Gravy

In “Sniffing Out American Truffles,” Gravy reporter Irina Zhorov explores truffle production in the U.S.—and how the South is emerging as a hub. 

Truffle production in the U.S. is a young industry. Commercial cultivation started in the 1980s. Truffles are a complicated business. When you’re farming truffles, what you’re really growing is trees. The truffles are fungi that grow on tree roots. The tree and the fungi work synergistically, the tree providing sugars to the fungi for nourishment and the fungi helping the roots reach further into the soil to absorb more nutrients. For this relationship to work well, and for truffles to flourish, the type of tree and fungi must be a good match, the soil ought to be of sufficiently high pH, and weather and moisture need to be suitable.

Europeans, particularly in Italy and France, figured out the formula to make this complex system function. Truffle orchards once abounded on the continent. World Wars I and II, as well as changing land use, destroyed many of those operations, but the industry there is still established. When American farmers began to seed their truffle orchards, most of them imported European truffle varieties on European trees. European truffles are big and delicious, and want-to be growers knew that system worked. But European trees have struggled in North America; they lack defenses for local pests, and many of the early orchards have died out.

 

An operation in North Carolina, Burwell Farms, tried something different. They inoculated native loblolly pines with the European bianchetto truffle variety. They're now the most productive truffle orchard in the United States, but they still can't keep up with growing demand.

 

As the industry matures, there are also attempts to cultivate native truffle varieties, like the Appalachian truffle, the Blue Ridge truffle, and other newly discovered species. And there's growing interest in foraging for native truffles, too. The industry is becoming increasingly attuned to local varieties and possibilities to make this luxurious product our own.

 

In this episode of Gravy, Zhorov visits Burwell Farms and follows their dogs at work harvesting truffles. We hear from Burwell Farms' Jeffrey Coker; Margaret Townsend, president of the North American Truffle Growers Association and owner of NewTown Truffiere; chef Joe Kindred on what excites him about local truffles; and North Carolina extension agents Katie Learn and Jeanine Davis on local varieties.
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In “Virginia Has the Blue Catfish Blues,”Gravy reporter Anya Groner takes listeners to the Chesapeake Bay, where, over the past decade, invasive blue catfish have derailed the ecosystem in the East Coast’s largest fish nursery.

Native to the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio River basins, blue catfish were first stocked in the bay’s tributary rivers in the 1970s to provide a new trophy fish for recreational anglers. At the time, no one predicted that a freshwater catfish could make its way into the brackish waters of the Chesapeake Bay, much less outcompete native crabs, oysters, and fish. The impact has been devastating for the environment and for the seafood industry. Generational watermen are going out of business, and most of the fishmongers who buy and process their catch have shut their doors.

Yet, Dr. Michael Schwarz, associate director of Virginia Tech's Seafood and Agricultural Research & Extension Center, says there’s a lucrative way to manage the population of this expanding apex predator and reinvigorate the seafood industry.  Blue catfish happen to be delicious. Studies show that managed correctly, a blue catfish fishery could have an economic impact of $1.1 billion and create 7,000 new jobs.

“ The easiest solution for anything is to eat it,” says Kyle Rowley, the chief operating officer of Skrimp Shack, a fourteen-restaurant franchise in Virginia and North Carolina. As a topwater predator, blue catfish don’t have the muddy flavor sometimes associated with farmed catfish. And Rowley says, they fry beautifully. Three years ago, he added blue catfish to Skrimp Shack’s menu. “We're doing something right that is actually helping our fellow Virginians, and we enjoy that.”

But building a market for an invasive species is an inherent conflict of interest, says Dr. Mary Fabrizio, a biologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “Basically you're starting the fishery to put itself out of business,” she says. If the fishery is as lucrative as some predict it can be, the goal could switch from shrinking the population to maintaining it. Fabrizio’s computer models show that unless a very high number of catfish are pulled from the bay, culling catfish won’t rejuvenate native fish.

Join Groner as she travels from the docks of the Chesapeake Bay to marine labs and restaurants, asking watermen, fishmongers, scientists, and restaurateurs to ask what it will take to build a blue catfish market and whether it’s possible to balance the needs of the seafood industry and the ecosystem.
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In “A Taste of the Other Georgia in Pensacola,” Gravy reporter Martin Padgett ventures to Pensacola to sample a bit of Georgia—a Georgia much further away than the five-hour car ride to Atlanta.

Florida’s Gulf Coast brings to mind pictures of crystal-sand beaches and the Navy’s Blue Angels, but until recently, it hasn’t been known as a haven for global food. That’s begun to change, and as Pensacola has begun to grow out of its small-town roots, Chef George Lazi has brought a new cuisine to the table, along with a symbol of hospitality.

Lazi grew up in Soviet Georgia, but when the USSR collapsed in 1991 and Georgia declared independence, the childhood he knew disappeared. When Georgia’s economy imploded, families would
go without work, without power, without currency—but would still gather to share what food and drink they had, and to drink Georgian wine from the ceremonial ram’s horn present in nearly every home, a horn called the khantsi. Lazi left Georgia when he was nineteen to come to America, where he learned from some of the best chefs in the hallowed halls of food. But after he married, he and his wife, Luba, looked south to find a place they could build their own restaurant, and a place they could call home.

While he drinks very strong espresso with Lazi at the chef’s Pearl & Horn restaurant in Pensacola, Padgett learns how the chef’s family has brought its story to an unclaimed corner of the South. The traditional southern foodstuffs like red snapper are the stars on the menu—only here they’re paired with khmeli suneli, a Georgian spice that blends fenugreek, coriander, and marigold. And if you look around Pearl &
Horn’s dining room, you might catch a glimpse of one of Lazi’s khantsi, standing proudly on the bar.

In this episode, Gravy asks about the items we keep and those we leave behind, while exploring how we meld one culture into another through immigration—and what that means to the ever-changing South.

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Atlanta can seem like it’s a very long way from the oystering communities in Florida’s Panhandle. There are, in fact, hundreds of miles between them. But there are ways even distant places are intimately connected, perhaps more intimately than you’d guess. And when one of those places is in trouble, those connections get revealed.

This is the story of what’s happening to the oysters in Apalachicola Bay, and why that has inspired interstate legal battles—even a Supreme Court lawsuit. It’s also the story of what a place whose whole identity revolves around seafood does, when that seafood is threatened.

The audio from oysterman A.L. Quick was gathered in 2006 as part of the Southern Foodways Alliance oral history project on Florida's Forgotten Coast. You can listen to that oral history and more than a dozen others with oystermen and other residents of Franklin County at southernfoodways.org.
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Order a catfish po-boy or a few pounds of crawfish in Acadiana any Friday between Mardi Gras and Easter, and you may be surprised to learn that your delight is another person’s sacrifice. The Catholic tradition of abstaining from meat on Fridays in Lent is alive and well in Southwest Louisiana, a region where more than a third identify as Catholic. Thanks to the long list of Catholic churches and restaurants that roll out an array of delectable seafood options on Lenten Fridays, it’s not much of a burden. St. Francis of Assisi in Breaux Bridge and the Knights of Columbus Council at St. Pius X in Lafayette both have long-standing Lenten fish fry traditions that bring together their communities and welcome anyone hungry for fried catfish, regardless of religion. Olde Tyme Grocery in Lafayette sells close to 2,300 seafood po-boys during the 40-day period. Religious abstinence never tasted so good. 

The episode was reported and produced by Sarah Holtz.
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