It’s that time of year when restaurants pay top-dollar for prized winter truffles from Italy and France.
They were on display one recent weekend at Oenotri, an Italian restaurant in downtown Napa, Calif. There, a waitress carefully pulled the truffles from a small brown box and weighed them on a scale. An exotic food luxury comes at a price: The tiny fist-sized truffles were worth $4,000.
While U.S. chefs buy most of their truffles from the famed food regions of Provence in France and Tuscany in Italy, there is a truffle movement afoot in America, with growers from North Carolina to California to Oregon hoping to cash in on the highly valued mushroom that grows underground.
One of those people is Robert Chang of the American Truffle Company, which sells its intellectual know-how to would-be truffle growers.
The San Francisco Bay Area company has financial stakes in truffle orchards in 15 countries, stretching from Finland to South Africa. In the U.S., Chang is making his pitch to vineyard owners, among others.
“There is a healthy level of interest,” from California grape growers, Chang said in an interview.
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