduate student, the person who became my first customer asked me to inoculate trees with the French black truffles.

So this tree is very well colonized.

You can find truffle mycorrhizae throughout the root system.

NARRATOR: Farming truffles means creating the conditions where both the host tree and the fungus can thrive.

And encouraging truffle mycorrhizae to take hold.

Myco means fungus and rhizae means root.

So it's a symbiotic organ that's part fungus, part root.

Under a microscope, a truffle mycorrhizae looks kind of like a corn dog.

NARRATOR: With Charles's help, those corn dogs went to town on Pat Long's tree roots.

The results in my first try were not what I would expect these days.

But it was evidently good enough, because Pat's orchard is now among the most productive truffle orchards in the country.

It definitely worked.

NARRATOR: Productive French black truffle orchard, that is.

Oregon truffles have so far proven difficult to cultivate.

Oh, I would love to cultivate the native species, I've been working on it for 25 years.

And it's hard.

That first step of inoculating the seedlings can be done, we can do it.

But we can't do it cost-effectively.

We have to grow ten trees for every one that actually has the truffle mycorrhizae.

NARRATOR: But the opportunity could be huge.

North America is poised to become the largest market for fresh truffles on the planet.

With Oregon right at the forefront.

In the sense that say, Wisconsin is identified with cheese and Idaho with potatoes, the brand of truffles is sort of Oregon's to lose.

NARRATOR: This little lump of earth, it's more than a mushroom.

No one element can stand alone.

NARRATOR: The truffle needs the tree and the tree needs the truffle.

ANNA: It's collaboration, it's cooperation, it's coming together.

NARRATOR: The truffle also needs the dog and the dog needs the human.

In nature, this is the way everything happens.

Everything feeds something else, or should, for it to work properly.

NARRATOR: And if we humans want the truffle, we need the dog and the tree and the sun and the rain and the vast web of connections that we don't see.

But that makes life in the Northwest superabundant.

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