Data-Crunching Indian Recipes

This may come as a surprise to some, but there are lots of people who don't think Indian food is delicious. I would be really interested if scientists have distilled something as subjective as your pallet and refined it to a formula.

Interesting read!<p>My wife practices ayurveda so we eat a lot of Indian food.<p>In terms of the flavor profiles they mention in the article, ayurveda has a concept of the 6 tastes: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent and bitter. A well-balanced meal should include all the tastes.<p>I am not sure how much ayurveda has influenced &quot;Indian&quot; style cooking, but I assume quite a bit. Maybe someone else can weigh in on it.<p>And yes it does require quite a number of ingredients.<p>Example, the breakfast I just made included:<p>Poha (flattened rice), mushrooms, coconut flakes, onions, green beans, almonds, potatoes, apples, cilantro, mustard seeds, hing, turmeric powder, cumin powder, salt, lime, chilis, coconut oil<p>Took about 20 mins to prepare.

I&#x27;d love to see a tool that allows one to input ingredients and see flavor overlaps. It&#x27;d be really interesting to use this with one&#x27;s favorite foods and use it to build recommendations for others.

I think emphasis on the ingredients used is short-sighted. Cooking technique can drastically alter the flavor of ingredients.<p>There is a reason we brown meat, and it&#x27;s not to &quot;lock in juices&quot; or some such nonsense. There is a reason we let stews, well, stew so long. Dry aging beef isn&#x27;t just a game of musical chairs for entertainment reasons. There is a reason awesome ramen soup takes more than 24 hours to make. It&#x27;s why you can&#x27;t just add smoke flavor and color to neutral spirits and get whiskey. It&#x27;s why you can&#x27;t add liquor and acetals to grape juice and have wine.<p>It&#x27;s all about giving time for various enzymatic processes to do different types of work on the food. I suspect that the slow, stewing cooking methods typical of Indian curries allows the proteins in the meats used to break down and create a significant amount of glutamic acid, the chemical responsible for the &quot;umami&quot; or &quot;savory&quot; flavor.<p>While this article is very interesting, it&#x27;s very far from the whole story.

&#x27;Labor intensive cuisine&#x27;? No more labor intensive than any other cuisine. Most of the time it&#x27;s: stir things to brown them a bit, add the liquid part, and let it simmer unattendend for a while.<p>EDIT: <i>Milk, butter, bread, and rice, meanwhile—all of which are hallmarks of Western cuisine</i><p>I&#x27;m wondering if the author has ever even been to an Indian restaurant.

&quot;The takeaway is that part of what makes Indian food so appealing is the way flavors rub up against each other.&quot;<p>The article seems to be a missive from the Capt Obvious dept, just apparently &quot;datafied&quot; with some study. I did not learn anything new from it, neither do I agree that Indian cuisine is necessarily more complicated compared to cooking from other regions of the world. Glad some people somewhere enjoyed the exercise of collating ingredients and flavours, I guess.

It&#x27;s delicious (in restaurants) because of the copious amounts of cream, oil, and butter (well, ghee) used. No mystery there!

As far as I know, most of the Indian food is not &quot;fast food&quot; category i.e. you need to have patience and heart to prepare and it takes real effort and you need to have patience to sit and eat comfortably rather than eating on the way or eating while walking ...etc. It naturally helps health.<p>This may or may not be the case with other cuisines.

Indian food is one of the oldest cuisines in the world -- created in a region with abundant crops and flavors, it represents the pinnacle of human cuisine.<p>Each recipe is tens of thousands of years old and has been refined into what it is today. That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s do delicious.

Slightly OT: reading this near to lunchtime was a huge mistake.<p>Edit: because now I&#x27;m craving Indian food, not because there&#x27;s something unappealing about it.

&gt; More specifically, many Indian recipes contain cayenne,<p>Cayenne is a city in French Guiana. &quot;Cayenne pepper&quot;, on the other hand, is a specific cultivar of the red chilli pepper that&#x27;s not really used in India (although lots of other varieties are).<p>&gt; the basis of curry powder that is in dishes like red curry, green curry, or massaman curry.<p>Those are all Thai curries, not Indian ones!

Similar paper on the subject, broadly breaks down other regions and has a similar finding that &#x27;western&#x27; food shares flavor compounds while others do not.<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/full/srep00196.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;srep&#x2F;2011&#x2F;111215&#x2F;srep00196&#x2F;full&#x2F;srep00...</a>

The new-age cuisines, those created by the celebrity chefs and fusion food-trucks, are optimizing on this trait, which is roller-coaster flavor ride with every bite.

It doesn&#x27;t come with its own cardboard microwave holder?

What???<p>They&#x27;ve missed the essential ingredient of good food. You have to add some love to it before it can become great food!

I like Indian tacos.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!

Fuck empiricist reduction. So sick of this bullshit epistemology trying to break us down to equations.

Beware, amateur science incoming! Sugar. Sugar is what makes food delicious. It comes in various shapes, most notable (for me) is potato, rice and bread.<p>I can eat that stuff... FOREVER. Indian food has a lot of it. Rice, bread and in the sauces.<p>Just my two cents.