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Franklin Garland of Hillsborough pulls a gallon-sized plastic bag out of his freezer, opens it up and breathes in the nutty, earthy aroma.

To the undiscerning eye, the bag's contents look like nothing more than frozen clumps of mud. But those clumps are prized among gourmet chefs, and the roughly one pound's worth of black Perigord truffles in the bag will set an epicure back about $800.

Garland takes one out, shaves a few slivers off and puts them on a paper plate.

"That's about $10 worth of truffle right there," he said, pointing to the slivers.

"But we have higher demand than we can supply. I estimate, just from all the calls I get, that the demand is about 500 to 1,000 pounds a week. And we only produce about 50 pounds a year."

One of the most valuable foodstuffs on Earth is blossoming in North Carolina, and several farmers in the Piedmont region are experimenting with "the diamond of the kitchen."

Though the local truffle industry is still in its infancy, and a number of farmers are still waiting for their first truffles to sprout, many expect the subterranean fungus to become a lucrative business.

"Before the only truffles that were available were from France or Spain or Italy," said Jane Morgan Smith , co-owner with her husband Rick of Keep Your Fork truffle farm in King.

"And they had to be canned or frozen to be shipped over here. But ours are fresh, out of the ground. I feel they're worth more (than the European truffles)."

In 1978, Garland was reading the Wall Street Journal when he stumbled upon an article about truffle growers in France. He was working as a professor of electronics at Alamance Community College and running a greenhouse at the time. He had never eaten a truffle, but on a whim decided to venture to Europe to learn more about the fungus. In 1979, he became one of the first people in the United States to try growing truffles when he planted about 750 inoculated trees on his farm in Hillsborough. Twelve years went by, however, before he hit pay dirt.

Known scientifically as tuber melanosporum , truffles grow on the roots of trees (commonly oaks, hazelnut and filberts in North Carolina) and have been collected in Southern Europe since antiquity. But it wasn't until the 19th century that they were successfully domesticated. Even today, growers still rely heavily on luck. They also need to be patient, as five to 10 years might pass before an orchard yields a single truffle. And many trees may not yield anything at all.

"It's not like putting a tomato seed in the ground and watering and fertilizing it and knowing that three months later you'll have a tomato," said truffle expert and grower Tom Michaels of Chuckey, Tenn. "Truffle growing is really more of an art. It's not rocket science, though we wish it were rocket science, because in rocket science you know exactly what you're doing. Truffle growing is a long process and the results have been variable. It is for the risk taker."

In Pinehurst, Susan Rice a former real estate investor, said she hopes to eventually have a 200-acre orchard — which would be the world's second largest. She planted her first trees last year and is currently working on clearing her acreage. She plans on having 100 acres planted by November.

"It's a pivotal time in the industry," said Corey Rice, Rice's 31-year-old son and director of farming. "It's such a young industry. We kind of make a joke that this isn't something you can just to go to the agricultural extension and say, 'Hey, I want to grow truffles' and get three or four manuals on how to do it. There's been a lot of fine tuning to get (the industry) to where it is today, and we want to take it to the next level and create something that many chefs here in the U.S. can use."

According to the North Carolina Specialty Crops Program (a division of the state's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services) the state is home to more than 60 truffle farms, many of them started with the assistance of Garland and his wife Betty. The two received a $235,000 grant from the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission in 2003 to start 50 test plantations. The 56-year-old Garland has about 10 acres of his own, but a major part of his business is selling inoculated seedlings for $24 each. How he inoculates the trees is a trade secret, as are many other aspects of the truffle business.

Though the soil does require some liming to bring up the pH level (from 6.5 to 8), conditions in North Carolina are ideal for truffles, Garland said.

"Our climate is very similar to climates in Spain, France and Italy," he said. "It's a temperate climate, good for the trees. Truffles form in the spring, so they're in the process of forming right now. They'll be harvested in the winter."

Garland's clients include Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse and other local and national chefs. Most gourmands can buy directly from the growers, though availability varies throughout the year (truffle season generally runs from late fall to early spring) and they have trouble keeping up with demand from restaurants. Some specialty shops sell bottled or canned truffles.

The food of kings

Few are the people who can say they've eaten truffles three times a day on a regular basis. Rick Smith is one of them.

"You'll get hooked on truffles," the 63-year-old retired maintenance worker said. "We were eating like kings last year. We had truffle omelets, truffle butter. I said to my wife, 'Honey, who do you know among kings and queens who eat truffles every day?"

The Smiths' quarter-acre orchard this year yielded no truffles, but the few pounds they dug up last year caught the attention of Martha Stewart, who filmed a segment for her show on the couple's property.

When they planted their orchard eight years ago, they fielded many questions on the order of "how do you grow chocolate?"

Though the wrinkly orbs look like the ganache confections, and some do have a chocolatey aroma, their taste is elusive.

"It's like asking what a banana tastes like. Well, it tastes like a banana," Garland said. "Their flavor is unique. They're kind of earthy and mushroomy, but truffles — they taste like truffles. They're a very, very dense mushroom with a consistency somewhere between an apple and a nut. They're crunchy."

The flavor is delicate, but can go a long way. Less than half-an-ounce can flavor a pound of butter. Gourmands put them in everything from ice cream to vodka. But in any recipe that calls for truffles, Garland explained, truffles are the main ingredient, even if only a little bit is being used.

"You can have a very good steak, but if you're using truffles, the main attraction is that you're using truffles, even if it's a prime steak that cost $70," he said.

A rare commodity

With their border collie, Friday, the Smiths set out for the orchard. Friday is trained to paw at the ground when he sniffs a truffle. Trees with truffles growing under them will usually have a circle of bare ground, or brule, around them. In the old days, truffle hunters used pigs to sniff them out, but the swine would often end up eating the fungus, so most people now use specially trained dogs — which typically have no appetite for truffles — to find the culinary treasures.

On this day, the Smiths walk away empty-handed.

"Water is one of the things that concerns us," Rick Smith said. "You have to keep them moist, and this past year with the drought, we barely kept them alive. We just couldn't use that much water without running our well dry. But we had a pond built, and as we speak I'm in the process of laying pipe to the trees."

Changing climate has hurt the truffle harvest in Europe, where, according to a recent Associated Press story, truffle production has declined from about 1,000 tons a year in the early part of the 20th century to 50 tons. For that reason, however, many local farmers are optimistic about the growth of the American truffle business.

"The DNA is the same as the ones from Europe. If you're a true, true connoisseur you might be able to detect a little difference in taste, but I've sent North Carolina truffles to chefs and they can't tell the difference," Susan Rice said. "And there's such a shortage right now that it'll probably take 30 years before anyone can even think of having an overage of truffles. And that's if everyone started planting today, since it takes five years to really get them going."

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com