Watch Party Downtown Make Pull-Apart Cheese Bread with Oregon White Truffles

Each year, Oregonians forage for an estimated 2 to10 tons of wild white and black truffles, and Eugene is the epicenter for eating the rare, highly prized aromatic fungi: Local chefs regularly serve the truffles throughout harvest (December through March), and they actually know how to use them (too many chefs obscure their flavors by combining them with bold ingredients). As the video shows below, Party Downtown is one of the best places to eat truffles in Eugene (and one of the few places to eat American-grown truffles in America).

I had the ultimate Oregon truffle experience at Eugene's Party Downtown restaurant while visiting for the 2017 Oregon Truffle Festival. It's owned by husband and wife team, Mark Kosmicki (manger) and Tiffany Norton (head chef), and they gave me my first real Oregon truffle moment: pull-apart cheese bread touting Oregon white truffle-infused Saint Angel triple-cream cheese. I visited again in January 2018 to recreate the moment, and it was everything and more — buttery challah, heroic creaminess, and heady, punch-in-the-gut-pungent musk from the white truffle. And I didn't even need to visit Italy or Croatia for my Tuber-magnatum hookup this time.

Mark says foragers sometimes find truffles year round near Eugene, and he'll put truffles on the menu whenever a forager shows up at his back door with a fresh crop. If you want to eat Oregon truffles, I highly recommend starting in Eugene, visiting in January or February for the very peak of the harvest. Call Party Downtown to see if they have truffles on the menu, and then maybe slip them a fifty to make sure that cheese bread's involved.

And if you want to learn the ins and outs of American truffle farming, check out my article on Eater.com, Why Haven’t American Truffles Taken Root Yet?

Here's the video:

Music: Voltaic - Kevin Macleod - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDcX23Rwrzo