
Data-Crunching Indian Recipes - cgoodmac
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/03/a-scientific-explanation-of-what-makes-indian-food-so-delicious/?hpid=z4
======
dkhenry
This may come as a surprise to some, but there are lots of people who don't
think Indian food is delicious. I would be really interested if scientists
have distilled something as subjective as your pallet and refined it to a
formula.

~~~
f055
I concur. For one, I find Indian food pretty bad, too much spices, too much
ingredients, and everything tastes like curry ;)

~~~
moron4hire
Understand that "curry" is a style of dish, about as specific as "stew". It
doesn't automatically imply a specific flavor or set of flavors, just as
"stew" doesn't automatically imply meat and potatoes, even if they do feature
frequently in many stews. Are you perhaps thinking of turmeric or cumin? They
feature heavily in a lot of different curries and are particularly strong and
distinct in flavor.

------
up_and_up
Interesting read!

My wife practices ayurveda so we eat a lot of Indian food.

In terms of the flavor profiles they mention in the article, ayurveda has a
concept of the 6 tastes: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent and bitter. A
well-balanced meal should include all the tastes.

I am not sure how much ayurveda has influenced "Indian" style cooking, but I
assume quite a bit. Maybe someone else can weigh in on it.

And yes it does require quite a number of ingredients.

Example, the breakfast I just made included:

Poha (flattened rice), mushrooms, coconut flakes, onions, green beans,
almonds, potatoes, apples, cilantro, mustard seeds, hing, turmeric powder,
cumin powder, salt, lime, chilis, coconut oil

Took about 20 mins to prepare.

~~~
vram22
>I am not sure how much ayurveda has influenced "Indian" style cooking, but I
assume quite a bit. Maybe someone else can weigh in on it.

As amalag says (sibling comment), quite a bit, though less nowadays (because
of traditional knowledge fading somewhat, time needed to make such food
properly, work pressure, fast food, and increasing popularity of Western and
other cuisines). There are a few books that talk about this, i.e. how
traditional Indian food recipes incorporate Ayurvedic principles, for health
(and taste :). One such book that talks about this a little, IIRC, is
"Prakriti: Your Ayurvedic Constitution" by Dr. Robert Svoboda, who studied
Ayurveda in India.

[http://www.drsvoboda.com/prakriti-bk.htm](http://www.drsvoboda.com/prakriti-
bk.htm)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Svoboda](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Svoboda)

------
c0nsumer
I'd love to see a tool that allows one to input ingredients and see flavor
overlaps. It'd be really interesting to use this with one's favorite foods and
use it to build recommendations for others.

~~~
scribu
The tricky part would be getting the molecular breakdown for each ingredient.
I'm not sure if that sort of data is readily available.

~~~
jp555
I'd think you'd only need a breakdown of the taste receptor stimulating
compounds.

But even then whether food tastes good or not is _very_ complex and goes WAY
beyond taste receptors. There's the obvious smell and the way it looks, but
even the sounds around you while eating, how hungry you are, what your
drinking, the temperature of your beverage, the room's light levels,
temperature, and humidity, and even the height of the table, what kind of
chair you're sitting in, and the texture of your napkin will affect how you
perceive the taste of a meal.

------
moron4hire
I think emphasis on the ingredients used is short-sighted. Cooking technique
can drastically alter the flavor of ingredients.

There is a reason we brown meat, and it's not to "lock in juices" or some such
nonsense. There is a reason we let stews, well, stew so long. Dry aging beef
isn't just a game of musical chairs for entertainment reasons. There is a
reason awesome ramen soup takes more than 24 hours to make. It's why you can't
just add smoke flavor and color to neutral spirits and get whiskey. It's why
you can't add liquor and acetals to grape juice and have wine.

It's all about giving time for various enzymatic processes to do different
types of work on the food. I suspect that the slow, stewing cooking methods
typical of Indian curries allows the proteins in the meats used to break down
and create a significant amount of glutamic acid, the chemical responsible for
the "umami" or "savory" flavor.

While this article is very interesting, it's very far from the whole story.

------
michael_h
'Labor intensive cuisine'? No more labor intensive than any other cuisine.
Most of the time it's: stir things to brown them a bit, add the liquid part,
and let it simmer unattendend for a while.

EDIT: _Milk, butter, bread, and rice, meanwhile—all of which are hallmarks of
Western cuisine_

I'm wondering if the author has ever even been to an Indian restaurant.

~~~
piyush_soni
Indian cuisines are quite labor (and time) intensive as compared to the other
cuisines I've seen, and that's why hard to prepare. For example, going by this
link ([http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/malai-
kofta/](http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/malai-kofta/) ) , the curry based
dish 'Malai Kofta' (very popular in India) is said to take 1 hr 30 minutes in
total. Even if it's 1 hour, it's too much time just for a part of food (It's
eaten with a 'naan' or flat bread, which needs to be prepared separately).

Certainly more time consuming than stacking raw meat slices and veggies inside
a bread and topping it with mayonnaise.

~~~
_delirium
That doesn't sound particularly out of line for western cuisine, at least if
you look at traditional food, rather than hamburgers. A typical "classic"
French dish takes about 4-8 hours in total to prepare all the sauces and meats
and such. Even just properly browning onions takes 30-45 minutes, and that's a
pre-cooking phase in many French dishes. I've been learning Greek cuisine
lately and it's similar, e.g. melitzanosalata (a common side dish / spread)
takes 60-90 minutes or so, and has to be done before preparing the main meal
unless you have multiple ovens.

------
Geekette
"The takeaway is that part of what makes Indian food so appealing is the way
flavors rub up against each other."

The article seems to be a missive from the Capt Obvious dept, just apparently
"datafied" with some study. I did not learn anything new from it, neither do I
agree that Indian cuisine is necessarily more complicated compared to cooking
from other regions of the world. Glad some people somewhere enjoyed the
exercise of collating ingredients and flavours, I guess.

------
bluedino
It's delicious (in restaurants) because of the copious amounts of cream, oil,
and butter (well, ghee) used. No mystery there!

~~~
amalag
Most of the sauces are very similar, a tomato base with some cream thrown in.
You start to get really sick of it.

------
q2
As far as I know, most of the Indian food is not "fast food" category i.e. you
need to have patience and heart to prepare and it takes real effort and you
need to have patience to sit and eat comfortably rather than eating on the way
or eating while walking ...etc. It naturally helps health.

This may or may not be the case with other cuisines.

~~~
bluedino
Indian food is huge as takeaway/takeout.

------
grandalf
Indian food is one of the oldest cuisines in the world -- created in a region
with abundant crops and flavors, it represents the pinnacle of human cuisine.

Each recipe is tens of thousands of years old and has been refined into what
it is today. That's why it's do delicious.

------
taylorwc
Slightly OT: reading this near to lunchtime was a huge mistake.

Edit: because now I'm craving Indian food, not because there's something
unappealing about it.

------
jpatokal
> More specifically, many Indian recipes contain cayenne,

Cayenne is a city in French Guiana. "Cayenne pepper", on the other hand, is a
specific cultivar of the red chilli pepper that's not really used in India
(although lots of other varieties are).

> the basis of curry powder that is in dishes like red curry, green curry, or
> massaman curry.

Those are all Thai curries, not Indian ones!

------
nullp
Similar paper on the subject, broadly breaks down other regions and has a
similar finding that 'western' food shares flavor compounds while others do
not.

[http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/full/srep00...](http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/full/srep00196.html)

------
myth_buster
The new-age cuisines, those created by the celebrity chefs and fusion food-
trucks, are optimizing on this trait, which is roller-coaster flavor ride with
every bite.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
It doesn't come with its own cardboard microwave holder?

------
aceperry
What???

They've missed the essential ingredient of good food. You have to add some
love to it before it can become great food!

------
GalacticDomin8r
I like Indian tacos.

------
sigzero
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!

------
astazangasta
Fuck empiricist reduction. So sick of this bullshit epistemology trying to
break us down to equations.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
I'm assuming you don't believe in evolution, then?

Because if you do, if you accept the reality of evolution, genetics, the slow
accretion of complexity through purely random changes, some of which are
positive, etc., then EITHER you implicitly accept reductionism OR you must
explicitly state how it is we are not just chemistry.

We are piles of complex chemistry, and not much more. In fact, nothing more,
according to our best reproducible, documentable, shareable, practical,
implementable knowledge. (As opposed to slippery mystical knowledge which is
hard to reproduce, document, share, do anything practical with, etc.)

~~~
astazangasta
Actually you are dead wrong. Not only do I believe in evolution, I have a PhD
studying evolutionary biology (mostly mammalian phylogenetics).

Yes we are piles of chemistry. "Not much more" is an empiricist conceit, as is
reproducibility. But thanks for making the chauvinism of empiricist
epistemology clear via your comment. You are exactly who I am complaining
about, the asshole who sees people in love and thinks, "hmm, oxytocin."

~~~
PeterWhittaker
Thank you for the pleasant name calling, that's always fun.

For the record, when I see in people in love I think "Hey, that's wonderful,
the world needs more of that, that's fantastic". I rarely think of the
chemistry involved because it is irrelevant to that context.

But it is there (and would be entirely relevant were I studying the mechanisms
involved, was I interested in the neuropsychology, etc.).

To deny its presence, though, to argue otherwise, is either to be mystical or
irrational.

Or in your case, angry. And rude.

Ta!

------
seivan
Beware, amateur science incoming! Sugar. Sugar is what makes food delicious.
It comes in various shapes, most notable (for me) is potato, rice and bread.

I can eat that stuff... FOREVER. Indian food has a lot of it. Rice, bread and
in the sauces.

Just my two cents.

~~~
chengiz
This is utter nonsense. A very few cuisines such as Gujarati use noticeable
amounts of sugar. A large majority of Indian curries _at most_ have a small
amount of sugar, not enough to be discernible to the palate, but helps blend
the flavours together. It is nothing like barbecue/meat sauces in the west
where the second major ingredient is sugar.

~~~
ars
He means that potato, rice and bread and equivalent to sugar. They sort of are
from a nutritional point of view, and I guess he means from a flavor point of
view as well.

~~~
magic_beans
They aren't "sort of are". Potato, rice, and bread all metabolize to sugar.

~~~
ars
They all have protein too, which makes them "sort of are".

However the carbs in potato especially metabolize very fast to sugar. The
others are slower. But even potato has protein.

