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.’

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Cooking is essentially chemical engineering in a home laboratory, known as a kitchen, with an optional lab coat, known as an apron.

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.

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chillies and tomatoes—both of which came from the New World and were introduced to India by the Portuguese.

anyone gives you grief about ‘authenticity’ in food, please move them to the part of your brain labelled ‘Recycle Bin’ (and click on the ‘Empty Recycle Bin’

button for good m...

Soda reacts with the pectin (a hemicellulose) in the skin of the chickpea, which breaks it down faster than by just applying heat and pressure. Using a pinch of soda is, therefore, both energy efficient and results in a perfectly soft final product.

baking soda can also be used to accelerate the Maillard reaction,

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Tea is mildly acidic,

Adding a teabag to the chana has two advantages. It neutralizes all the unused baking soda, so that your stomach does not have to do it for you (burrp!) and lends a lovely dark brown colour to the chana.

Modern Indian cooking is more about technique than about the quality of ingredients.

difference between Italian food made with ordinary ingredients and premium ingredients is like that between day and night.

Tomato ketchup is a fantastically underrated flavour enhancer. Chapter

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sous vide cooking.

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piety.

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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.

but heat is best understood as a measure of the energy from the continuous, random movement and collision of atoms and molecules in a substance.

heat will move from a place where there is more to a place where there is less of it. In

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At this point, it should dawn on you that this is precisely why cooking something dry on metal pans is the fastest way to cook (or burn) food, while boiling something in water takes more time, and baking in an oven takes even longer.

capacity is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a substance. Water

has high specific heat capacity. Steel, on the other hand, has very low specific heat capacity.

boiling point of water is the temperature at which there is enough energy to break the bonds between water molecules, which keep it in liquid state, and liberate them into

the air as water vapour (steam).

Imagine trying to walk through a crowd of people. The larger the crowd, the harder it is to walk through. So,

the higher the air pressure, more is the energy required to liberate the water molecules. This is why at high air pressures, the boiling point of water is more than 100oC, which means you need more heat to boil water.

at lower air pressures, the boiling point is ...

Conduction is the transfer of heat from a solid to any other substance via surface contact. Conduction is how the oil you add to a metal pan heats up as a result of energy transferred from the metal to the oil.

Convection is the transfer of heat from a liquid or gas to your food.

Electromagnetic waves with high-enough energies can transfer heat directly to your food, provided they are close enough to the source.

hot sun also heats it up using the exact same principle, except that the source of this radiation is 150 million km

A hot light source generates infrared radiation that heats up and...

What they are good at is specifically causing water molecules to align themselves to the magnetic field they create.

Microwaves work by heating up the water inside foods, which is why they don’t work for food items that don’t have enough moisture.

Starch Gelatinization:

55oC and 85oC,