Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking

by Krish Ashok

‘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.’

Cooking requires loads of patience

starch gelatinization, protein denaturation, hydrolysis and the Maillard reaction.

Major chemical reactions

Bromelain, found in pineapple juice, and papain, found in papayas, are used to ‘tenderize’ meat this way.

Why pineapple and papaya are used in cooking meat

to worry about than melted silicone. Mandoline

A teaspoon of oil added to the water in the pressure cooker will significantly reduce foaming when cooking legumes.

Cooking tip for making daal

You can make idli on the first two days, and as fermentation continues slowly in the refrigerator, you can make dosas on the third and fourth days, and utthapam after that.

Fermentation slowly in the fridge

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

Squeezing some lime juice into the water also prevents oxidation.

Note to prevent oxidation after cutting

If you are scrambling an egg or making an omelette, the trick to getting the softest and fluffiest results is to salt the broken egg at least 15 minutes before you cook it. The salt will uncoil the proteins in the egg before they have the chance to set rapidly when heat is applied. This allows for a softer texture in your omelette or bhurji.

Making soft burji

This is why a pinch of sugar is a good idea in any dish, because it balances saltiness.

Adding sugar

unused sodium bicarbonate reacts with the hydrochloric acid produced in your stomach to generate what in polite company tends to be called bidirectional body wind.

Fancy fart

A whole bulb of garlic (mind you, cloves of garlic will likely burn), drizzled with some oil, wrapped in aluminium foil in a 175oC oven, which is the temperature at the end of the Maillard reaction chain, for 30 minutes will yield spectacularly caramelized garlic which, when added to butter, makes for the most satisfying garlic butter you will ever taste.

GArlic butter

Caramelized garlic can also be used in chutneys to add a more complex and sweet flavour, compared to just raw or pan-browned garlic. Try this: Blend caramelized garlic, cashew nuts, salt and green chillies to get the most astonishing chutney with the complex, savoury and sweet taste of garlic, the creamy and nutty texture of cashew nuts, the herby hot freshness of green chillies, and salt to bring it all together for a flavour explosion in your mouth.

Garlic caramelization and chutney

By the way, if you want to deal with garlic breath using some knowledge of chemistry, eat parsley, apples or pears, which contain our good old friend polyphenol oxidase.

Getting garlic taste out of your mouth

But cabbage is not too different from the onion, in the sense that it is mostly watery but packs a ton of flavour molecules which can be unlocked with the slow application of heat. If you are patient, you can, in about 30 minutes, brown and caramelize cabbage into something way more delicious than steamed cabbage. Here’s a quick recipe for caramelized cabbage sabzi: Caramelize the cabbage separately while you make an onion, ginger, garlic, chillies and spices base. Add the browned cabbage to this and quickly mix it before turning the heat off. Temper with mustard/chillies. Caramelized cabbage has more flavour than onion because it has more glutamates, which lend a umami (savoury) flavour to the dish. This idea will be explored in Chapter 5.

Cooking cabbages

Try drinking a strong cup of black coffee with a tiny squeeze of lemon. As odd as this might be, if you are someone who is sensitive to strongly bitter tastes, you will enjoy the coffee more (and trigger coffee Nazis, which is not a bad thing to do).

Coffee with lemon

Coca-Cola is so strongly acidic that its pH is lower than that of vinegar!

How acidic is coca cola

However, if you are making a gravy that is yoghurt-based, and need to cook it for a fair bit of time, the trick is to use some starch like corn flour, rice flour, wheat flour or gram flour (besan) and whisk it into the yoghurt to strengthen the emulsion, thus keeping it from breaking down when heated.

Art of cooking with curd

Don’t throw away the drained water. Add some asafoetida, salt and curry leaves to make a refreshing summer drink.

Making a tasty summer drink from curd water drained from hung curd

The first layer of acid is the chopped tomatoes, which are mildly acidic while adding umami (more on this in Chapter 5). Then we have the tamarind chutney, which provides the bulk of the base sourness. On top of this, we have the green chutney, which has lime juice,

Chaat

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

Using saved tomato ketchup satchets

Acids cause us to salivate.

Yum salads

Acids also cause plant cell walls to toughen up by bonding with the pectin, which is why cooking lentils with acids (such as tomatoes or tamarind) takes longer.

Note for sambar

good way to use acids is to layer them, as you might do with spices (recall Chapter 2). In dishes like fish curry, sambar or kadhi, the acid is the anchor, while in dishes like dal, acids are the accent on top. You can layer acids by using different ones at various stages of the cooking process. Chaat, as described earlier, is a fantastic exemplar of acid layering—tamarind and tomatoes act as the base, while amchoor and lime juice, and occasionally pomegranates, are the accents.

Using acids in food

Why mushroom and tomato taste best together

Since umami amplifies saltiness and sweetness, a good way to reduce your salt and sugar intake is to use MSG, which, in addition to adding umami, is only about one-third as salty as common salt.

Reducing salt intake

saltiness is typically the tongue’s ability to detect sodium in food.

How saltiness works

to quote John Oliver,

What krish ashok watches on youtube

Let’s begin with what it can do to pectin. Baking soda is the guy operating the wrecking ball on pectin. Adding a pinch of baking soda when cooking legumes like chana, rajma and black urad dal will reduce the cook time and fuel consumption by about 40 per cent.

Baking soda on pectin

armed with a Gatling gun and sporting Ray-Ban shades. A pinch of baking soda in the water you boil peeled potatoes in will break down the pectin, resulting in rough, jagged surfaces with significantly more surface area for crisping.

More surface area for crisping... Higher surface area means faster escape of water and hence faster possibility to start malliard reaction and/ or crisping depending on the need

Bases, on the other hand, can make it tender.

Baking soda tenderizes meat

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).

Making better dosas

You can even make a fluffier omelette by adding a pinch of this to the eggs before cooking them.

Fluffier omelletes with sodium bicarbonate

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.

A splash of vodka, brandy or rum when cooking onions, ginger, garlic, tomatoes and spice powders has two benefits: extraction of more flavour from the spices and the alcohol’s ability to release all those sticky bits from the bottom of the pan, which have a ton of flavour thanks to the Maillard reaction.

Using alcohol to cook

The amount of alcohol in beer is not strong enough to make a difference, so at the very least, use wine. The cheapest one will do because once heated, all the evocative notes of strawberries and smoked salmon in your fine Chardonnay will largely be destroyed. You can, however, use beer as an acid

Why cooking with beer won't help

When you try and roast papad in a microwave, you will find that it cooks unevenly. There’s a nice physics explanation for that. The frequency that microwave ovens operate at is 2450 MHz. This means that the electromagnetic waves oscillate around two billion times in a second. And since microwaves, like all forms of radiation, travel at the speed of light, you can calculate the distance between two peaks of the oscillating wave by dividing the speed of light, which is a constant everywhere in the universe, by the frequency. That gives us a wavelength of about 12 cm. Since this is the distance between two peaks, it means that there should be two points where the field will be at 0.

Why papads are shaped the way the way they are in microwawaves

You can roll the raw papad into a glass tumbler and put it in the microwave. This way, every spot on the papad will rotate with the turntable and get even coverage.

How to ensure papads cook evenly

If you crave chickpeas one day but forgot to soak them, worry not. Simply microwave the chana in water for 20 minutes (at a low power setting) and then let it sit for another 20 minutes in the same hot water. You will have chana that is as good as the one soaked for eight hours. Pressure-cook it and use it as you please.

Using microwave to get soaked channa quickly

What if I tell you that you can make instant pulao in the microwave just by adding some ghee,

whole spices, washed rice, salt and water. Simply let it microwave for 10 minutes at high power, and then 10–15 more minutes on a low setting, and it will be done.

Making instant pulao for one with physics

But at the same time, I agree that store-bought ginger–garlic paste tastes terrible because the sodium citrate lends a sour taste to it that does not go well with the complex flavours of ginger and garlic.

Why store bought ginger garlic paste suck

ingredient I urge you to keep around in your kitchen is xanthan gum.

Xatnthan gum for makingb Rotis

Use 50 per cent coconut milk + 50 per cent water.

Use soy sauce instead of salt for umami-flavoured rice.

Umami yum

If you don’t want to use wheat at all and want the full flavour and nutrition of the non-gluten flour you are using, the modernist solution to the problem is xanthan gum. It’s a surreally powerful thickener that adds no flavour of its own. The best part is that you need a really tiny amount. In fact, a small pinch of xanthan gum can help you make millet rotis that do not break up like the Balkans.

Power of xangtham gums

It took decades for urban families to consider it okay to store leftovers. Most food in India is cooked and eaten fresh, which is why there tends to be extraordinary focus on making just the precise amount, so that wastage is minimal. In the pre-refrigeration era, this was crucial because food spoils much faster in tropical conditions. We all know that fungi and bacteria absolutely love temperatures above 30oC, a temperature considered to be early winter in Chennai, where I live.

Why refrigeration is frowned upon

In fact, there is a rather interesting aspect to the design choices fridge manufacturers make for India. Freezer space tends to be much smaller because we don’t store or consume meat in large quantities, frozen vegetables are still a tiny market, and more crucially, a large number of people still haven’t realized that freezing is the absolute best way to store literally anything long-term.

Why freezers are smallin india

A chutney involves eight elements:

Making chutneys

Chutney cheatsheet