Indian food

There are so many delicacies in the world, and each delicacy has different ways of cooking it. For those who like delicacies from all over the world, they are more attracted by Indian spices, such as cardamom and chili pepper. , tamarind and various other spices are an integral part of Indian cuisine. At the same time, let’s experience the deliciousness of Indian cuisine together.

However, behind the strong appeal of Indian food, what makes it so special and delicious seems to be unknown. In a massive study of more than 2,000 popular recipes, data scientists have discovered a key reason why Indian food tastes unique: It's very exaggerated in taste and very different from Western culinary cultures, and it's reflected at the molecular level .

Before going any further, let’s take a step back and think about what flavors actually are and how they interact with each other. If you analyze most Western dishes, you will find an interesting but not surprising phenomenon. Western cooking likes to pair foods with similar flavors together. Food chemists have broken down these flavors to the molecular level. By mixing different compounds, you can obtain a special taste.

Most of these compounds have scientific names, but there is a simpler compound called acetal, which has a refreshing flavor found in whiskey, apple juice, orange juice and raw beets. On average, each food ingredient contains more than 50 flavor molecules. A 2013 chart published by the website Scientific American shows which foods taste most similar to other foods. Not surprisingly, peanut butter and roasted peanuts have the highest flavor overlap, but there are also some more specific connections, such as strawberries being more closely related to white wine than apples, oranges or honey.

Western chefs like to use ingredients with similar flavors. However, many Asian dishes contain ingredients with different flavors, and Indian cuisine is the most obvious example. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology analyzed data from thousands of recipes on popular recipe websites. They compared the various raw materials of each dish with each other to determine the degree of similarity in taste molecules between the raw materials. The results showed that the taste similarity between the raw materials was low.

The following is a brief description of the experimental process. For example, there are four ingredients in a dish, like the following:

Each ingredient contains a set of flavor molecules, and the flavors contained in two ingredients may overlap. For example, coconut and onion, although they are very different, they still have the same flavor molecules as you can see from the picture below.

Then you can draw a map based on all the ingredients with overlapping flavors, there are 6 types of overlap.

Researchers conducted this analysis on thousands of recipes, with a total of 200 ingredients. They found that unlike Western cooking, Indian cuisine tends to combine ingredients in one dish without any overlap in flavor. The unique composition of Indian cuisine seems to be tied to specific ingredients, and spices often mean that similar-tasting ingredients are not included in the dish.

More specifically, many Indian dishes contain chili pepper, and it is the main ingredient in almost all Indian curries. Researchers found that when chili peppers are included in a dish, they are less likely to have other ingredients with similar flavors. The same goes for green chillies, coriander, and *** curry, which are also widely used ingredients in Indian cuisine. The researchers pointed out: "The spices in the recipe determine the choice of other ingredients."

In contrast, the ingredients in Western dishes represent the combination of milk, butter, bread and rice. Indian food, on the other hand, tends to pair ingredients with similar flavors together. When these ingredients appear in an Indian dish, the flavor overlap is likely to be relatively large.