Indian food, with its hodgepodge of ingredients and intoxicating aromas, is coveted around the world. The labor-intensive cuisine and its mix of spices is more often than not a revelation for those who sit down to eat it for the first time. Heavy doses of cardamom, cayenne, tamarind and other flavors can overwhelm an unfamiliar palate. Together, they help form the pillars of what tastes so good to so many people.
But behind the appeal of Indian food — what makes it so novel and so delicious — is also a stranger and subtler truth. In a large new analysis of more than 2,000 popular recipes, data scientists have discovered perhaps the key reason why Indian food tastes so unique: It does something radical with flavors, something very different from what we tend to do in the United States and the rest of Western culture. And it does it at the molecular level.
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Before we go further, let's take a step back and consider what flavors are and how they interact. If you were to hold a microscope to most Western dishes, you would find an interesting but not all-too-surprising trend. Popular food pairings in this part of the world combine ingredients that share like flavors, which food chemists have broken down into their molecular parts — precise chemical compounds that, when combined, give off a distinct taste.
Most of the compounds have scientific names, though one of the simpler compounds is acetal, which, as the food chemist George Burdock has written, is "refreshing, pleasant, and [has a] fruity-green odor," and can be found in whiskey, apple juice, orange juice and raw beets. On average, there are just over 50 flavor compounds in each food ingredient.
A nifty chart shared by Scientific American in 2013 shows which foods share the most flavor compounds with others and which food pairings have the most flavor compounds in common. Peanut butter and roasted peanuts have one of the most significant overlaps (no surprise there). But there are connections that are more difficult to predict: strawberries, for instance, have more in common with white wine than they do with apples, oranges or honey.
Data crunching Indian recipes
Chefs in the West like to make dishes with ingredients that have overlapping flavors. But not all cuisines adhere to the same rule. Many Asian cuisines have been shown to belie the trend by favoring dishes with ingredients that don't overlap in flavor. And Indian food, in particular, is one of the most powerful counterexamples.
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Researchers at the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur crunched data on several thousand recipes from a popular online recipe site called TarlaDalal.com. They broke each dish down to its ingredients, and then compared how often and heavily ingredients share flavor compounds.
The answer? Not too often.
Here's an easy way to make sense of what they did, through the lens of a single, theoretical dish. Say you have a dish with 4 different ingredients, like the one below:
Each one of those ingredients has its own list of flavor compounds. And any two of those ingredients' lists might have some overlap. Take the coconut and onion, for instance. We can all agree that these two things are pretty different, but we can also see (in the Venn diagram below) that there's some overlap in their flavor make-up. (Ignore the math symbols.)
You could create the same diagram for all the ingredients with overlapping flavor compounds, as in this diagram. There are six that have overlap. (Again, ignore the math.)
The researchers did this for each of the several thousand recipes, which used a total of 200 ingredients. They examined how much the underlying flavor compounds overlapped in single dishes and discovered something very different from Western cuisines. Indian cuisine tended to mix ingredients whose flavors don't overlap at all.
"We found that average flavor sharing in Indian cuisine was significantly lesser than expected," the researchers wrote.
In other words, the more overlap two ingredients have in flavor, the less likely they are to appear in the same Indian dish.
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The unique makeup of Indian cuisine can be seen in some dishes more than others, and it seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients. Spices usually indicate dishes with flavors that have no chemical common ground.
More specifically, many Indian recipes contain cayenne, the basis of curry powder that is in dishes like red curry, green curry, or massaman curry. And when a dish contains cayenne, the researchers found, it's unlikely to have other ingredients that share similar flavors. The same can be said of green bell pepper, coriander and garam masala, which are nearly as ubiquitous in Indian cuisine.
"Each of the spices is uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavor sharing pattern with rest of the ingredients," the researchers noted.
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Milk, butter, bread, and rice, meanwhile—all of which are hallmarks of Western cuisine—were found to be associated with just the opposite: flavor pairings that match. When any of those ingredients appeared in an Indian dish, there was a good chance there would be a lot of flavor overlap.
A lesson for all chefs
The takeaway is that part of what makes Indian food so appealing is the way flavors rub up against each other. The cuisine is complicated, no doubt: the average Indian dish, after all, contains at least 7 ingredients, and the total number of ingredients observed by the researchers amounted to almost 200 out of the roughly 381 observed around the world. But all those ingredients — and the spices especially — are all uniquely important because in any single dish, each one brings a unique flavor.
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But the upshot should also be a thought that we might be approaching food from the wrong angle. Combining ingredients with like flavors is a useful (and often delicious) strategy, but it might be a somewhat misleading rule of thumb. Indian cuisine, after all, is cherished globally, and yet hinges on a decidedly different ingredient pairing logic.
Post by downtoearth on Mar 4, 2015 12:00:43 GMT -5
Mmmm. I have leftover coconut curry for lunch and I'm hungry now.
Oh and there was a study that came out in 2008ish that talked about how the spice combo of Indian food (fenugreek, I think is in most curries) actually increased breast milk production in women - I used that info to increase my Indian food intake and love while pregnant and breast feeding.
I asked the guys I work with if they like Indian food (bosses were in from out of state and we were deciding where to go for lunch) and they all answered "no, I've never had it, but I don't like curry". ^o) Bear in mind, they're all 22, fresh out of college, and their idea of going out for lunch is Sheetz (for those unfamiliar... think Wawa... or gas station that serves quick food).
I asked FI's bff on Saturday and he said the same thing... never had it, but I don't like curry. OMG. I need to get FI to an Indian place sometime. He's never had it, but he loves trying food from other cultures, and we were almost there on Saturday before his friend went dumb. Dammit. I WANT NAAN.
Post by cattledogkisses on Mar 4, 2015 12:35:11 GMT -5
Interesting! One of the things that I love about many Indian/Middle Eastern/North African cuisines is the way that they mix sweet and savory flavors together (adding raisins and cinnamon to a spicy meat dish, for example), but apparently it goes much deeper than that!
Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mix by hand until a soft ball of dough is formed. Knead for about 10 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic.
Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl and turn it once to coat with oil. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature for about 1 1/2 hours.
Place a pizza or baking stone in the oven. Preheat the oven to 475°F.
Punch down the dough and divide equally into 4 pieces. Roll into balls, cover, and let rest for 10 minutes. Roll out each ball of dough on a floured surface to an oval, 1/4 inch thick. Brush the tops with melted butter. If desired, sprinkle garnish on top.
Place as many dough ovals as will fit without touching each other directly on the baking stone or sheet and bake until each oval is puffy and just beginning to turn golden, 6 to 7 minutes. Remove from the oven. Serve warm.
I asked the guys I work with if they like Indian food (bosses were in from out of state and we were deciding where to go for lunch) and they all answered "no, I've never had it, but I don't like curry". Bear in mind, they're all 22, fresh out of college, and their idea of going out for lunch is Sheetz (for those unfamiliar... think Wawa... or gas station that serves quick food).
I asked FI's bff on Saturday and he said the same thing... never had it, but I don't like curry. OMG. I need to get FI to an Indian place sometime. He's never had it, but he loves trying food from other cultures, and we were almost there on Saturday before his friend went dumb. Dammit. I WANT NAAN.
So... I say this as well, I must confess.
I know there are a lot more dishes in Indian cuisuine than just those with curry, but some curries bother my senses so much I feel nauseated, especially when combined with cumin. I love many Thai dishes but this one place specializes in some curry plates that are so fragrant I cannot eat there.
I think I'd like to try some dishes via take-out so I can ignore the curry-induced nausea.
Post by mrsukyankee on Mar 4, 2015 13:19:55 GMT -5
And tonight I'm going to my in-law's house and having, yup, you guessed it, Indian food!!! Kadhi chawal which is amazing!!! The dish is prepared by putting fried fritters in yogurt based curry. I can't wait. And H is making lamb curry this weekend. I'm blessed.
I asked the guys I work with if they like Indian food (bosses were in from out of state and we were deciding where to go for lunch) and they all answered "no, I've never had it, but I don't like curry". Bear in mind, they're all 22, fresh out of college, and their idea of going out for lunch is Sheetz (for those unfamiliar... think Wawa... or gas station that serves quick food).
I asked FI's bff on Saturday and he said the same thing... never had it, but I don't like curry. OMG. I need to get FI to an Indian place sometime. He's never had it, but he loves trying food from other cultures, and we were almost there on Saturday before his friend went dumb. Dammit. I WANT NAAN.
So... I say this as well, I must confess.
I know there are a lot more dishes in Indian cuisuine than just those with curry, but some curries bother my senses so much I feel nauseated, especially when combined with cumin. I love many Thai dishes but this one place specializes in some curry plates that are so fragrant I cannot eat there.
I think I'd like to try some dishes via take-out so I can ignore the curry-induced nausea.
It sounds like you actually have a reaction to the taste/smell of curry. As in, you've actually attempted but your body had a reaction. To me, that's different.
The guys at work were just "no, don't wanna... never tried it, but we don't like it". Turns out that they're picky eaters. The bosses that were in already knew about it and were picking on them all through lunch. They still have the taste buds of a toddler (chicken fingers, ham sammiches, hot dogs, spaghetti, etc) and haven't branched out into big kid food yet.
I asked the guys I work with if they like Indian food (bosses were in from out of state and we were deciding where to go for lunch) and they all answered "no, I've never had it, but I don't like curry".
This was me, with Thai food until I was (seriously) 35. I convinced myself I didn't like peanuts and lemongrass, so I always stayed away from Thai.
Then I dated my first non-white guy and he introduced me to Thai. I can't believe how foolish I was. I would eat Thai every night if I could. It's one of the few Asian cuisines I make at home, or at least make well.
When I worked at Cafe 112 at Microsoft, I ran the Wellness station, which was all vegan/vegetarian. I brought a whole bunch of new Thai recipes into the program that it had never had before.
That reminds me, I still have a tupperware full of phad thai sauce in the fridge that needs using.
Oh man, this hits home. Last night I made a curried chicken dish using a jar sauce. It was so.so.bad. I will always make my own from now on. Lessons learned.
I asked the guys I work with if they like Indian food (bosses were in from out of state and we were deciding where to go for lunch) and they all answered "no, I've never had it, but I don't like curry".
This was me, with Thai food until I was (seriously) 35. I convinced myself I didn't like peanuts and lemongrass, so I always stayed away from Thai.
Then I dated my first non-white guy and he introduced me to Thai. I can't believe how foolish I was. I would eat Thai every night if I could. It's one of the few Asian cuisines I make at home, or at least make well.
When I worked at Cafe 112 at Microsoft, I ran the Wellness station, which was all vegan/vegetarian. I brought a whole bunch of new Thai recipes into the program that it had never had before.
That reminds me, I still have a tupperware full of phad thai sauce in the fridge that needs using.
This was me, with Thai food until I was (seriously) 35. I convinced myself I didn't like peanuts and lemongrass, so I always stayed away from Thai.
Then I dated my first non-white guy and he introduced me to Thai. I can't believe how foolish I was. I would eat Thai every night if I could. It's one of the few Asian cuisines I make at home, or at least make well.
When I worked at Cafe 112 at Microsoft, I ran the Wellness station, which was all vegan/vegetarian. I brought a whole bunch of new Thai recipes into the program that it had never had before.
That reminds me, I still have a tupperware full of phad thai sauce in the fridge that needs using.
Waits patiently for recipes.
These recipes are great, if you want to feed 120 people.
I love indian food. I have a recipe for naan that is awesome.
H is adverse to coconut-based foods. It's so weird. He spent 2 weeks in Mumbai and Pune, ffs!
You won't find many coconut laden foods in Mumbai unless you specifically go out for South Indian or have one of the few dishes that contain coconut (coconut rice, some fish dishes, festival treats/snacks, and a few desserts). All of the good street food snacks are carb based- Vada Pav, Toasties, Frankies, and various bits of fried dough. South Indian cuisine uses more coconut but North Indian does not. I cannot recall a single indian dish that I had while living in Mumbai that contained coconut. I didn't start seeing coconut used in food until I got to Bangalore. Kerala and Tamil Nadu use quite a bit of coconut and every Indian dish I had in those 2 states either contained coconut milk or was fried in coconut oil. Dammit now I want either some Kerala food or Konkan food!!!
Paan will usually have coconut it in but Paan is nasty as hell and should be avoided by everyone
Sadly most of the Indian restaurants in the US serve mostly North Indian cuisine. South Indian food is 1000x better!
I know there are a lot more dishes in Indian cuisuine than just those with curry, but some curries bother my senses so much I feel nauseated, especially when combined with cumin. I love many Thai dishes but this one place specializes in some curry plates that are so fragrant I cannot eat there.
I think I'd like to try some dishes via take-out so I can ignore the curry-induced nausea.
It sounds like you actually have a reaction to the taste/smell of curry. As in, you've actually attempted but your body had a reaction. To me, that's different.
The guys at work were just "no, don't wanna... never tried it, but we don't like it". Turns out that they're picky eaters. The bosses that were in already knew about it and were picking on them all through lunch. They still have the taste buds of a toddler (chicken fingers, ham sammiches, hot dogs, spaghetti, etc) and haven't branched out into big kid food yet.
Oh, ok.
I have received weird looks and responses like, "You know not EVERY dish has curry in it..."
I go to this Lebonese place all the time and they make this delicious boiled fish coated in paprika. I like that. One day a colleague was getting take out and I asked for the fish. They brought me yellow curry fish. I tried to eat it, but it still made me gag.
If I have Mexican dishes with too much cumin I also gag.
And tonight I'm going to my in-law's house and having, yup, you guessed it, Indian food!!! Kadhi chawal which is amazing!!! The dish is prepared by putting fried fritters in yogurt based curry. I can't wait. And H is making lamb curry this weekend. I'm blessed.
One of my favorites. My mom is such a a amazing cook and hers is to die for