Masala Lab

Highlights

Page 1

When I was a child my dream was to become a circus artist. My parents’ dream, though, was for me to get the good education they never had. So I ended up studying medicine.

Note: is this guy Indian? :P

Page 117

Before I left for my first trip abroad, I asked my late maternal grandmother, who was a fantastic cook, to tell me the recipe for adai, a crispy multi-lentil pancake that is very easy to make but hard to get right. I probed her about ratios, texture, timing and sequence. Clearly, she was not used to being asked these questions. Cooking for her came from aromas, the tactile memory of her fingers, and the visual and auditory cues.

Note: This is Amma

Page 122

‘Patience. That’s the ingredient you are missing. If you give anything enough time, it will turn out delicious. You can approximate all the other ingredients.’

Page 157

Unfortunately, pseudoscience, amplified by WhatsApp, has given the word ‘chemical’ a negative connotation. People regularly say, ‘I don’t want to eat anything that has chemicals in it.’ In that case, I’d advise them to fast indefinitely. It’s a cognitive fallacy, which assumes that somehow the glutamate salt in monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a chemical, while the same glutamates inside the fleshy part of a tomato are natural. At a molecular level, they are the same thing!

Page 177

This book is an attempt to de-exoticize Indian cooking and view it through the lens of food science and engineering. There is art in cooking, no doubt, but there is a lot of craft too, and craft is, as Michael Ruhlman puts it in his fantastic book Ratio: The Simple Codes behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking,

Note: Next book

Page 227

So, while the chana is being pressure-cooked, we start with the gravy. Every recipe book will give you a different list of ingredients, and every garam masala/chana masala spice mix will have unique ingredients. Here’s the thing: None of that matters. Just see what your kitchen has and use it. Modern Indian cooking is more about technique than about the quality of ingredients. Sure, premium ingredients help, but technique matters way more than the quality. This is because urban Indians rarely have access to high-quality fresh produce, unless they are quite rich. Contrast this with Italian cuisine, where most dishes use a tiny number of really high-quality ingredients, and the difference between Italian food made with ordinary ingredients and premium ingredients is like that between day and night.

Note: I wonder how true this is. He’s saying it doesn’t matter because people don’t have access, but what if they did?

Page 267

In summary, this book is an attempt to introduce an engineering mindset into Indian cooking, with the ultimate aim of making the reader a better cook and turning the kitchen into a joyful and creative laboratory for culinary experiments. It also aims to equip you with modular nuggets of scientific knowledge, which will help you adapt and invent new dishes with greater facility. At the same time, it is important to say this. A vast majority of home cooking in India is done by women, with no help and little choice in the matter. Urging someone who just wants to feed the family in the shortest possible time, while balancing family and career, to carefully consider whether the citral in lemongrass pairs well with the piperine in pepper before using them together is an exercise in dilettantism, like trying to upsell a laborious chore as a hobby. That I get to treat my kitchen as a laboratory is a privilege not many have. My hope is that this book has enough simple science and engineering lessons to help cut down cooking time, while improving flavour and predictability.

Note: Truth

Page 336

Most beginner cooks don’t get consistent-enough results from their efforts in a reasonably short amount of time for them to fall in love with cooking, and that, I think, is a pity. Art is and should be hard to master, but if the craft is hard to get right, then the documentation is probably inadequate.

Note: Amen

Page 365

And that brings us to the concept of temperature. It is simply a quantification of how much heat there is in a substance or system. But here’s a tricky thing to consider. If you touch a pan that is at 70oC, you will burn your finger badly. If you touch a pot of water at 70oC, it will mildly scald you, but if you put your hand inside an oven at 70oC, the air will feel only mildly hot. So, just understanding temperature isn’t enough because different substances at the same temperature feel different to us and, thus, have entirely different effects on food. We need to understand a few more concepts to get the hang of this, which brings us to density.

Note: I don’t think I appreciate this enough

Page 377

This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being.

Page 625

The foundational principle of a pressure cooker is to cook food in water at high pressure. You add water to a vessel and tightly seal it so that no air escapes, and then heat it from below. The water starts to boil, and some of it becomes vapour, but now this vapour is trapped and cannot escape. This increases air pressure inside the vessel because there is now more gas trapped in it, and this pressure prevents more water from turning into vapour. And, of course, engineers figured out that we also need a safety valve to make sure that the pressure inside does not rise to a point high enough for the cooker to turn into a bomb. This safety valve is designed as an opening at the top of the sealed vessel, on top of which a calibrated weight rests. The mass of this ‘weight’ is calibrated in such a way that if the pressure increases beyond a certain limit, it will overcome the gravitational force exerted on the weight and cause it to move up and open the valve, letting go off some of the steam. This reduces the pressure inside the vessel and the weight falls back down. The general idea is to try and keep the pressure inside approximately 1 bar above air pressure. At this increased air pressure, water boils at 121oC. So, a pressure cooker is, in its simplest sense, a device that lets you cook using liquid water at 121oC (unlike an open vessel that allows you to do this at 100oC).

Page 657

While pressure-cooking is a tremendous time-saver, and in the case of a few green vegetables, moderately better at retaining nutrition and colour, I don’t recommend throwing every single ingredient into a pressure cooker and turning it into a homogeneous mush in the single-minded pursuit of cooking dishes in one shot. While you can make a decent sambar and a half-decent biryani or pulao in a pressure cooker, you cannot make a great sambar or pulao because great cooking requires flavour-layering and textural variations, which are impossible to achieve by assaulting every ingredient with uniform 121oC heat at high pressure. But if you are short on time, there is no better method.

Page 690

When rice is cooked in hot water, a process called gelatinization happens. This is where starch molecules, which are made up of long chains of sugar molecules, break down and form cosy relationships with water molecules to create two kinds of textures—a hard and waxy texture from the amylose, and a sticky gooey texture from the amylopectin. So, in addition to the variety of rice you use, your cooking methods also go a long way in determining if your final product will be nicely separated and fluffy, or sticky. The general, fail-safe algorithm to cook rice perfectly is: Wash away as much amylopectin as possible from the surface of the rice. This is the starch that becomes sticky when cooked. Wash rice till the water runs clear. Then add water to the rice and bring it to a boil. When the rice’s internal temperature hits 65oC, starches gelatinize. Don’t worry, you don’t have to poke a thermometer into a rice grain to accurately measure this. Just let the water visibly come to a boil, and the moment that happens you will know that all the starch in your rice has gelatinized. As the water comes to a boil, place a lid on your cooking vessel and reduce the heat to the lowest setting possible. At this point, we are simply letting the gelatinized starches absorb the rest of the water in the vessel. This takes about 15 minutes. Once all the water has visibly been absorbed, take your vessel off the stove and let it sit for 10 more minutes with the lid closed. At this point, a process called retrogradation happens, where each grain separates and creates its own identity, much like a teenager reading Ayn Rand. Once this is done, open the lid and fluff up the rice with a fork before serving.

Page 729

Two of the hard-to-digest carbohydrates in legumes like kidney beans (rajma)—raffinose and stachyose—cannot be digested by our digestive systems efficiently and, thus, become food for the bacteria in our guts. They metabolize these carbohydrates and produce gas, causing a rather familiar discomfort and occasional wind production. Turns out, eating fart-producing beans is not a bad idea at all because it encourages the growth of a diverse colony of healthy gut bacteria, who are, in general, excellent tenants.

Page 766

Now that we have rice and dal out of the way, let’s consider the other staple carbohydrate: wheat. The original grain that made large-scale human civilization possible, wheat (like rice, corn and sugarcane) is a grass, making the grass family of plants one of the most successful species on the planet. Whether we have domesticated these grasses, or they have deviously convinced human beings to stay addicted to carbohydrates and, thus, grow them on a massive scale, at the cost of other plants, is a question worth pondering over when you mix atta and water and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Note: From harari

Page 782

Here is what happens when you add water to atta or maida. There are two proteins in wheat—glutenin and gliadin—that form a stretchy and elastic structure called gluten, which traps air to create give your finished bread a light and airy texture. Maida forms stronger gluten structures than chakki-ground atta, which is why chapattis made of maida are chewier than those made using atta. Gluten formation in a chapatti is focused on creating a soft, yet not overly chewy, superstructure. But in a loaf of bread, gluten formation is focused on making a strong structure that is able to handle the expanding gas generated by the yeast in the dough, finally turning it into a crisp brown crust at high heat in the oven, thanks to the Maillard reaction.

Note: Finally understood what the fuck this gluten is and how and why to form it

Page 795

Mix atta and water, and roughly bring it to a shaggy mix (no need to knead) till there are no dry bits of flour. Let it sit for 30 minutes. This triggers a process of autolysis where gluten formation starts in the presence of water. You can use slightly warm, but not boiling, water to increase gluten development. Boiling water will cook (gelatinize) the starches in the wheat, and that will leave less water for gluten development. Some methods do recommend using boiling water, but that will produce not just a soft chapatti but also an ultra-flaky one. Ultimately, it’s a matter of personal preference. I tend to like my chapattis with some amount of chew. The beauty of autolysis is that you don’t need to knead the dough at all. The dough will literally knead itself. After 30 minutes, work in some salt into the dough. We don’t add the salt up front because salt tends to tighten the gluten network, and we don’t want that during the early stage of gluten development. Just knead the dough mildly till it looks shiny and slick (the autolysis phase will help make this happen pretty quickly) and you are done! Think of all those instructions that ask you to knead the dough for 10 minutes. If you think the exercise will be useful for your deltoid, triceps and biceps, go ahead, but it is not really necessary.

Note: Chapathi dough

Page 954

The choice of fat used for deep frying is important. Given that there is now a tendency to buy unrefined or ‘virgin’ oils for use at home, please remember that the smoke points of unrefined oils is almost always lower than the temperature you need for effective deep-frying. And, by the way, when you heat oil, any fancy aroma that an unheated expensive oil has all but disappears. So, buy expensive oils only as finishing oils, not cooking oils. In general, it’s a good idea to use a virgin or unrefined oil for day-to-day cooking, and a refined oil with a high smoke point for deep-frying, which is not something you are going to do every day.

Page 998

Flavour is a combination of taste, smell, mouthfeel, and to a smaller extent, sound and visual experiences. And despite the fact that 80 per cent of flavour perception happens in the nose, we tend to associate the tongue as being the Watson and Crick of flavour to the nose’s Rosalind Franklin.

Note: Love the reference

Page 007

What kind of molecules tend to be sweet? Sugars, aldehydes, alcohols and certain amino acids taste sweet to varying degrees. Acids, such as tamarind, vinegar, yoghurt, juices of citrus fruits and many other organic acids in fruit juices taste sour and tart. Saltiness comes from, well, salts, of which sodium chloride tastes the saltiest, while other salts exhibit varying degrees. Bitter tastes come from substances called alkaloids such as caffeine (in coffee), theobromine (in chocolate), quinine (in tonic water), and so on. Our ability to detect bitterness comes from the need to identify poisons before we ingest them. Pure caffeine is deadly and poisonous, although a tiny amount as part of our morning coffee is typically safe. Umami is the fifth taste that has recently been added to this list. It is the savoury, lingering, meaty taste that comes from the presence of salts of a specific amino acid called glutamic acid. Food that is rich in glutamates has an intense, savoury and lingering flavour that feels very satisfying. Umami-rich foods do not need to be overly spiced or salted because of this lingering effect.

Page 020

Fascinatingly, food scientists (and grandmothers and mothers) have figured out that there is a sub-threshold level of taste, which while not being individually detectable, can amplify or mute other tastes. For example, a tiny pinch of salt in your kheer can make it taste more intensely flavourful without being perceptibly salty, which no one would want. This is also why jaggery tends to be preferred when making Indian desserts, because it naturally contains a bit of salt. Likewise, a tiny pinch of sugar can mute saltiness without tasting perceptibly sweet. This is why a pinch of sugar is a good idea in any dish, because it balances saltiness. In fact, restaurants tend to take this effect to its logical extreme—adding lots of sugar allows you to add lots of salt to your dish. This combined effect is like turning the volume knob to 11, which is why restaurant food tastes more intensely flavoured than home-cooked food. And finally, a tiny pinch of salt can also mute sourness.

Page 028

Temperature also impacts how you perceive taste. At lower temperatures, our tongues’ ability to detect tastes decreases. This is why melted ice cream tastes cloyingly sweet. It turns out that taste buds operate at their peak between 20oC and 30oC. This is why coffee is tolerable at 50–60oC, which is usually the temperature at which it is served, while it tastes bitter once it gets to room temperature, which tends to be the temperature range in which our taste buds operate at their peak.

Page 042

This is why many foods that smell funny taste amazing once they are in the mouth. A good example is cheese. Many older Indians find the funky smell of cheese off-putting. This is because what you smell before you eat the cheese is the overwhelming smell of the ketones and aldehydes in it. Once you chew it, the complex molecules generated by the slow fermentation process start to hit your nose retronasally, and that’s when you go ‘ah, cheese’. Flame-roasted brinjal is another example. It smells acrid and metallic but is delicious once you actually chew it. Fish is another interesting example. Most people not used to fish will first taste and smell a sulphurous molecule, which makes up the intense flavour of cooked fish and can be rather off-putting for anyone who has never eaten fish before. But once you chew, a ton of umami flavour molecules start hitting your tongue, and that is what makes any Indian fish curry such an addictive dish for those who are used to fish.

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The most commonly used salt in India tends to be iodized salt, which is sodium chloride mixed with tiny amounts of potassium or sodium iodide, a practice that started in the late 1950s to address the problem of goitre, a serious thyroid malfunction caused by the deficiency of iodine. There is, however, one problem. Iodide salts tend to break down at high temperatures and lend an acrid metallic taste to food. You will not notice this when making gravies because the temperature is not going to exceed 100oC in those cases, but you will notice it when you deep-fry or bake food in an oven. This is why it is recommended to use non-iodized salt when baking or deep-frying food. By the way, the processed food industry usually never uses iodized salt for this reason. While I do not want to underplay the seriousness of iodine deficiencies, it’s not too hard to get your iodine from other dietary sources, such as dairy products, seafood and several fruits and vegetables, and use non-iodized salt in your kitchen. At the very least, use iodized salt when making gravies and non-iodized salt when deep-frying.

Note: Good tip on iodised salt

Page 122

The word ‘sugar’ and its equivalents in every language, from Persian to Arabic to European languages, follow the path that sugar itself took from its origins in what is today Bengal. It is derived from sharkara in Sanskrit. Fun fact: Even the word ‘jaggery’ comes from the Portuguese jagara that comes from the Malayalam sakkara, which again goes back to the Sanskrit sharkara.

Page 182

Like with most spices, chillies (both green and red) lose their flavour once they are powdered. They do not, however, lose heat because capsaicin is not volatile. If you want the flavour of the chillies, use them whole. If you only want heat, use the powder. If you are sensitive to heat, a common misconception is that it’s the seeds that contribute all the heat. They don’t. The seeds are removed because they taste bitter. It’s the placenta, which connects the seeds to the flesh, that has most of the capsaicin. So, removing that will reduce the heat levels in your chillies. It’s interesting to note that this misconception is yet another in the long list of ‘wrong explanations with the right outcomes’ that plague Indian home cooking. When you remove the seeds from a chilli, there is a good chance that you are likely using a knife to slice them away. The act of doing that will, in most cases, also slice away the whitish placenta to which the seeds are connected. So, it’s natural to think that it’s the seeds that contribute to the heat because the technique seems to work. Here is a cheat sheet for using heat in your dishes: The right amount of heat intensifies other flavours. Fat mutes heat, which is why idli gunpowder is paired with sesame oil or ghee. Alcohol mutes heat, which is why bar snacks in India tend to be insanely spicy, because after a couple of large pegs, your TRPV1 receptors are not exactly in working condition. Acid amplifies heat. Some years ago, my wife and I went on a trip to Sri Lanka. Being foodies, we asked our driver to take us to a place where the locals ate rice and fish curry. He did, and in case you haven’t been to Sri Lanka, let me tell you that their recipes tend to start with the number of kilograms of chillies to be used, followed by other minor ingredients such as fish, tamarind, etc. Now I love hot food, but I can’t say the same for my wife. The fish curry was so delicious that she somehow kept going, but at one point her brain said, ‘Now hold on a minute, this individual seems to be continuing to switch on my TRPV1 receptors, and frankly, I’m tired of playing this annoying pain and pleasure game.’ And so it decided to turn on the pain dial. As the restaurant staff saw my wife in great discomfort, they offered her some Coca-Cola, which, as I’m writing this book about food science a decade later, makes for a useful anecdote about not using acids to mute heat. Coca-Cola is highly acidic and will only makes things worse. After the Coca-Cola made things worse, the entire restaurant was invested in rescuing my wife and, finally, a serving of vattalappam, a rich coconut custard, which had enough fat to wash off the capsaicin, did the trick. Heat alleviates richness or fattiness in dishes. When your dishes are too greasy, creamy or heavy, heat will reduce the perception of richness.

Page 236

Now that you know where flavour comes from, and what kinds come from which spices, the next step is to understand how to extract flavour. How you choose to extract flavour has a significant bearing on the amount of flavour extracted. Depending on the dish and personal preferences, you might want a specific spice to impart a mild, medium or strong flavour. If every spice you use were to impart a strong flavour, your dish would be overwhelming. The flavour of a spice in a dish depends on: How you mechanically damage it: Cut, chop, smash, mince, grind, etc. How you cook it: Dry-roast, oil-roast, boil in water, etc. How long you cook it: In general, the longer you cook, the lesser the intensity of the flavour of spices, but this is a tricky concept. When you cook a gravy for a long time, the amount of water will reduce, which will increase the concentration of spices in your dish, thus making it taste more intense. So, it’s important to understand this distinction. The intensity of a single spice’s flavour will reduce with cooking, as more aroma molecules are lost to the air, while the dish in totality might taste more intense because it is becoming thicker. What you pair it with, in terms of acid, fat, salt and sugar.

Page 290

And what is the difference between a good aloo jeera and an amaklamatic (from the Tamil word amaklam, which means amazing) aloo jeera? Flavour layering.

Note: Hahaha

Page 306

The combination of coriander seeds, red chillies, black pepper, fenugreek and cumin in the masala is a familiar blend for folks in south India. It’s sambar or rasam powder, depending on the proportion of the spices. The garam masala in it is a familiar finishing spice mix to a wide swathe of people across India, particularly more so in the north, east and west. Then there is amchoor, which adds sourness, something that is quite critical to creating a balance between all the other spices. Also, there is sugar that amplifies and enhances all the other flavours without perceptibly adding sweetness. And then there is the corn starch, as a thickening agent, so that your noodles does not come out thin and watery, apart from the three magic ingredients: onion, garlic and ginger powder. These are typically fresh spices, but when we dehydrate them and turn them into powders, they turn into addictive flavour bombs. In fact, the use of garlic and onion powder is what gives consumer snacks that intense, addictive taste. These sachets of instant noodles spice mixes are, in my opinion, one of the subcontinent’s greatest, albeit underappreciated, spice combinations. It manages to taste like everything in general, and yet nothing in particular. Those used to a diet of sambar and rasam will detect familiar notes, while those used to eating biryani will detect those notes thanks to the garam masala and onion powder. The lesson here is that while there is a science to blending spices, and we shall examine that in detail shortly, it’s important to not forget familiarity and nostalgia. Nostalgia and memory play a strong role in flavour perception. After all, the olfactory cortex is within gossiping distance of the emotion and memory cortex. Familiarity and nostalgia are enabled by the stunning diversity of culinary traditions in India. If you start a dish with mustard oil and add mustard, fennel, nigella, fenugreek and cumin, it will bring Bengali cuisine to mind, no matter what you do after that. And if you start with coconut oil, and add curry leaves, garlic, mustard and cumin, it will evoke Kerala. Combinations of flavours that have been used for centuries in specific regions will almost always be the first place to look for inspiration.

Note: This is the best page yet

Page 379

As a small aside, the software engineer in me has to tell you about Larry Wall’s annual ‘State of the Onion’ speech. One of the most popular programming languages in the early days of the Internet was PERL, and as it was with most technology back then, PERL was a complex mess that kept adding more and more features as the appetite for building web applications developed over time. Its open source nature meant that developers kept adding layers to the base of the language and, thus, the annual ‘State of the Onion’ speech to all PERL enthusiasts, by its original developer and patron saint of the early Internet, Larry Wall, came to be.

Note: Love the conversational tone

Page 415

One might then think that perhaps the defence mechanism ultimately failed, but consider this: Onion and garlic seem to have convinced human beings to grow them on a massive scale around the world, so who actually won this evolutionary battle?

Note: Again, from Harari

Page 429

The primary flavour profile of an onion is savoury and pungent. In fact, the molecule that causes you to tear up is also the one that, when heated, is converted to another molecule called MMP (3-mercapto-2-methylpentan-1-ol, if you want to show off to your friends). MMP lends the meaty, savoury and luscious taste to any gravy that features onions. Now you know why so many gravies start with onions in this part of the world. The more mechanical damage you do to the onion, the more MMP is released, and thus more intense the flavour in your dish. It is also fairly water-soluble, so adding a bit of water after sautéing the onions will get you a stronger flavour, as it will prevent any further loss of aroma to the air. Raw onions are also mildly acidic. The pyruvate scale measures the pungency of onion and garlic on a scale of 10. If you are using an onion for a salad and will be eating it raw, just soak it in water for a bit to remove most of the pungency. If you want your salad onions to remain crunchy, don’t use warm or hot water, as the heat will break down cell walls and turn the onions limp.

Page 499

Finely chop some onions and add it to some hot oil in a pan. Now assume you are Great Britain (circa 1947) and partition the onions into two portions. In one half, add a tiny pinch of baking soda. Stir things around to prevent the onions from burning, while keeping the line of control intact. In a few minutes, you will see the onions with the baking soda turn a delicious golden brown, while the other side remains mostly translucent. Baking soda accelerates the breakdown of pectin, which in turn releases the proteins and sugars inside the onion. These, when heated up, undergo the Maillard reaction. As long as the pectin holds, it will guard the innards of as many onion cells as possible with great dedication. This, unfortunately for us, results in under-flavoured onions in our dish. But baking soda has another trick up its sleeve. Maillard reactions happen faster in alkaline environments, and sodium bicarbonate raises the pH level of anything it’s added to, all of which has the effect of a single precision-guided stone missile that de-fruits two mangoes from a tree. Not only does it break down pectin, it also hastens the browning of onions. You can also use soda to great effect when trying to save the planet by reducing the use of energy to cook lentils, particularly chickpeas and black urad dal. A pinch of baking soda added to the lentils in the pressure cooker will cook them in half the time it would otherwise take. It’s the same chemistry.

Note: Love this tip and love the translation from Tamil

Page 519

It turns out, to summarize, that onions don’t just have physical layers, they also have layers of flavour that you can unlock depending on how you chop them and cook them. In general, the idea is to think about what flavour you want. If you cook your onions till they are translucent, they will impart a mild flavour to your dish. I’d use this for milder, creamier curries, like kormas, etc. Mildly browned onions will impart a complex sweet and savoury flavour, suitable for tikka masala-type strong-flavoured gravies. If you go all the way to golden brown, the onions become suitable for bhuna (roasted), rogan josh or theeyal-type dishes. If you go all the way and caramelize them, you might as well just go ahead and smear it on a piece of toast and wonder what you’ve been missing out on all these years. Or you could get creative and use it in Gujarati-style preparations that call for a distinct sweeter note, in addition to the spicy ones. Instead of just using jaggery or sugar, use caramelized onions to get a fantastically more complex-tasting Gujarati dal.

Note: How to cook onions

Page 873

Most of the flavour is in the gooey pulp and the seeds, so please throw away any recipe that asks you to discard them. The pulp is particularly rich in glutamates (more on this in Chapter 5), which is what adds the umami flavour to any dish featuring tomatoes. The flavour of tomatoes improves with cooking and concentrates when you sun-dry or dehydrate them. When recipes call for tomato puree, noobs add tomato puree, experts add tomato paste and legends add tomato ketchup. Tomato paste is highly concentrated and provides a more consistent and rich sourness than the general flavour lottery that comes with fresh tomatoes. But tomato ketchup, which also has onion powder, garlic powder and vinegar, is the secret weapon of the expert cook. When a recipe calls for tomatoes, add the fresh ones, and then drop in a sachet of the tomato ketchup that you should be saving up from all your home deliveries. Ketchup will improve any red-coloured gravy. For special occasions, especially when making gravies where tomato is the star, say a paneer makhani, you can apply the flavour-layering principles outlined so far. Use fresh tomatoes, tomato paste (or ketchup) and dehydrated tomato powder to get the most intense, layered flavour.

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But back to our acids for now. If you want to make things interesting in your kitchen, try out different kinds of acids. Take recipes that use tamarind and replace it with vinegar instead. Always remember, it is best not to add citrus when cooking, but you can add vinegar. Or you could try raw mango, or kokum. In dishes that call for a squeeze of lime, try squeezing orange or pineapple juice. Interestingly, pineapple juice makes for a fantastic marinade because the bromelain molecule is particularly good at tenderizing meat, while the sugars enhance the flavour of whatever it is that you are marinating, in addition to encouraging more browning reactions. Green apples also make for an interesting way to add sourness.

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Acids cause us to salivate. The processed food industry takes advantage of this weakness of ours to make what is nutritionally terrible food taste delicious. And since adding acids balances the saltiness and sweetness, it allows them to cram more salt and sugar than is good for us into the snacks. This is not to deny that they taste delicious as a result.

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Baking soda has the ability to accelerate the Maillard reaction, the one that turns ordinary food deliciously brown. Anytime you want more browning, sodium bicarbonate is your friend. A pinch added to vada or dosa batter will produce restaurant-grade dosas and vadas (now you know what they are doing). A pinch added when sautéing chicken will give you the right amount of browning before the chicken dries out.

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The subcontinent has had a love-hate relationship with alcohol. A sizeable percentage of the population does not touch it in any form as a result of religious strictures, while a portion of the remaining number regularly stands in lines at state-run shops that usually monopolize the sale of spirits. The sizeable tax revenues stemming from them make up most of individual states’ budgets thanks to a fundamentally flawed federal system that centralizes all other tax revenues while rewarding poor administrative behaviour. Some states, however, have prohibition, which is when the black market steps in and does a stellar job of catering to the tipplers’ needs. And then there are states that have strong voting blocks of women who will oppose any relaxation in the availability of alcohol. The complexity of this part of the world, which stems from structural poverty and the entrenchment of a caste system, where the British and upper-caste communities worked together in the past to snub rich, local brewing traditions that made kallu, feni and a thousand other fermented spirits, is not a topic for this book. Alcohol is politics in this part of the world, and there are no easy answers. As an urban, well-to-do hipster, my whining that I don’t get craft Belgian beer in the state-run Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC) store near my house flies in the face of a complex large-scale issue involving alcoholism and its concomitant evil, domestic violence. That said, armchair-uncleji theories about how tropical parts of the world do not have brewing traditions because of their climate are patently silly. When you put human beings, carbohydrates and some microbes together, alcoholic drinks will emerge. This brings us to a useful segue in our chapter. When you ferment things, ethanol is almost always produced. There is no escaping it.

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I want you to consider using alcohol in moderate amounts while cooking process. You don’t have to drink it, and rest assured, your finished product will not be any more alcoholic than the bread you bake or the yoghurt you ferment.

Note: Damn so much coaxing needed for Indian audiences

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This is a crucial thing to remember when making good food—we can only taste things that are water-soluble, but we can smell way more volatile aroma molecules thanks to the olfactory receptors in our noses. Most spices and strongly aromatic ingredients have volatile flavour molecules that are not water-soluble, so we can’t actually taste them. Remember, you smell cardamom, you don’t taste it. What you taste when you bite into cardamom is its woody mouthfeel and bitter taste. This is why fats are absolutely crucial to cooking, because most flavour molecules are fat-soluble, not water-soluble. This means that when you cook spices in hot oil, it extracts all of these flavour molecules and dissolves them into the oil, thus preventing them from being lost to the air. When you eat this food, the enzymes in your saliva start breaking down the fats, which results in those dissolved aroma molecules escaping into your mouth. As they enter the short, shared highway that transports both food and air, the act of breathing out elevates the aroma molecules, which are basically gases, and makes them hit the olfactory receptors. That is when you truly experience the complex taste of the thousands of aroma molecules from the saffron in your biryani.

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Now that I have your attention with the words ‘saffron’ and ‘biryani’ (no political angle here, I assure you), let me tell you that after fats, the silver medal winner in the 100 m flavour extraction race is alcohol. A tiny amount of alcohol used while cooking will almost always result in a stronger flavour. The alcohol will help transport more aroma molecules to your nose and make your dish pop.

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If you are frying fish (or vegetables) using a batter, try a batter made of maida, salt and vodka (which is just plain ethanol diluted in water). What the alcohol does is reduce gluten development, which we do not want in a fried product, as it will cause chewiness. It also prevents surface starches from absorbing too much water to gelatinize, which will result in a drier and crispier crust. This technique was pioneered by Heston Blumenthal, who went one step further and carbonated his batter before use. The aerated batter makes the crust airy, in addition to being crisp. Trust me, use this technique and you will have some game-changing pakoras to enjoy.

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That brings us to one of the subcontinent’s greatest culinary inventions, the biryani. It is the apotheosis of craft in the kitchen. It brings together the most aromatic varieties of the subcontinent’s staple grain—rice—and life-nourishing protein, but not like two families at an arranged marriage. It brings them together like two companies merging and, to quote several PowerPoint presentations, drives synergies across the board. A good biryani is not just conceptually but also literally layered with multi-dimensional flavours—of the meat that has undergone the Maillard reaction at the bottom of the vessel, the umami of the glutamates in the animal protein, the fantastic aromas of the rich spices coating the meat, the layering of fresh herbs and flavour-transporting fat (ghee), the textural contrast between the perfectly soft yet fiercely independent grains of rice and the crunch of fried onions, not to forget the top layer that blends the incredible complexity of saffron and the floral top notes of kewra water—that make it the Gaia of dishes, a layered living system of rice, meat, spices and fat, a complete meal by itself that requires no side dish. It is the single most consumed dish at restaurants in India. According to Swiggy, in 2019, forty-three orders of biryani were received every single minute of the year.

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When straining the rice, please remove any whole spice husks. While restaurants want to give you visual confirmation of the fact that they are being generous with expensive spices by leaving those flavourless husks behind, you be a nice person and remove them. No one wants to be navigating through a minefield of cardamom husks when focusing on a mouthful of orgasmic biryani.

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When it comes to Indian cooking, there’s an interesting socio-historical aspect to a lot of tacit knowledge about texture. Because of the historical taboo against constantly tasting the food one is cooking (because your saliva will come in contact with it) seasoned cooks have evolved a lot of visual and tactile cues to determine cooking milestones. This is often so ingrained in older folks that my mother, for instance, will call me or my brothers to taste what she is cooking for salt, heat (as in, spiciness) and sourness, because she cannot get herself to do it! So, taste what you cook all the time, and keep in mind that hot food tastes milder in intensity. This is why coffee that has cooled down to room temperature tastes more bitter than hot coffee.

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