In Search of the Best American Truffles

Tom, a Lagotto Romagnolo, hunting Oregon winter white truffles with his trainer, Jim Sanford. Credit: Laura D'Art

FIRST PUBLISHED IN WSJ. MAGAZINE, APRIL 2014

"ALL RIGHT, TOM, lavora!" barked Jim Sanford at the curly-haired dog sniffing the duff. A cheery, bilingual Lagotto Romagnolo, Tom possesses a nose finely trained to the scent of culinary truffles. Some years ago, Sanford boasted, Tom unearthed 200 pounds of black Périgord truffles in a Tennessee orchard—a haul worth $240,000. On this January morning, Tom hunted the Oregon winter white truffle, a wild fungus that thrives beneath young Douglas firs in the Willamette Valley. I watched as Tom, latching on to a whiff, suddenly dashed over to the trunk of a tree. He raised a leg. "OK, now he's going to pee," Sanford explained. "He always has to approve the stand of woods. I'm Tom, and I approve this forest."

The forest Tom approved of is located behind a bed and breakfast near Eugene. Oregon is home to four of the seven wild culinary truffle species native to North America. At a mushroom symposium here in 1977, James Beard, the dean of American gastronomy and an Oregon native, is said to have tasted a local white truffle and deemed it as good as Italian white truffles. Today, Italian white truffles command $2,000 per pound; Oregon whites, in top form, fetch $400 per pound. At some point, Oregon's wild truffles acquired a reputation as a second-rate talent. It's hard to find one served on a dinner plate outside of Oregon. This frustrates Charles Lefevre, who holds a Ph.D. in forest mycology from Oregon State University, where researchers have been studying truffles for a century. "The market underappreciates it, but we have a culinary treasure here," he said.

In an effort to rehabilitate the stature of American truffles, in 2006 Lefevre and his wife, Leslie Scott, founded the annual Oregon Truffle Festival. It was the first festival of its kind outside of Europe. "Our intention was to stimulate the birth of an industry," Lefevre told me in January. This year's festival, held at the peak of truffle season, sold out. There were truffle forays and truffle-cooking classes and a taste of many things–plus–truffles: beef tenderloin, cured with Oregon white truffles; cupcakes, baked with Oregon black truffle–infused butter; and popcorn dusted with truffled caramel.

Oregon white truffles have a garlicky-cabbage aroma similar to the Alba white truffle, the jewel of Italian cuisine. By a wide consensus, they are not as intense as the Italians, "but what they lack in intensity they make up for in aroma complexity," said Jack Czarnecki, author of the Beard award–winning A Cook's Book of Mushrooms, who holds the only license to produce truffle oil in the United States. The Oregon black truffle—tasting of pineapple and musk—is altogether distinct from the French black Périgords. Over the years, Lefevre has pitted Oregon truffles against the prized Old World varieties in a number of unscientific blind tests. "The Oregon truffles have always come out on top," Lefevre told me. "I would not conclude that the Oregon white truffle is necessarily better. But the European variety still costs me $1,500 a pound, where the Oregon white truffle at that time was $80 a pound."

 Truffles are the strange fruit of a fungus. Unlike mushrooms, they develop entirely underground, and when fully ripe, emit a beguiling, aromatic gas—an "eat me" broadcas—designed to lure an animal to spread its spores. Truffles actually mature and ripen over several months, like tomatoes on a vine; an immature truffle has the aroma of a Styrofoam ball. Foragers in Europe use trained dogs or pigs to sniff the ripe ones, ensuring a crop of uniformly high quality; Italian law even mandates the use of dogs. (Sows are drawn to the wild Italian white truffle by a scent that resembles the sex pheromones of male pigs.) In Oregon, mushroom foragers—"hippie harvesters," as one local chef put it to me—have historically used steel rakes to collect local truffles. Raking is an indiscriminate method; it reaps both mature and immature. Early on, odorless truffles—carrying the culinary value of green tomatoes—ended up in the hands of chefs. The reputation stuck.

When Lefevre founded the Oregon Truffle Festival, there were hardly any truffle dogs west of the Mississippi River. In east Tennessee, a plant pathologist named Tom Michaels, a graduate of the same Oregon State University truffle program as Lefevre, was cultivating Périgord truffles using oak trees he'd imported from France. Michaels brought his truffles to Blackberry Farm, a luxury inn at the foot of the Smoky Mountains. He and the proprietors struck a deal: Michaels would supply Blackberry with black truffles if the farm would lend him a dog when he needed.

"This dog started everything," Sanford told me, as we followed Tom following his nose across a carpet of fir needles. "Dove? Dove? Good boy, Tom. Molto bene." After a career as an elephant trainer, Sanford ended up at Blackberry Farm, where he trained Tom to find Michaels's truffles. (Sanford-trained dogs now sell for $6,000 each.) Lefevre, looking to give Oregon truffles their due, recruited Sanford to train dogs at the truffle festival. When Tom trotted into his first Oregon forest, he unearthed 25 ripe winter white truffles in half an hour. I watched him take about a minute to find one, an exhilarating sight. He announced this discovery by quietly pawing the ground: Buried under a few inches of duff, like a rough jewel, was a knobby, golden-colored truffle.

Students at Sanford's training seminar had brought their Labrador retrievers, German shepherds and one poodle. There are now at least four truffle-dog trainers on the West Coast. "It's exploded," Kris Jacobson, a former K9 cop in Eugene who founded Umami Truffle Dogs, said about the demand from chefs for dog-hunted truffles, which cost twice as much as raked truffles.

At Sanford's training I met Jason Germick, a bearded 37-year-old who showed off a bowl containing two dozen freshly picked white truffles. He led a shaggy Lagotto Romagnolo named Aldo—Tom's grandson. Germick had recently left a 12-year career as a financial advisor with JP Morgan Chase in Seattle to "pursue his passions." He saw a fertile opportunity in truffles. His friend owns a few acres in Washington, where they intend to plant oak and hazelnut trees inoculated with Périgords. (It takes five to seven years for a baby tree with Périgord spores to bear fruit.) An Oregon couple I'd met over truffle eggs that morning had a similar plan: They handed me a card for their crowd-funded campaign to build a Perigord truffle orchard.

Lefevre sees an industry for the wild Oregon truffles as well as the lucrative Périgord truffles, which sell for $800 per pound and thrive in the same terroir as the area's grapes. (No one has successfully cultivated the Italian white truffle outside of its native habitat; Lefevre is in the early stages of figuring out how to farm the wild Oregon varieties.) "This group of people is comparable to the demographic that pioneered the wine industry in California 50 years ago," said Lefevre, who has a 14-year-old business, New World Truffieres, selling oak and hazelnut seedlings inoculated with Old World truffles to farmers across North America. In a 2009 feasibility study, Lefevre and his colleagues estimated that sales of cultivated and native truffles produced in Oregon could earn $200 million annually—and bring in $1.5 billion more through other economic benefits, like tourism.

"This is not emus—one of these hobby crops where somebody's just selling an idea but there's not actually a market," Lefevre told me. "There is a big market for truffles already. It's just a matter of figuring out how to do it to reduce the risk, to make it more reliable, more predictable. I believe we are at the very early stages of a burgeoning industry."

Engineer Mate Rimac Revolutionizes Electric Cars

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Mate Rimac and the Concept One. Credit: Andy Isaacson

FIRST PUBLISHED IN WSJ. MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 2013

MATE RIMAC guides the Concept One—a prototype electric sports car he first designed when he was 21 years old—onto a stretch of road in Sveta Nedelja, a suburb west of Zagreb. The cherry-red vehicle is low, sleek and hardly subtle. Stepping gently on the accelerator, Rimac propels the car to 60 mph in less than three seconds. Jerking the steering wheel, he screeches through a roundabout before returning us to the parking lot outside Rimac Automobili—the Croatian engineer's automotive start-up—where he flings the car into a tight circle, pinning me hard against my seat.

"I'm not showing off," says Rimac through a haze of tire smoke. "I want to show you that the technology is reliable enough to do crazy stuff with an electric car. It's not just something that looks pretty at an auto show. We can build it today. We just need scale."

Unofficially, the Concept One is the world's fastest accelerating electric automobile. The car spreads 1,000 hp across four motors—one for each wheel. As the car turns a right corner, the front right wheel can break for a fraction of a second while the rear wheel generates power. It's an innovation that Rimac, now 25, points to as the "kind of stuff you can't do with an engine," and which defines the Concept One, in his self-confident estimation, as "the sports car of the 21st century."

The official Guinness records for the world's fastest accelerating electric automobile, which hang on the wall of the company's airy white-tiled showroom, belong to a converted 1984 E30 BMW parked in the adjacent shop. Rimac uses the boxy green vehicle as a "test mule" for technologies his company develops. He built that car when he was 19. At the time, Rimac had been winning international competitions for an electronic glove he devised in high school that functions as a keyboard and mouse, and came up with an idea for a car mirror system that eliminated blind spots.

After licensing his mirror invention to a European automotive supplier (Rimac is bound by an agreement not to disclose its name), by 2008 he'd earned enough money to buy the used BMW, which he then began entering into "drifting" competitions (a motor sport in which the car goes into a controlled skid). When the engine blew up after a few races, Rimac decided to marry his passion for cars and electronics. He'd always reveredNikola Tesla, the Croatian-born inventor and electrical engineer, and it occurred to Rimac that an electric motor—a source of instant power, free of cumbersome spark plugs and oil filters—would yield a superior sports car. "It wasn't about making the car environmentally friendly," he says. "The performance is just much better."

It took Rimac six months to convert the BMW into an electric car, using off-the-shelf components. Back at the Croatian racetrack, he was mocked. "What are you doing with this washing machine? Can I charge my phone with it?" competitors joked. Something always broke after each race, but Rimac kept tinkering, designing all the parts himself. The car eventually became "quick enough to whoop a Tesla in a street race," as one auto blog reported. By 2010, Rimac's DIY vehicle was trouncing even gasoline-powered cars.

"At that point, it started to get serious," Rimac tells me. A Croatian businessman approached him on behalf of Abu Dhabi's royal family. They wanted to see a prospectus. "They said, 'We want two cars,' " he recalls. "I was like, 'We're just a couple guys in a garage.' " He set to work on the Concept One.

What began as a hobby then turned, almost by accident, into a business. Today, Rimac Automobili employs 22 people, mostly Croatian engineers (the one non-Croatian employee, the company's head of sales, came from Tesla Motors). Thinking it would be wise to hire someone with actual car-making experience, Rimac Automobili initially brought in an engineer from BMW. But his high salary, and the specialization he'd grown accustomed to from working in the car industry, were not a great fit for the company's start-up culture, where the guy who makes the brakes also orders the parts for it.

"It was a learning curve—we made mistakes," Rimac admits. "But eventually I realized we were doing something right: developing cars for a lot less money than big car manufacturers and managing to beat them in many fields. We have an advantage starting with a blank sheet of paper. There's no heritage that we have to incorporate into the design."

For the first year, Rimac, then 22, hobbled along on a shoestring, helped by some seed money from his father—a shopping-center developer—and the promise of investment from Abu Dhabi. "I sold everything I had just to pay the rent," he recalls. In a superstitious mood, Rimac and his girlfriend, Monika Mikac, the company's head of public relations, concocted a reverse incentive: They vowed to swear off two of their biggest vices—chocolate and potato chips—for an entire year if the company finished a prototype for the Concept One by the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show.

When the Concept One debuted in Germany, the industry took notice: The all-wheel-drive vehicle reaches a maximum speed of 190 mph and boasts an average range of 150 miles on a single charge. The power-to-weight ratio is on par with a Formula One engine. Rimac replaced conventional mirrors with cameras, linked by fiber-optic cables, and added a few other luxury flourishes, like self-closing doors.

Most of the components—almost everything but the battery cells and air bags—are developed in-house. Rather than use molds to make the wheels or pedals, as is typical in mass production, two large milling machines cut parts out of solid aluminum blocks, a costly process that enables the company to adapt quickly to design changes. "Only Formula One cars or spaceships are made this way," Rimac explains. "Nikola Tesla had to go to America to be successful. I wanted to stay here to give young Croatians a chance to work on something interesting."

With only one complete commercial vehicle sold to a European car manufacturer, the company was desperate for revenue. What sustains Rimac Automobili is designing and producing various components—electric power trains or battery management systems—for other automotive companies. Recently, Applus Idiada, an automotive engineering company in Spain, commissioned an electric supercar made with the windows and roof of the Concept One but built to different specifications. Rimac has sold batteries to a company that's building levitating trains, and he hints at a breakthrough in the works for "the next generation of braking systems.

"We can design and build prototypes fast and inexpensively, and not just for electric cars. We make chassis, electric parts, molds—all under one roof. But if BMW wants to develop a supercar with an electric power train, the best one on the market is from us," Rimac says. "Our technology could end up in a high-volume product under a different brand. If we had sufficient funding, we probably wouldn't do this kind of stuff. It's a simple matter of survival. Enzo Ferrari started to make road cars just to finance his race cars—he did it to pay the bills."

 Building a show car to drive business to its engineering services is a strategy that many auto companies adopt, explains Christoph Stuermer, an industry analyst with IHS Automotive in Frankfurt. "Part of Tesla's business plan is to license out other technologies. There are similarities there," says Stuermer.

Looking ahead, Rimac intends to ramp up production of the Concept One, release a new model every two to three years and keep slashing the sticker price. (The car currently lists for $1 million.) He views his target customer as more of a Bugatti or Ferrari enthusiast, rather than a Tesla driver. Indeed, Rimac brushes off comparisons with Tesla, not just because he believes his company occupies a different market, but because Tesla's $465 million in federal loans places the company on an unequal playing field.

Although Rimac Automobili has carved out novel revenue streams, questions over its financing still dog the company. "The government won't help us, banks won't give us loans and there aren't foreign investors in this region," Rimac says. This hurdle is one shared by scores of other electric automobile upstarts operating out of garages and universities: Capital is scarce. Still, Rimac may be able to get by producing a handful of Concept Ones a year, appealing to that niche of customer that manages to keep high-performance automakers like the Italian supercar manufacturer Pagani afloat. For now, he can keep eating chocolate.