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And because we have never bothered to build a standard, documented model of underlying cooking methods and the science behind those techniques, a metamodel, if you will, Indian cooking continues to wrongly be considered all art and no craft.
By treating our culinary tradition as something sacred, artistic and borderline spiritual, we are doing it a grave disservice.
In fact, the insistence on purely oral traditions of transmission of knowledge have ended up making the art a very elitist affair not accessible to the wider population.
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!
While there are a million different chemical reactions that happen when you cook food, the four major ones that are worth understanding are: starch gelatinization, protein denaturation, hydrolysis and the Maillard reaction.
Food chemistry reactions
Starch Gelatinization: This is what happens when you cook starches in grains like rice, wheat, lentils, potatoes, yams, etc. In the presence of water and heat, long starch molecules break up and some parts of their molecules form hydrogen bonds with water.
Protein Denaturation: This is what happens when heat or acids are applied to proteins. The long and complex structure of proteins unfolds in such a case.
Maillard reaction: Arguably the most famous reaction in cooking, it causes browning of food and a host of delicious, aromatic by-products. This is what is happening when your onions brown or your chicken sears in a pan.
A fair number of people believe that pressure cookers made in the 1980s are more reliable and better constructed than the ones being sold today. Apparently, during the golden era of pressure cooker manufacturing, cookers would make perfectly cooked rice in three whistles, whereas the modern ones tend to be temperamental. This is not true. What is true is that a fair number of Indians are using the pressure cooker the wrong away, and still achieving mostly good results, so we never bother to correct our understanding.
Perfectly cooked rice is rice that has typically absorbed water in a 1:1 ratio by volume. Anything less and it will taste powdery and dry. And if you let it cook with more water, it will keep absorbing water and turn into congee. But if you add water in a 1:1 ratio, you will end up with undercooked rice because a good amount of that water will evaporate when it comes to a boil. So, it is necessary to add extra water to compensate for evaporation. That’s the tricky part. Estimating how much extra water you need on top of the 1:1 ratio requires some experimentation with the vessel you use.
An interesting fact: The amino acids in your own cells react with sugars over time, in a very slow version of the Maillard reaction, to render proteins in your tissues dysfunctional, which, scientists say, is a component of human ageing!
In fact, the Marathi word for potato is literally the Portuguese word: ‘batata’.
The word tamarind comes from tamar-e-Hind (dates from India), despite the fact that it originated in Africa, because that’s simply where the Arabs assumed it came from.
Baking soda can also tenderize tough cuts of meat. If you recall Chapter 1, a common misconception is that using acids in a marinade helps make the meat tender. They do not. On the contrary, acids make meat tougher. Bases, on the other hand, can make it tender. If you add a pinch of baking soda to tough cuts of meat, like beef or mutton, and let it sit for 5 minutes, it will make the meat tender. But don’t add too much or you will be left with a nasty aftertaste.
xanthan gum. Despite sounding like a sticky alien that hails from a planet in a faraway galaxy, it is a polysaccharide (long chain of sugar molecules) produced by the fermentation of simple sugars by a bacteria named Xanthomonas campestris. This magical substance, even a tiny amount, can thicken any gravy, batter or dough. You might wonder why not just use corn starch, rice flour or maida, but that’s like asking why use an Uzi submachine gun when a blunt knife is available. If you have ever tried making rotis using millet-based (or any non-gluten) flours, you know how painfully difficult it
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As much as I might ask you to not trust recipes blindly, you should not trust the temperatures and timings blindly in this book either. They are meant to be a starting point. If those timings and temperatures work for you, that’s fantastic, but all it means is that you probably live in south Chennai and buy groceries from the same places that I do.
