Hunter digs up a monster mushroom, an Oregon black truffle, and onto the menu it goes at Higgins

By Katy Muldoon, Oregonian

It looks like coal, smells like dirt and tastes like heaven. And for Higgins Restaurant, which bought what may be the biggest black truffle ever found in Oregon, it was a bargain at $80.

Dug Sunday, the 1-pound, grapefruit-sized truffle was delivered Friday to the downtown restaurant, where chef Greg Higgins described how he’d employ the delicacy: finely diced then barely warmed in a vin rouge sauce crafted from red wine, vinegar, fish stock and cream. Through this weekend, the velvety sauce will spill over polenta and lower Columbia River sturgeon.

Now that you’ve stopped drooling, here’s how the truffle met the plate.

Richard Maxfield, a professional truffle digger from Falls City, was on private timber land in rural Polk County. He was sifting through alluvial deposits around approximately 30-year-old Douglas fir trees when his potato rake met the mammoth mushroom, chopping it in two. Had his trusty truffle-sniffing Jack Russell terriers been with him, he says, they’d have alerted him to the prize fungus and he wouldn’t have whacked it in half.

Realizing its size, he says, “I almost hyperventilated.”

In his 20 years of truffle hunting, Maxfield has found two others that may have approached a similar size. A typical Oregon black truffle weighs no more than 1 ounce.

They sell for about $50 a pound this year — an epic truffle season — and up to $100 a pound when they’re less abundant.

The next morning, Maxfield called Lars Norgren of Peak Forest Fruit, a fruit and mushroom merchant from Manning. He told Norgren the truffle was huge, ripening and needed to move fast. Norgren, figuring it was maybe a 9-ouncer, agreed to meet Wednesday and buy it.

“So when he pulls this thing out of the bag and it’s a pound,” Norgren says, “I was flabbergasted … Any time you find a truffle that’s as big as a pingpong ball, you’re proud of yourself. Most of them are the size of marbles or peas.”

He paid Maxfield $50 and called Higgins.

Norgren’s son, Gino Accuardi, arrived at the restaurant shortly before 4 p.m. Friday, Leucangium Carthusianum in hand. In the pre-dinner rush, the kitchen bustled with line chefs readying such Northwest treats as hazelnut-smoked Sockeye risotto and Totten inlet mussels. Along with Higgins, several stopped what they were doing, picked up the biggest black truffle they’d ever seen and inhaled.

–   Katy Muldoon