THE GREAT TRUFFLE HUNT

We spent two decades trying to grow Périgord truffles on our Okanagan farm. This year, we finally succeeded.

- Robert Mohr

I FIRST TRIED TRUFFLES IN 2006, at dinner with my wife, Andrea, and two of our friends at Il Pastaio in Beverly Hills. Scanning the specials, I saw a $65 plate of pasta with white truffle. I was a surgeon in California at the time-I'm now retired-and I usually wolfed down most of my meals between procedures. That price tag shocked me, but my ignorance about truffles astonished my friend Michele. She came back to our table with the chef, who carried a container of small, gnarled nuggets.

"Take a whiff of this," he said. When I leaned in, I was hit by a unique aroma-earthy and woody, but also a little salty. The box, he said, held roughly 15 to 20 pounds of truffles. It cost him $30,000, and it was all he could get for the season. He went to the kitchen and came back with a plate of pasta with shaved truffles on top. "Enjoy," he said.

The flavour was indescribably rich, unlike anything I'd eaten before. One bite was all I needed to understand why hunters have foraged for these elusive subterranean fruits for centuries, and why chefs pay $30,000 just to buy one box of them. I would spend the next 17 years of my life trying to grow my own.

When our truffle journey began, Andrea and I had 2.5 acres of land in the Okanagan (we'd bought it as a seasonal residence in 1999), the funds for our shared curiosity and the understanding that truffles had never been successfully harvested in the region. Cultivating truffles is a labour of patience. They are the underground fruit of fungus that grows at the base of inoculated host trees, including hazelnut and oak, and they usually take at least seven to 12 years to emerge after the trees are planted. There are a variety of species-Tuber magnatum is known as the white Alba truffle, and Tuber melanosporum is the black Périgord truffleand growing them is an imperfect science.