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Loading... Truffle Boy: My Unexpected Journey Through the Exotic Food Undergroundby Ian Purkayastha
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  breic | Mar 30, 2021 |    ) carolfoisset | Feb 28, 2019 | no reviews | add a review
"Ian Purkayastha is New York City's leading truffle importer and boasts a devoted clientele of top chefs nationwide, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Chang, Sean Brock, and David Bouley. But before he was purveying the world's most expensive fungus to the country's most esteemed chefs, Ian was just a food-obsessed teenager in rural Arkansas--a misfit with a peculiar fascination for rare and exotic ingredients. The son of an Indian immigrant father and a Texan mother, Ian learned to forage for wild mushrooms from an uncle in the Ozark hills. Thus began a single-track fixation that led him to learn about the prized but elusive truffle, the king of all fungi. His first taste of truffle at age 15 sparked his improbable yet remarkable adventure through the strange--and often corrupt--business of the exotic food trade. Rife with tales from the hidden underbelly of the elite restaurant scene, Truffle Boy chronicles Ian's high stakes dealings with a truffle kingpin in Serbia, meth-head foragers in Oregon, crooked businessmen and maniacal chefs in Manhattan, gypsy truffle hunters in the forests of Hungary, and a supreme adventure to find "Gucci mushrooms" in the Himalayan foothills--the land of the gods. He endures harsh failures along the way but rebuilds with tremendous success by selling not just truffles but also caviar, wild mushrooms, rare foraged edibles, Wagyu beef, and other nearly unobtainable ingredients demanded by his Michelin-starred clients. Truffle Boy is a thrilling coming-of-age story and the incredible but true tale of a country kid who grows up to become a force in the world of fine dining,"--Amazon.com. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)381.456640092Social sciences Commerce, Communications, Transportation Commerce Specific products and servicesLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.2)
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Wikipedia in English
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> People often think that mushrooms grow best in ancient virgin forests. The opposite is true. Mycorrhizal fungi including truffles are considered early successional species, which thrive in recently disturbed habitats. In the Pacific Northwest, the biggest disturbance for the past hundred years has been logging, and the clear-cuts are most often replanted with Douglas fir, a valuable species for lumber that is also a host for native truffles and other fungi. The result is that millions of acres in the Pacific Northwest are popping with truffles, chanterelles, matsutakes, porcini, hedgehog mushrooms, and other commercially important species. Unlike wild mushrooms, however, the native truffles weren’t esteemed.
> Europeans used dogs or pigs to hunt truffles because the animals can sniff out the ripe ones. Immature truffles lack scent. American truffle hunters just randomly raked forest floor to uncover every truffle they could find, ripe or not. As a result, most of the haul would be unripe, and so chefs thought that Oregon truffles were flavorless
> Most people have the mistaken idea that truffles are exclusively foraged from the wild. In fact, the black have been cultivated under oak trees for almost two hundred years in France, and since the 1970s the French have also raised black truffles on hazelnut trees, sometimes called filberts, a species that matures faster than oaks
> Based on what I was seeing, Ubaldo must have sourced half his white truffles from Hungary. My stomach cramped as I understood Ubaldo’s secret. He had fooled me into thinking I was selling Italian white truffles, and I had unknowingly swindled my clients by telling them the same thing
> The main culinary difference between white and black truffle is that the latter can be cooked without killing its flavor, which is why black truffles can also be canned and used to flavor preserved products like pâté.
> The last time my parents went to India, a month-long voyage to source ingredients and furniture for Khana, they had bought me a shirt. I remember receiving it in the mail and inhaling the exact smell that now surrounded us in the Delhi night. (