There are so many delicious things in the world that all kinds of food are eaten in different ways. For people who like world cuisine, they are more attracted by Indian spices. Spices such as cardamom, pepper and tamarind are part of Indian food, and we feel the delicacy of Indian food together.

However, behind the strong attraction of Indian food, the reason why it is so special and delicious seems unknown. In a large-scale study of more than 2,000 popular recipes, data scientists have discovered the key reason why Indian food tastes unique: it is very exaggerated in taste and very different from western cooking culture, which is reflected in the molecular level.

Before further analysis, let's take a step back and think about what tastes are and how they interact. If we analyze most western dishes, we will find an interesting but not surprising phenomenon. In western cooking, we like to mix foods with similar tastes. Food chemists decompose these flavors to molecular level, and a special flavor can be obtained by mixing different compounds.

Most of these compounds have scientific names, but there is a relatively simple compound called acetal, which exists in whisky, apple juice, orange juice and raw beets and has a fresh and pleasant taste. There are more than 50 flavor molecules in each food raw material on average. A picture published on Scientific American website 20 13 shows that the tastes of those foods are most similar to those of other foods. Not surprisingly, peanut butter and roasted peanuts have the highest overlapping rate, but there are also some special relationships. For example, strawberries are closer to white wine than apples, oranges or honey.

Western chefs like to cook with ingredients with similar tastes, but many Asian dishes contain ingredients with different tastes, and Indian food is the most obvious example. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology analyzed the data of thousands of recipes on popular cookbook websites. They compared the raw materials of each dish and found that the taste molecules in the raw materials were the same. The results showed that the taste similarity between raw materials was low.

The following is a brief description of the experimental process. For example, a dish has four ingredients, as follows:

Each raw material contains a group of taste molecules, and the tastes of the two raw materials may overlap. For example, coconut and onion are very different, but as can be seen from the picture below, their taste molecules are still the same.

Then, you can draw a map according to all the ingredients with overlapping tastes, and there are 6 kinds of overlaps.

In this way, the researchers analyzed thousands of recipes with 200 ingredients. They found that unlike western cooking, Indian food tends to mix ingredients without overlapping tastes in a dish. The unique composition of Indian dishes seems to be related to specific raw materials, and spices usually mean that dishes do not contain raw materials with similar tastes.

More specifically, many Indian dishes contain pepper, which is the main ingredient of almost all Indian curry powder. The researchers found that when there is pepper in a dish, it is unlikely that there will be other ingredients with similar taste. The same is true of green pepper, coriander and curry, which are also widely used raw materials in Indian cuisine. The researchers pointed out: "The spices in the recipe determine the choice of other raw materials."

In contrast, the ingredients in western-style dishes represent the collocation of milk, butter, bread and rice, but compared with Indian dishes, they are more inclined to mix ingredients with similar tastes. When these ingredients appear in Indian dishes, the taste overlap may be greater.