Name: The Truffle Kingpin of New York City
Uploaded: 2018-11-05T02:18:22.000Z
Duration: 2 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Truffles are just such an elusive, mysterious ingredient.

These are the Spanish winter black truffles, they're from Périgord.

They just have this alluring, earthiness quality that I've never tasted before.

They kept me totally obsessed with them for almost 10 years now.

My name is Ian Purkayastha, and I procure hard to find ingredients from around the world, mainly fresh truffles.

I'm a dealer of sorts; I deal truffles out of my car.

It definitely has this underground element.

When I was younger, people used to call me the Truffle Boy.

I'm constantly on the hunt for identifying the most desirable regions that produce the very best truffles.

-They smell really nice. Where are these guys from? -Spain.

They've never been successfully cultivated on a commercial scale.

And they grow underground; and they're obviously extremely rare and hard to find; that's why they're worth their weight in gold.

As soon as the truffle is found, the clock is constantly ticking, because there's only a seven-day shelf life.

They're 98 percent water; every single day that a truffle is unused, it's evaporating.

I still get excited every time I get a new truffle shipment in.

They are sent from Europe to JFK, where they're cleared by FDA, USDA, Homeland Security and Customs.

I sort them, I go through every single truffle, looking for imperfections, and then I, basically hop in the car with a box full of truffles.

And sell to 90% of the fine dinning restaurants in New York.

Everyone from, David Chang to Sean Brock, to Eleven Madison Park, Le Bernardin, a variety of Michelin stared restaurants.

During truffle season we import around $200,000 worth of truffles a week.

A small amount of truffles could be anywhere from five to 15,000.

We're dealing with quite a lot of valuable product.

I'm doing something that I love, it doesn't even feel like work anymore.

My warehouse smells like truffles, my car smells like truffles, my apartment.

It's like I can't escape truffle, it's like they're smothering me, which is a great problem to have, I guess.