Indian food is intoxicating and is coveted all around the globe. It is a potpourri of various ingredients and flavors. But, behind the appeal of Indian food, the main reason that makes this food so appealing is not only the taste, but it’s something at the molecular level. When we speak about flavors, we see that most of the western, oriental and continental dishes have their flavors overlapped, i.e., we see the ingredients are all ‘Like-flavors’, but when it comes it Indian foods, the flavors are “unlike-pairings”. Food chemists have broken down foods into their molecular parts to know their precise chemical compounds that, when combined, give off a distinct taste.
In the West, Dishes are made with ingredients that have overlapping tastes. i.e., the use of similar flavors while preparing the dish. Many Asian cuisines have been shown to oppose this trend by favoring dishes with ingredients that don’t overlap in flavor, Indian food is one of the most powerful counterexamples.
Research scientists at the IIT, Jodhpur crunched data on several thousands of recipes from a popular online recipe site called TarlaDalal.com. They broke each dish down to its ingredients and molecules, then compared how often and heavily do these ingredients share flavor compounds. To which they found that it’s almost never too often.
The distinctive makeup of Indian cuisine is the use of ‘specific’ spices and ingredients. i.e., Indian dishes generally don’t have any chemical common groupings. More specifically, many Indian recipes contain cayenne, the basis of curry and when a dish contains cayenneit’s unlikely to have other ingredients that share similar flavors. “Each of the spices is uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavor sharing pattern with rest of the ingredients,” the researchers noted.
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.
By: Archa Dave
