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By Karla Jones Seidita Special to the Rappahannock News
Virginia Truffle Growers in Rixeyville grows and sells trees inoculated with truffles.
You’re probably familiar with chocolate truffles. They’re the namesake of the edible fungi that originally bore the name (some people mistakenly think truffles are mushrooms) and were crafted to resemble their free form. Apart from that, chocolate truffles and fungi truffles bear no connection to one another.
Fungi truffles (from here on TO just be calling them truffles) are highly prized, frightfully expensive culinary punctuations to glorious haute cuisine. A smidgeon goes a long way in providing the earthy, rich, mushroom-y flavor that beckons them from forest to table. If you didn’t know what they were and saw them in a gourmet shop, you’d pass up the shriveled, little black (or sometimes white) masses of fungus every time but, once you’ve tasted truffles, they’ll haunt you forever.
Truffles traditionally come from Europe (France in particular) where they’re gathered in the wild. Carefully trained pigs are used to sniff them out in the forests. Truffle farming is rare in Europe.
With acid rain and pollution devastating European forests and fuel costs to fly the highly perishable truffles to our shores escalating, wild truffles are becoming scarce. This scarcity, coupled with increasing demands for truffles, is pushing European prices through the roof
Seizing the opportunity to cash in and bring truffle farming, .with its consistently demonstrated, predictably good yields to Virginia, Pat and John Martin teamed up with Maggie Shumack and Tim Terry. After a long search for the right property, the Martins purchased a tract of land in Rixeyville, near Culpeper for their truffiere (pronounced trufer-ree).
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