The Appalachian couple hunting for wild American truffles

Massi was onto something. The 1-year-old Lagotto Romagnolo dog was pinging back and forth through the thick underbrush blossoming along the creek, nose to the ground, sniffing at the patchwork of fallen leaves. His movements were quick but purposeful, as he made shorter zigs and swifter zags until he suddenly beelined straight into a thicket. He rooted around, wagging his curly tail with unbridled joy.

In just a few seconds, Massi — short for Massimo — was racing back toward his owners with something delicately clutched in his mouth, his eyes blazing excitedly. His truffle-hunting partner, Eva, a 2-year-old brown Lagotto Romagnolo, trotted after him to see his discovery.

“Good boy!” praised Luke Gilbert, whose woodsy beard matched his wool jacket and faded work pants. He gently wrested Massi’s find from the dog’s jaws, then rewarded him with a treat.

“What’d he get?” asked Natalie Dechiara, now 35, Gilbert’s wife and business partner, clad all in black, including her weathered leather boots.

Gilbert, now 34, held up what looked like a dirty potato, a little larger than a golf ball, but with a reptilian texture.

It was an Imaia gigantea, colloquially known as a Blue Ridge truffle, native to the eponymous billion-year-old mountain range surrounding Asheville, N.C., where we were trekking on a clammy December morning last year. In season from the end of September until late January or early February, A-grade versions of these rare fungi can command up to $80 an ounce, making them nearly three times as valuable as silver.

In just 45 minutes, the dogs found nine, potentially worth a couple thousand bucks. Not bad for a walk in the woods. Over the course of that season, they would find more than 250 pounds of Blue Ridge truffles worth northward of $200,000, proof that there’s a virtual gold mine in the hills around Asheville, an echo of the actual gold rush that unfolded here at the turn of the 19th century.

Gilbert and Dechiara were hoping to do even better this year. Mother Nature had other ideas.

Early on the morning of Sept. 27, on the eve of truffle season, Hurricane Helene roared through the Asheville area on its 500-mile-long tear of deadly destruction that started on Florida’s Big Bend coast and finally subsided in the Southern Appalachians. Forty-two people lost their lives in the surrounding Buncombe County as the region was pummeled with nearly 14 inches of rain, which flooded the French Broad River running through the city and devastated its River Arts District, washed out countless roads, destroyed homes and businesses indiscriminately, and left people without power, phone service, and internet connectivity, some of which has still not been restored.

When the storm hit in the early hours of the morning, Dechiara and Gilbert were in bed at their metal-roofed cabin home sitting on nine heavily wooded acres on a mountainside in Fruitland, just outside Asheville. As they lay there, a 100-year-old black locust tree crashed onto their roof, sending them leaping out of bed and running out the room. “We should have been in the basement,” Gilbert says. “We are very fortunate and counting our blessings.”

Trees fell for hours, each coming down with a horrifying splitting, cracking, whooshing that ended with an earthshaking thud. When the storm finally subsided and the couple felt safe enough to go outside around midday, the sun was shining, the sky was clear. Taking stock, they found close to 100 massive oaks downed across their property; their power, phones, and internet were out; the road leading to their house was impassable. They were cut off from the world, unsure of how bad it was elsewhere in Asheville and beyond, unknowing if anyone in their orbit was injured or worse.

And there was the question of the Blue Ridge truffles. Did the storm damage them or their growing environment so much that it would be a lost season, meaning the loss of a considerable chunk of income? They knew chefs would be trying to get in touch soon, but they had no idea what they were going to tell them.

For the past two years, the couple have been selling Blue Ridge truffles to some of the country’s top chefs, including James Beard Award winner Sean Brock, who owns three restaurants in Nashville and who fell in love at his first whiff. “Their aroma is like laying down in the forest, being that close to the ground, with the moss and the damp soil,” he says.

But when it came time to use them in the kitchen, he quickly realized Blue Ridge truffles weren’t like most other truffles. Notably, they soften like porcini mushrooms when cooked. To highlight that unique texture and consistency, Brock will often poach a truffle, halve it, score it, and then either sear the fungi like steak or glaze and grill it like barbecued meat. “I had to rewire my brain, because you look at it and think, ‘Ooh, that’s what a white truffle feels like in my hand,’” Brock says. “But comparison truly is the thief of joy and happiness. It’s our responsibility to show what’s special about them.”

Ian Boden, chef-owner of the Shack and Maude & the Bear in Staunton, Va., loves using them in a more traditional manner. He thinly shaves them over freshly made chitarra pasta glistening with butter, while regaling guests about their lore. “We live in an age in the food world where there must be a story with everything you’re doing,” he says. “Food has to mean something, and people have to connect to it.”

During my visit to Asheville, Gilbert and Dechiara wanted me to fully connect with the truffles we found on our hunt, so we drove over to Beradu, an upscale market and restaurant in nearby Black Mountain. The couple sliced open a few, revealing dark flesh veined with slender white skeins not unlike a cross section of marbled Wagyu beef. Chef Patrick Beraduce whipped up a feast, slipping truffles into sandwiches with melted Havarti and ham, and placing thick disks of them on a mustardy sauce to complement tender stone crab claws. It was a refined contrast to our time mucking through the forest, but that didn’t stop us from diving in after we’d shucked off our mist-soaked jackets and washed our hands.

The truffles were intoxicating, their primal, earthy scent tinged with undercurrents of sexy funk and bittersweet chocolate. With a meatier texture than white Alba truffles or black Périgords, their singular flavor was rich with hints of pecans and morel mushrooms, a distant relative in the fungi family Morchellaceae. It was a true taste of Appalachia and an exciting preview of the nascent American truffle scene.

“This is just the beginning,” Gilbert said between bites. “There are all these truffles out there, just waiting to be discovered.”

Though Italy and France have truffle-hunting traditions dating back to Roman times, the wider discovery of wild truffles in America is relatively recent. However, Matthew Smith, a truffle-specialized professor in the department of plant pathology at the University of Florida, theorizes Indigenous people ate them. He estimates there are hundreds of species of truffles in North America, many undiscovered. “You could be walking over a new species in your backyard or in the nature park near your house,” he says. “You don’t have to go to the Amazon to find new biodiversity, you just have to be tuned into it here.”

Blue Ridge truffles came on the radars of some foragers and mycologists in 2008 when a research paper in the journal Mycologia changed them from their previous classification to their current one, Imaia gigantea. (Their name comes from Sanshi Imai, who first discovered the truffles in Japan in 1933.) They became more familiar in early 2022, when Outside magazine published a groundbreaking article on truffle hunting in Appalachia, which piqued Gilbert and Dechiara’s interest. Gilbert had been selling foraged finds to restaurants for nearly a decade and founded Wild Goods in 2017. Dechiara joined the company in 2021 after working for five years with No Taste Like Home, an Asheville company that takes guests on foraging walks, then sends whatever is found to a local restaurant so the guests can enjoy it for dinner.

The couple, who married in 2023, went down every literal and figurative rabbit hole to learn more about Blue Ridge truffles. It quickly became clear they needed a dog, ultimately deciding on procuring a Lagotto Romagnolo, an Italian breed long favored by truffle hunters. They welcomed Eva to the family soon after, then trained her via Zoom classes with the Truffle Dog Company, which helps owners teach their canines how to locate the underground fungi without damaging them. “It’s about training yourself and the dog,” Dechiara says. “It’s probably harder to train the human to be consistent.”

They began taking Eva to look for truffles in the fall of 2022. For two months, they scoured the woods but kept coming home empty-handed. Eva was honing her skills, while neither of her masters was entirely sure which environment was most ideal for the fungi.

Sometime in late October that year, they were out on a hunt but hadn’t discovered anything. They were frustrated, on the verge of giving up, when Eva started burrowing. This wasn’t unusual. She had dug plenty of holes with nothing in them. But that day was different. Her pawing revealed their first Blue Ridge truffle. They were ecstatic. That night, they ate it to celebrate.

By the end of the season, they had a trio of spots where they could reliably find truffles, which they began selling to chefs, hawking at local farmers markets, and infusing into salts and butter to create a homespun line of gourmet goods.

A few months later, in the winter of 2023, they purchased Massi from an Italian breeder. He was tougher to train with his bad habits. “Eva would be on a scent trail, and he would come in and butt her off it,” Dechiara says. “It was like cheating on your math test from the kid in front of you.”

Massi ultimately became a master forager, eclipsing Eva’s energy and expertise. The couple could be the founders of a truffle hunting dynasty. Last December, Eva gave birth to five puppies. Gilbert and Dechiara are keeping only one, Rosie, who already started her training.

They are going to need all that expertise. Nine days after Helene, Gilbert was able to take the dogs out on a forage. Some of their favorite spots were inaccessible because the roads were impassable; another area was closed because a sheriff was checking on a report of a dead body.

The forest was a mess, but Gilbert saw potential in the loss. “All the downed trees will create fertile ground for saprotrophic mushrooms,” such as oyster mushrooms and turkey tail, “that decompose dead trees,” he says. “That’s just the recycling process of nature.”

Though he estimates some truffles were washed away by the flooding and he spent twice as long as he normally does on a forage, the dogs were still able to sniff out enough that it was worth the trouble. “I think the cost of truffles will go up this year, though,” he says. “It’s more work now.”

Overall, the couple remain optimistic. They didn’t lose any friends. They have cell service again, though their internet provider is still down, so they had to invest in a Starlink account. They’re back to selling at farmers markets, where they’re also giving away free home-cooked meals and clothes to those in need. There are lots of insurance forms to fill out, but that’s just paperwork.

Though sales to Asheville restaurants have mostly vanished, their mail order business is picking up. As soon as he could get through on the phone, Boden at Maude & the Bear checked in on the couple. After learning they were okay and truffles were still available, he immediately placed an order.