Ian Purkayastha

It is difficult to read about Purkayastha's repeated career missteps, but he clearly has a passion for his métier.

> 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.… (altro)