The seventh annual Oregon Truffle Festival Marketplace returns on Sunday, Jan. 29 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hilton Eugene & Conference Center in Eugene. The Marketplace features a stunning array of Oregon wines, artisan foods and wild-crafted products and services related to the burgeoning truffle industry. This culinary tasting marketplace caps off the one-of-a-kind, three-day Oregon Truffle Festival (OTF). All Weekend Experiences and the Grand Truffle Dinner are sold out.
Marketplace admission is $15 at the door and includes truffle tastings and access to a wide variety of artisan foods for sampling and purchase. The event features three truffle cooking demonstrations, tastings by local chefs, a truffle dog demonstration, dog harvested fresh truffles for sale and a lecture series. A $20 ticket includes wine tastings featuring eight of Oregon’s outstanding wineries.
“The Marketplace is a celebration of Oregon’s artisanal foods, our unsurpassed wines, and the authentic experience of native Oregon truffles, fresh from their source,” said Leslie Scott, Oregon Truffle Festival managing partner.
Returning gourmet food purveyors include:
Rogue Creamery – award winning cheeses
Red Ridge Farms – Oregon olive oil
Eugene City Bakery – truffled shortbread
PremRose Edibles – truffle-infused chocolates
Joel Palmer House – Oregon truffle oil.
More than a dozen new artisan purveyors will join the 2012 Marketplace to offer a taste of Oregon’s truffle bounty.
Local winemakers this year include perennial favorites as well as several highly acclaimed small producers whose wines are rarely available for tasting. A complete list of all represented winemakers can be found on the festival website.
The Marketplace lecture series will feature a special weekend guest, former New York Times food writer Molly O’Neill, who will speak about her “One Big Table” project and authentic American culinary traditions. The event will also include a talk about the James Beard Public Market in Portland, emphasizing the changing world and the importance of knowing from where one’s food is sourced. Dr. Marvin Hausman will be lecturing on current developments in the health benefits of mushrooms, a topic much requested by Marketplace attendees, and the series will conclude with a short film gifted to the festival by French filmmaker Regis Prevot titled “Black Magic: The Nose in the Truffle.”
O’Neill, along with authors Kathy Gunst of NPR’s “Here and Now,” and Cole Danehower, editor of Northwest Palate magazine, will be on hand to sign their books, available for purchase at the Marketplace.
The festival will also offer for sale a limited number of signed archival prints of truffle cartoons by award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Felipe Galindo, one of which was created exclusively for the festival.
This year the festival is honored to be partnering with the Oregon Falun Dafa Association to offer discounted tickets to Marketplace attendees for the Feb. 1 performance of “Shen Yun,” a show in which magnificently costumed dancers move in poetic arrangements that evoke pastoral beauty, imperial drama, and the glory of ancient Chinese culture. Visit their table inside the Marketplace to access the code for purchasing discounted tickets to this extraordinary performance.
For more information on the Oregon Truffle Festival and on the Sunday Marketplace, visit www.oregontrufflefestival.com.
About the Oregon Truffle Festival
Now in its seventh year, the Oregon Truffle Festival is the only event of its kind in North America and showcases a truly unique culinary treasure. Oregon plays a key role in the growing international truffle industry, through both the focal point provided by the Oregon Truffle Festival, and through decades of research on truffles at Oregon State University (OSU). Many of the world’s most successful truffle researchers and farmers received their graduate and postdoctoral training at OSU, including Dr. Charles Lefevre, festival co-founder and owner of New World Truffieres. For more information visit www.oregontrufflefestival.com.
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