It's truffle season in Oregon; get out your wallet

EUGENE, Ore. – Truffle marketer and promoter Jim Wells walked into March restaurant in Eugene recently with a small box.

Within minutes the area around him had an aroma of apples and earth that heralds truffle season in Oregon.

It's the time when the fungi that are cousins to mushrooms come into their own, and Wells had a doozy.

In the box was the biggest black truffle Wells had seen in three years.

At 6.9 ounces, it was the size of a portobello mushroom, and it fetched a pretty penny at March: $250.

"I've heard tales of bigger, but they're like fish stories. No proof," Wells said. Such a delicacy could easily sell at auction for $500, Wells said.

Europe's more famous white truffles are much more expensive, one once selling for $165,000, said fungus expert and Wells' fellow truffle promoter Charles Lefevre.

Wells is secretive about where he found the truffle. It came from private forestland somewhere in the Willamette Valley or the foothills of its flanking mountains.

Oregon truffles grow at the base of Douglas fir trees, mostly in young virgin forest on the edges of meadows or land that was previously pasture.

With growth that's triggered by cold weather, the truffle season starts at the north end of the valley and moves south.

January is prime time for truffles. The season runs through spring, when Oregon's white truffles will appear.

Wells said the second Oregon Truffle Festival in Eugene is scheduled Jan. 26-28.

It offers those with money to burn the opportunity to taste truffles prepared by some of the state's finest chefs. Tickets for the three-day event range from $15 for truffle tasting and lectures, to $1,025 for admittance to all the lectures, tours and meals of the three-day event.

A dinner featuring five courses prepared by James Beard-award winning chefs, for $150, is also a fundraising event for the nonprofit foundation The James Beard House and for a scholarship in the culinary arts program at Lane Community College.