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How the masala magic works
What makes Indian cuisine distinct from Western cuisine?
A team of complex systems experts from IIT Jodhpur who applied data analytics techniques on 2,543 recipes from across India have found the answer.
According to their finding, which has created ripples in the world of food science and gastronomy , combining ingredients with very different flavours in one recipe gives Indian cuisine a unique character. In fact, in Indian cooking more the number of common flavour molecules shared by two ingredients, the lesser the chance of them co-existing in a recipe. (Flavour molecules give an ingredient the sense of taste and smell peculiar to it.) For example, red chilli powder and cumin share only six flavour molecules but this pair of ingredients can be found 406 times across Indian cuisine.
This research turns the accepted notion in Western cuisines — that two ingredients will go well together in a recipe if they share a large number of flavour molecules — on its head. For example, two pairs of ingredients that occur together frequently in American cooking are butter and milk, which share 73 flavour molecules and butter and vanilla, which share 32 flavour molecules.
So why were the computational researchers dabbling in kitchen science? Short answer: trying to answer a simple question -what makes Indian food special? Assistant professor Ganesh Bagler with basic training in physics and a PhD in computational biology along with his students Rakhi NK doing a PhD in biomedical text mining and Anupam Jain an MTech system science student started by identifying the best repository of Indian recipes, which are well curated, formatted and covering several regional cuisines. That happened to be the Tarla Dalal's collection of recipes that includes eight regional sub-cuisines — Bengali, Gujarati, Jain, Maharashtrian, Mughlai, Punjabi, Rajasthani and South Indian.
From 2,543 recipes, they identified 194 ingredients, which were then divided into 15 categories — spice, vegetable, fruit, plant derivative, nutseed, cereal crop, dairy, plant, pulse, herb, meat, fish seafood, beverage, animal product, and flower. Then a database of the flavour molecules present in these 194 ingredients was created. Each ingredient is associated with a set of flavour molecules which is the taste profile of that ingredient. Based on the flavour profile they looked at the 'food pairing' or sharing of flavour compounds in Indian recipes and discovered that more the extent of flavour sharing between any two ingredients, the lesser the chance of them occurring in the same recipe. An average Indian recipe contains seven ingredients but some can contain up to 40.
A flavour network was created to identify pattern of ingredients coming together in a recipe. This revealed the distinct feature of food with least overlap in flavours occurring in one recipe. While this is a feature observed in some Asian cuisines, researchers found it very pronounced in Indian cuisine.This was referred to as negative food pairing only to distinguish it from the already observed phenomenon in Western cuisines like North American and Western European of positive pairing.(Cuisines from southern Europe and East Asia have shown a mild tendency towards pairing differently flavoured ingredients.) Interestingly, Mughlai cuisine shows the least tendency to pair vastly different flavour molecules. But then this food tradition carries strong influences from outside the Indian subcontinent. Those ethnically from the subcontinent showed a strikingly strong pattern of negative pairing.
The Indianness of a recipe is not sensitive to the replacement of ingredients of any category except for spices. If we were to replace an ingredient of one category with another from the same category, say one vegetable with another, it would not change the molecular pattern of the recipe radically. But changing a given spice with another would destroy the negative food pairing. In a list of the top 15 ingredients in terms of their contribution towards food pairing, 14 are spices demonstrating their key place in Indian cuisine.
India has a tradition of using food as medicine as Charaka Samhita and Bhavaprakasha, important Ayurvedic texts, refer to food or natural ingredients as medicine. Key molecular components in spices are reported to have various curative properties, one of the most celebrated among them being curcumin, a compound found in turmeric.
While the traditional use of spices may not have been based on the understanding of their molecular properties, using spices for flavour, colour and preservation might have led to empirical evidence-based understanding of their medicinal values.
How the masala magic works - The Times of India
@jouni,
This might help you to understand Indian cuisine.
@apple
This might help you to to understand how uneducated you appear when you let loose your illiterate gibberish, thinking expensive is the soul of food.
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