This got me dying
who paid for this study bruh
it’‘s literally seasoning. that’s it. that’s what make food taste good.
Bro it’s more complex than just ‘ey they used seasoning’
It’s HOW they used seasoning, compared to other areas of the world.
Indian seasoning does this neat color wheel of flavor, fitting a bunch of spices that are very DIFFERENT from each other, to create a huge range of complex flavor.
Meanwhile in Italy for instance, they tend to use flavors that are SIMILAR. For instance, Basil and Oregano, or Sweet fish with Sweet wine. It makes foods less likely to contrast weirdly in your mouth, and it’s the basis of why fancy european people pair red wines with steak and white wines with chicken. Savory with Savory, Light with Light.
“ That like flavors should be combined for better dishes—an unspoken but popular hypothesis stipulated by recipe-building in North American, Western European, and Latin American cultures—is an idea essentially reversed in Indian cuisine. “
well yes, spices need to not just complement the food but contrast against each other. to get maximum flavour when cooking indian food:
1. use whole spices, dry roast small quantities of individual spices together and then grind them to a powder. balance is what you’re looking for, not just chucking in handfuls of seasonings willy nilly because quantity does not equal flavour when it comes to spicing indian food.
2. whole spices go in the oil first. always. also everything gets fried on its own before it’s chucked into the sauce/curry. even the curry base is started off by frying onions/ginger/garlic/tomatoes or any combination thereof. basically…FRY THAT SHIT. i don’t know of any regional cuisine in india that uses stock for simmering. frying everything individually is how we add flavour instead.
3. indian food needs to be cooked long and slow for the flavours to really merge. don’t skimp on the cooking time if you can because that makes a huge difference.
This was so enlightening
I feel a need to mention that the researchers for this study are NOT white, as stated above. They’re Indian. It’s Indian people saying “why does our cuisine work and taste so vastly different than anywhere else in the world?” To quote from the article:
“Researchers Anupam Jaina, Rakhi N Kb, and Ganesh Bagler from the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur ran a fine-tooth comb through TarlaDalal.com—a recipe database of more than 17,000 dishes that self-identifies as “India’s #1 food site”—in attempts to decode the magic of your chicken tikka masala or aloo gobi.”
There’s a major misunderstanding in how a lot of people understand science. There’s this idea that there’s a frontier of stuff we don’t know and a big block of stuff we do. Their first reaction is to scoff because we already “know” that Indian food “uses spices” and that’s why it tastes good. Why waste time re-treading that ground to come to the conclusion you already have?
In reality, the frontiers of knowledge are everywhere. Most of what gets studied is common everyday stuff because we generally have a good grip on what stuff does but the holes are in the “how it does it”. And we don’t know anything to perfect certainty, only degrees of relative certainty, and in varying levels of precision.
The person who says the Earth is flat isn’t making a terribly large miscalculation of the curviture of the Earth, and on a local scale it may not impact their day to day life, but they are still wrong. The person who says the Earth is round is also wrong, but the model is off from reality significantly less. The one who says the planet is an oblate spheroid futher brings the model into precision, but ultiamtely, the only perfect 1:1 model of the planet, is the planet.
Every measurement is going to have a margin of error. Doesn’t mean we should just stop at the sphere, or even the oblate spheroid.
it’s so reductive! “indian food tastes good because of Basic Non-White Knowledge that spices exist, there couldn’t possibly be anything else special about it” - what an example of shitting on the people they act like they’re supporting!
We literally still have *no idea* how to make Maple syrup without Maple trees.
The tree does something fucking magical with compounds and mixtures and whatever the fuck with it’s sap we humans are unable to figure out.
It’s why all the fake maple syrup doesn’t taste right. We can’t fucking mimic what the trees do.
We’re able to grow literal MEAT IN A PETRI DISH and yet tree blood is beyond us.
cc: @petermorwood :)
