At Black Boar Truffle in Bozeman, truffle mycelium is harvested and dried before being ground into a fine powder that’s used to authentically flavor a line of culinary products
How a Bozeman Company Is Shaping a Culinary Ingredient
Just north of Four Corners, tucked away in a quaint complex, the Black Boar Truffle facility appears rather unassuming. Yet behind its doors lives an operation reshaping how one of the world’s most mysterious culinary ingredients will be understood and experienced: the truffle.
Immediately upon entering, the space feels alive and fluid in motion. Noises of preparation echo off each wall. The team, made up of only eight people, is buzzing through the space, preparing for a regular food-safety audit.
The clean air nearly tastes metallic, emitting an earthy undertone. It’s the case until entering the production room, where the soft scent becomes immediately pungent; this is where the magic happens. Where the impossible became possible.
Unlike most fungi, the fruiting body of a truffle develops entirely underground. They mature underneath the soil, establishing symbiotic relationships with the roots of certain hearty trees, like oak and hazelnut. The mycelium exchanges nutrients with these root systems, and the treasured truffle body remains hidden below.
This growing method is what has kept the peculiar fungi in such high esteem for generations. Traditionally gathered in parts of Europe, culinary truffles also grow in the Pacific Northwest, where trained dogs sniff them out for harvest in the wild.
Before ever meeting Black Boar founder Kelly Gaisford, of Bozeman, it becomes clear that this company is challenging the conventional limits of how truffles can be grown and experienced.
Bags upon bags of Black Boar’s signature Organic Black Winter Truffle Powder fill the shelves, representing years of research condensed into something quite simple, yet absolutely revolutionary.
THE FACES BEHIND THE MICROSCOPE
Aaron Sanchez, production manager and chef at Black Boar, guides me through each controlled space. In the growing room, the light, earthy undertone quickly transforms into a chocolatey, pungent scent. Shelves are lined with mushroom grow bags, each holding a prepared substrate that’s been largely overtaken by dense, fuzzy mycelium networks.
“I kind of nerd out over this,” Sanchez says with a laugh as he explains the intricate process.
The substrate is the organic material that the fungus grows through. Once inoculated with Black Boar’s pure truffle culture, the bags sit in a dark, temperature-regulated room for about six to eight weeks, while the mycelium colonizes the food source. From there, the fungal material is harvested, dried, then ground into a fine powder.
After we observe the process, Tyler Gaisford, Kelly’s brother, shows me the finished product.
Bags upon bags of Black Boar’s signature Organic Black Winter Truffle Powder fill the shelves, representing years of research condensed into something quite simple, yet absolutely revolutionary. The bags are filled with 100 percent Tuber melanosporum; thousands of dollars’ worth of powder that could easily be mistaken for cocoa—at least until you taste it.
How was this possible? With natural growing conditions near-impossible to replicate, how did a quiet company from Bozeman get here?
The answer begins with the founder.
Kelly’s light and whimsical energy precedes her as she enters the conference room. Each of her thoughts builds effortlessly from the last. She’s youthful. Chatty. Funny. Intensively inquisitive.
She beams as she reminisces about recent recognition from the Research Chefs Association, yet it never feels boastful. She’s reliving the milestone. The company has won the association’s attendee-voted Culinology Expo Product Award five times: one of those times being recognized for a truffle-infused mole that Kelly developed with Sanchez.
She remembers just how far truffles still flew under the radar in the United States when she began introducing her product at culinary showcases. “What can you make with this?” she was asked. “How do you sell this in product form?” “It will never catch on.”
Yet Kelly only took this doubt as motivation to prove them all wrong.
Through careful product development, she experimented with everything from salt to truffle maple sugar, eventually creating one of her proudest products: The Black Boar truffle soy sauce. The line continued into oils, salts, extracts, concentrates, and powders. Black Boar uses 100-percent real truffle—both black winter truffle (Tuber melanosporum) and white truffle (Tuber magnatum pico)—to create delicious, authentically flavored food.
But to create a line of products was one thing; to create a reliable source for the main ingredient was a different effort entirely.
ENDLESS CURIOSITY
Black Boar officially launched in 2011 with a line of culinary products, but the exploration began nearly a decade before that.
Kelly started her career working with medicinal mushrooms. As her fascination with fungi grew, so did her curiosity about truffles and her desire to make one of the culinary world’s most exclusive ingredients more accessible.
Gary Strobel, a retired Montana State University professor and plant scientist who received his doctorate from the University of California, Davis, was already a longtime family friend. That connection eventually grew into a scientific exploration of what’s possible.
Kelly smiles as she retells the story of how their idea came to fruition. “I don’t give up. Do you give up?” she asked Strobel once upon a time.
“I never,” Strobel replied.
They were determined to find a way to increase accessibility while maintaining authenticity.
Around this same time, many consumers’ first encounters with “truffle flavor” came not from truffles themselves but from manufactured aroma compounds added to oils and other foods. These synthetic additives could mimic the aromatic characteristics using petroleum-based chemicals, but they weren’t the fungus itself.
Black Boar took an alternate route, obtaining flavor from the organism directly. In 2001, while still working with medicinal mushrooms, Kelly’s colleague and mentor, Moshe Shifrine—who also received his doctorate from the University of California, Davis—presented Kelly with a truffle strain.
While moving facilities, the strain died. But with Strobel’s help, they were able to isolate the strain again. It was what Kelly recalls as the most difficult fungal isolation of his career.
Eventually, Strobel succeeded in isolating and propagating the living fungus, laying down the foundation for the process that Black Boar still prides itself on today. That work became the basis of the company’s patented methods for isolating and cultivating this rare fungus.
Even at age 87, Strobel stays healthily involved with Black Boar—continuing to experiment and ask questions, still carrying that endless curiosity.
FROM LAB TO KITCHEN
While the company saw progress in the lab, someone still had to convince chefs, manufacturers, and an industry heavily rooted in tradition that a small, woman-run, Montana-based company had created something well worth paying attention to.
As a woman so passionately driven, as if fueled by the doubts of others, there was no one better to take on the challenge than Kelly.
From the beginning, Kelly intentionally selected partners who viewed truffles as so much more than a simple delicacy, but as an ingredient deserving of respect. Rather than trying to flood or replace the wild-truffle market, Black Boar paved a different path—one that could make real truffle flavor more affordable and accessible while maintaining its connection to the organism itself.
Her work caught the attention of chefs, food manufacturers, and international brands searching for an authentic truffle flavor rather than synthetic substitutes. Black Boar’s reach also extends far beyond products in its own name; its ingredients have found their way into products from many large-scale companies, meaning many consumers may have tasted Black Boar’s holy grail without even realizing it.
And the most interesting work may still be ahead.
In the final room of the production tour, Sanchez shows me something else that stretches the bounds of what’s possible. Through the microscope, millions upon millions of fuzzy microscopic threads weave together into an intricate network of life and information. Mycelium.
In the same production space, another experiment suggests how Black Boar may be pushing beyond cultivation through solely mycelium. The work is still developing, yet endless curiosity strikes again as Sanchez alludes to a breakthrough that could further transform the future of growing truffles.
The conversation then shifts beyond Tuber melanosporum, toward regional fungi. There are multiple species that have remained unexplored, one being the huitlacoche, commonly called corn smut.
Usually referred to as the Mexican Truffle, huitlacoche naturally grows on corn and has long been celebrated in Mexican cuisine. While many farmers view it as a crop disease, chefs appreciate it for its deep, earthy flavor. Indigenous groups have been utilizing it for medicinal reasons for generations, and new experiments in the lab may reveal why.
And so another question arises: What else is possible?
What began as a single question about one once-gatekept European truffle may be evolving into something much larger. By unearthing how the authentic Tuber melanosporum can be isolated, cultivated, and introduced to the culinary world in a brand new way, Black Boar has opened the door to asking similar questions about regional fungi across North America and beyond. For a company that flies so well under the radar, Black Boar will be one to watch as Kelly and her crew continue to push their research to new extremes and uncover more of the impossible.
Among Kelly’s favorite aspects of the work is collaborating with chefs and food professionals with new ideas for truffle products, and she encourages those interested to visit blackboartruffle.com.
