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How do we learn something?
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One way is to do what Indians call Raktamaro, rote learning.
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Learn some instructions by heart and then hope that works out.
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But that's a horrible way to learn anything.
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If you want to figure out how to play chess, for example, a good coach won't make you
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memorize theory on day one, E4, C5 is a Sicilian defense, D4, D5, C4 is a Queen's gambit and
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Instead, you should first be taught the basic principles of the game, the importance of
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space, of occupying the center, developing your pieces, the importance of initiative
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This way, whenever you encounter an unfamiliar position, you can just apply these principles
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and figure out what to do.
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Similarly, a good poker coach won't begin by making you mug up ranges in different spots.
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This is your 15 BB shoving range from the hijack.
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This is your 22 BB reshove range from the big blind and so on.
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Again, you're better off learning broad principles first.
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This should be common sense, but it isn't.
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So many of us, me included, try to learn about cooking and food by reading and trying out
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But to understand the subject, we don't just need to know what to do.
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We need to understand why we are doing it.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is polymath thinker and unassuming artist Krish Ashok.
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There has never been a guest on the show who is such a perfect blend of the artistic and
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Ashok has been an internet legend in India for over a decade now.
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He's known as a brilliant humorist and musician, but he's also a systematic thinker about any
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subject that interests him.
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And in this episode, we are going to discuss his brilliant book, Masala Lab.
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This is a book that gets meta about cooking.
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It takes a step back from the world of recipes and looks into the science behind cooking.
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It approaches everything from first principles.
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In the process, it shows us why so much of the traditional wisdom about food that we
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get from our grandmothers is bang on.
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The book also contains an immense number of TIL revelations, even jaw-dropping ones.
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I love books that get meta like this, that go back to first principles.
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I'd done an episode almost a year ago with Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah on their book in
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service of the republic, which looked at public policy from a similar meta lens.
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And I am now writing a book called Hacking Cricket, which takes a similar approach to
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That might be warm to Masala Lab right away, as I love books that take this kind of approach.
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And Ashok's book is spectacular.
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It's accessible, insightful, and inspiring.
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In fact, after reading this intro, I am probably going to head on over to my kitchen.
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And I should probably say this in a whisker, but I might just end up making Maggie.
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A quick note before we begin though, we used a specific software I won't name or use again
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for the remote recording of this episode.
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And while the sound seemed fine to me through my monitor headphones, my audio file, not
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Ashok's, my audio file got all messed up and distorted.
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The conversation was so wonderful that I was pretty upset, but my editor Vijay managed
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to salvage it enough for us to be able to release this.
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So kindly excuse the quality of my audio, I hope the quality of the conversation will
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Before we start though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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By the time this episode ends, you will be dying to dive into the rabbit hole that is
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food and learn more about cooking and cuisines.
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The links in the show notes should help you, but I have one more resource for you.
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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus at thegreatcoursesplus.com.
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And I've spent the last couple of days lost inside one of their courses called Cooking
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Across the Ages by Ken Albala.
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This course is divided into 24 lectures and discusses cooking and food science and the
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various cuisines of ancient Rome, imperial China, medieval France, Renaissance Italy,
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and it takes us into the kitchens of the Vikings and the Aztecs, the Germans and the Brazilians,
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Check it out at thegreatcoursesplus.com where you'll also find a fantastic library of online
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They also have an app where you can listen to the audio of these courses.
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The same way you listen to podcasts, what's not to like?
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Do try it out, it will cost you nothing.
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You get one month of unlimited free access if you use the following URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com
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That's right, unseen, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash unseen for one month of unlimited free
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Ashok, welcome to The Scene on the Unseen.
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It's been a long time coming.
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I have to, by the way, tell my listeners that before the show started, I figured that there
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was an awkward question I had to ask, so I did not make an awkward mistake through the
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show, which was to ask Ashok what I should call him, Krish or Ashok, and he told me that
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the correct name to use is Ashok.
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So I have saved myself from committing what Ashok would call an Amit mistake.
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So, you know, I'm sort of going to first of all say that how glad I am that you are here.
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We have sort of, we've never met in person, but I have been following you, you know, all
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the way since the blogging days and all of that.
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And when I started the show, I thought it would be great to have you one day on the
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And we spoke about it a couple of years back and you said, yeah, when you're in Bangalore,
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just give me a buzz if I happen to be making a business trip there, we'll kind of do it.
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And that never happened.
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But you know, who has to leave the city in these crazy times?
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So I'm going to start off with my podcast version of, you know, chop some onions and
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saute them in oil till they get translucent, which is, you know, the cliched way in which
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so many Indian recipes start.
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And I like to kind of start my podcast by not talking about whatever the subject in
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question is, but rather by asking my guests about their personal journey, which is specifically
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interesting to me in your case, because even though we'll speak much of this episode talking
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about your wonderful eye opening book, you're a man of many parts.
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And you know, I did not know you as a food person back in the day, I knew you as a humorist
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and then a music person.
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So tell me a bit about your journey, what's your journey been like so far?
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It's been, I mean, nothing tremendously unique about it, except that I was born in Chennai
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and then, but my father had one of those rare Tambaram jobs that involved him getting transferred
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all over and he was actually in business, right?
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A very rare thing for a Tambaram family to be in.
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And my mother worked in a bank and then we literally lived all over India.
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So we changed schools every few years and so on.
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And so I grew up everywhere and my father's side of the family is slightly odd in that
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his father was an atheist, an avowed atheist, which is very strange to be for someone like
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that in the 1930s or 40s in the deep south of Tamil Nadu, a very, very religious place
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I mean, so atheist to the point that he did not allow, you know, idols or any kind of
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religious worship in the house.
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I mean, he was quite militant about it, right?
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And so my father grew up in a very interesting environment.
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He later in life, he became pretty religious, but I think he had that sense that his children
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should have the freedom to, you know, do what they please in a sense that I think normally
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when you kind of question religious tradition and all of that, you know, you'll get a very
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If you're one of these traditional sort of religious families, which I wasn't.
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My mother's side of the family is mostly priests.
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I mean, what two generations ago, they were just all priests and so you can see is sort
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And my mother tried very hard to get us to be religious and so on.
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So from what you can see on my blog and other things, clearly that didn't work on any of
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I mean, there were three of us.
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So me, my middle sibling who works in Microsoft and the youngest guy who's a graphic novelist
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and illustrator and works in China, right?
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So I think the mother's side of the family is also predominantly musical in the sense
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that a ton of her female relatives are all professional musicians.
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And so obviously, I think music was something that I had to learn the violin.
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It wasn't very enjoyable when I was eight or nine years old.
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It's a painful instrument to play.
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It takes six or seven years before you like the sound of what you're playing.
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In fact, later in life, I tend to rate musical instruments by an acronym called mean time
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to sonic palatability, which is that, you know, a keyboard is that you pick it up and
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it will sound decent in about five minutes, right?
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But a violin takes, you know, six or seven years and it's quite painful.
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But I think once I kind of got the hang of it, I became reasonably good.
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And I was actually, through my college, I was actually learning under a very famous
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violinist who recently passed away, Padma Bhushan T. N. Krishnan, right?
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And he was one of those serious guys who said, you know, you need to quit your engineering
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and come join me, you know, become a professional musician and so on.
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And you know, my father said, not quite sure, right?
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So he kind of, he was smart enough to realize that this is a very long day in that very
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few people become very successful and the rest is, you know, we didn't quite have the
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And this is one of those very insular, Carnatic music is one of those kinds of places, right?
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You still needed connections, you know, you still had to be reasonably rich and so on.
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So I think, you know, that's how my musical journey kind of began.
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I was, till my mid-twenties, I was still thinking, should I do a full-time career in Carnatic
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And then, you know, one thing led to another, I essentially picked up a profession that
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I felt at that time was the, you know, in the late nineties was the most amount of money
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for the least amount of effort, which is software, right?
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And also the one that kind of gave me the most amount of free time to pursue other things,
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I mean, in 1999 or 2000, having Saturday and Sunday off was a rarity, right?
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And the IT industry was literally the only one that actually had this sort of thing.
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So I joined TCS straight out of college.
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I went to, so what is now called Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology used to be called
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DIT, part of the Delhi College of Engineering, sort of this thing, right?
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And I, you know, I worked in software and every five years, every time I would get bored,
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I mean, I just had the fortune of having a boss who said, yeah, I'll give you something
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So, you know, in the sense that I've been with my job for almost 21 years and I absolutely
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I mean, it is, although it's my livelihood and it pays for all of the fancy stuff that
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I have in my studio, but it's a job that I would not think of giving up, despite the
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fact that I have all these other hobbies.
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And hobbies is something that I kind of continuously picked up.
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I was living in the US for about seven years.
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That was when I started seriously getting into Western music, kind of learned composition,
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went to a conservatory and learned to play the keyboard, started learning the guitar
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from YouTube, the first generation of YouTube and so on.
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And I think I've watched more YouTube bars than most people.
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So I watch it at, you know, two to three X. So I, you know, so I get through a lot of
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So I think so that is how I started getting into a lot of these hobbies.
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I was always into writing or human writings in school.
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It was mostly cheesy stuff, but it was, I think it was around 2008 when the financial
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crisis happened and my father's business kind of went under and it was actually a bad time.
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And so he was terribly under debt and, you know, we were all sort of struggling to stay
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afloat and I had to sort of use every little bit of my sort of financial resources to sort
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of, you know, bring things back under control.
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That was actually when I decided, fine, you know what, as a, as an outlet, let me sort
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of, you know, go onto social media and start expressing those and get that kind of feedback.
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Before that, I was a very private person.
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I still am in the sense that I don't, I don't go to parties.
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I don't sort of, I don't like small talk and so on, but I enjoyed, you know, putting out
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crazy creative stuff and, you know, engaging with people online.
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And that's when, you know, I ran into you.
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You were one of the superstars of the Indian blogging environment already when I just started
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And I think that that generation of people who kind of, you know, started expressing
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these interesting ideas and had the feedback from people.
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So that is how I started blogging.
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And then I used that medium as a, I was always into sort of more visual creativity.
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So I like making a lot of pictures and Photoshop memes and also mixing music and visuals and
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Amidst all of this, I mean, I was always cooking, right?
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So I was always someone who learned to cook very young, but I was a teenage boy, my mother
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So when she was either away or on travel, I would be the one to cook at home.
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It's just that I started sort of taking the science part a lot more seriously, I guess
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about seven or eight years ago, which is when I started, I would say writing down pieces
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that ultimately went with, I mean, this book didn't come together in like, you know, just
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the first three months of the pandemic.
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I noted down a lot of things that ultimately, you know, I did a lot of experiments at home
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to be able to over time sort of write this book, right?
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So that's been my journey.
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And one of the things I found fascinating about the book, in fact, the thing that I
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really liked about it particularly is that this is not about, you're not giving us Gyan
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about food or giving us recipes or whatever, you're taking a step back, getting meta, just
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talking about, you know, the sort of the first principles that animate the art and craft
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And I was drawn to that because that's something that I try to do in some of the various things
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that I've done, whether it was, you know, playing poker or whether, you know, the first
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thing I tell people who do my writing course is that, listen, I'm not going to give you
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Like I'm some kind of 3-3 writing Shankar and these are the 10 commandments, but let's
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get back to first principles and then, you know, build our own frame.
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Now, is this way of thinking something that is inherent to how you approach everything?
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For example, even learning music where first you start the violin as a kid, and I guess
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it's in the Carnatic tradition, where, as you have pointed out, not much is codified.
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A lot of it is just like passed on from guru to shishir and so on.
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You know, you wrote in your book about how Indian cooking is so much like Indian music
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in that sense, that there is no codification.
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It's almost treated as a mystical art that has to be passed on, whether it is from a
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grandmother in the kitchen or from an ustad with whom you sort of go and learn.
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So did you always have that kind of mindset that you're trying to break things down, you're
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taking a step back and thinking about stuff?
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I mean, I've always greatly enjoyed science, right from when I was very young, especially
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physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics, all of it.
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I think the one caveat being that I was not such a big fan of speed, right, in the sense
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that a lot of your entrance exams really test for speed, right?
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I mean, I liked solving very complex physics problems over a day as opposed to 50 problems
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in 90 minutes, which I was very bad at.
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And so when I attempted to do that, it was almost always since I was very bad at memorization.
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So very early, I really had sort of picked up this habit of trying to kind of derive
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first principles so that I could derive anything I wanted rather than memorize.
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So this was something that was always there.
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In a sense, it also served me well in my software career because that's basically it, right?
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At the end of the day, you're trying to solve a very, very hard and complex problem with
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people who are largely very young, inexperienced, are going to write terrible code.
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So therefore, you need to really get down to first principles and you need to let the
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process be documented to the point where you don't blame the person, but your software
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is still, you know, does what it needs to do, right?
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So I think, you know, a lot of the approach of the book in some sense is also that.
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So it's algorithmic, it's really, you know, rather than memorize or learn, you know, recipes,
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is there a more simpler way to break it down or to teach people?
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And in a sense, this is the reason I saw that this was an opportunity in the Indian cooking
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You know, there's a fair number of food science books in the West, you know, Kenji Alte Lopez
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and Harold McGee and others, and have really broken down a lot of Western cooking, largely
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European cooking, if you will, into into very, very granular, easy to understand principles
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with a great amount of precision.
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And for some reason, that's not there for Indian cooking.
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And, you know, it's not surprising.
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Most cooking is and was largely done by women with little choice in the matter at home.
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And, you know, till about 50, 60 years back, they did not have access to education either.
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So and we are largely an oral tradition, you know, kind of culture.
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So it's literally think about this, right?
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So there's you can you can literally name just one, you know, famous cookbook called
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the Manasola Saha written like in the 12th century in Sanskrit by the Chalukyan Empire.
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And even that really doesn't get into the specifics.
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It doesn't get into clearly the guy writing it.
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Probably they were caught.
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I mean, it was apparently written by the emperor himself.
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So clearly he didn't go right.
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But what's interesting is that there seems to be a complete lack of craft, if you will.
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So that's the distinction I make.
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So art is something inscrutable.
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You know, it's you just need to get it.
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It's you have a new intuitive sense and so on.
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But craft is craft needs documentation.
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Craft needs explanations for why you're doing what you're doing.
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And also a sense of a lot of the grandmother's wisdom, tacit wisdom ends up being right.
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But, you know, we don't know why it works.
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And in the Internet misinformation universe that we have, it's now becoming increasingly
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hard to figure out, you know, what is actually verified and what is unverified.
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Yeah, like turmeric curing covid and so on and so forth.
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A tangential question, since you mentioned art and craft, is that my sense of art and
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craft has increasingly come to be that that is really not much of a difference.
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The key difference is that art is that part of the craft which you haven't thought about
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consciously or can't articulate, but they amount to the same thing.
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And you know, since you're a musician as well, I'll ask your opinion in that context that,
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you know, in music also, I am sure you can sort of take a step back and get back to first
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principles that these combination of notes spark of, you know, these effects in the brain.
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And that is why we find them pleasant and we find something else noisy and blah, blah,
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And I think part of the art of coming up with something that sounds pleasant is actually
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using this internalized knowledge, which you haven't yet put into words or articulated.
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And whatever you can articulate automatically becomes craft because you can, you know, and
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I'm just kind of thinking aloud.
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But what's your sense of this?
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I think it's, you know, I would say music and other sort of traditional arts, if you
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will, be a drama or film or anything, right?
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Work slightly different.
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Definitely, I think, you know, if yes, culinary arts is there.
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But I would, we're really talking about a Michelin star or a famous chef who's creating
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something that you simply cannot reduce down to just the technique and so on.
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There is clearly something magical about that inspiration, just like, you know, you can
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analyze jazz music all you want.
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But the reality is that when jazz music came out onto the stage in the 20s and so on, a
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lot of Western classical musicians and critics were like, this is just a total, this is violating
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every bit of harmony theory that we knew.
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But yet, I mean, it really just went on to become the predominant popular form of music.
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And it actually influenced classical music.
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You know, the last stage of Western classical musicians, the Shostakovich, you know, a lot
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of the Russian composers and so on, Mahler and others, really stopped doing the usual
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formulaic harmony arrangements and started doing things that sounded a lot more jarring
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And they really set the stage for, you know, the kind of cinematic music that you hear
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from, say, Hans Zimmer or anyone or John Williams, so that you kind of set the mood in a way
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because you need a wider range.
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You need to be a lot more experimental beyond just what the rules of harmony tell you, right?
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And that, in a sense, that's true for, you know, a painting or sculpture and so on.
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It's hard to break down, say, the David in Florence, just down to the fact that it's
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about these are the proportions and the distance between the eyes and so on and so on.
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There's a golden ratio involved in all of this.
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So there's, you know, all that post-facto analysis to try to make craft out of an art
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is definitely is a very common phenomenon in other kind of arts.
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In this case, the only distinction I want to make is that I think cooking at home should
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not be that because at the end of the day, it's a high pressure daily thing that you
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It should not be something that you need to be mentored by a seasoned person for many
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It should be something that you can just pick up quickly because at the end of the day,
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you know, cooking by yourself, fixing your nutrition is one of the single most important
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things that you will do from a health standpoint, right?
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And so in that sense, I think that's the distinction I'm trying to make.
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As I clearly say, the book is not aimed at making you a great chef.
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It's aimed at making you a better home cook.
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And home cooking is an engineering discipline.
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It should not be like art.
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It should not be this inscrutable thing is, of course, right?
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Even in home cooking, you know, you sometimes have these, you'll remember your grandmother
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or your mother or some relatives, fantastic, you know, a chicken biryani or a dal or something
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Remember that a lot of that has to do with nostalgia.
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Our perception of flavor is done in the same part of the brain that processes nostalgia
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And this is something that I call out in that flavor chapter.
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So that's why your restaurant dal can't compete with your grandmother's dal, not because it's
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objectively better, because you simply have better memories of it.
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And once it's tied into those memories and memories are formed, that's what, you know,
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that's what enhances the experience of food itself.
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So it is very much a you basically, for both part, that's the that's the sort of magical
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experience you're thinking about.
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That's really just, you know, neurology, if you will, right?
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The craft essentially is fundamentally about saying, look, you know, this is there is a
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People tell you things like cook, you know, tamarind till the raw smell goes away.
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Those are terrible instructions.
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You know, how does that translate into writing?
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How does it translate into knowledge that you can actually pass on to someone else?
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Because you can't literally describe smells in that.
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But you can say, you know, cook the tamarind till it tastes as sour or as less sour as
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That's a better instruction.
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I mean, if you want to be really precise, if you're in the food industry, you will say
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use a pH strip and measure to see if the pH is between four or four point five, because
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all great food is typically in the range of four to four point five pH.
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I mean, that's what chefs and Western food scientists have said.
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But yeah, so that's the idea, is to bring some basic level of craft and engineering
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and better knowledge, if you will, to what is essentially a very daily laborious activity.
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And so that's that was the point.
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You know, what I was kind of getting at is that craft is underrated.
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You know, people will often have this hierarchy where art is up there and it's mystical and
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And craft is below that you're just going through the motions.
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And I think that that's really unfair that ultimately, you know, the finest art is what
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will eventually one day perhaps become craft when people understand it well enough.
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Before we get to the book, a sort of a final question that is not to do with the book or
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not to do with food, which is I'm very curious about your methods of knowledge management
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and how you organize all of that.
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And also a tangential question that how do you listen at 3X?
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You once mentioned that you listen to my podcast at 3X.
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And you know, when I tell others that I myself listen in between two and two point five,
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they're like, how can you do that?
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And I'm like, no, the brain normalizes everything.
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And I listen to all YouTube by 2X, by the way, except that you mentioned you listen
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to YouTube at higher, but there is no higher setting in my YouTube thing.
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So essentially, I think knowledge management is something that I've paid a lot of attention
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So again, something that I've learned from one of my bosses at TCS, who's now the chief
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And he was he was big on what he called personal project management.
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He said that people are great at following other people's project plans, but they don't
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have a project plan of their own.
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Do you know how much time you spend on reading?
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Do you know how much time you spend on talking to others?
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Do you have the right balance?
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And so in a sense that I kind of got serious about efficiency of learning, if you will,
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And let me be absolutely clear here, I don't recommend that other people simply blindly
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And it's something I like doing.
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I have multiple interests.
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But in general, so one of the things I do is there's this Edgar Dale sort of pyramid
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of learning, which is something that pedagogy teachers tend to use.
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So if you read something, apparently, you remember about 10 percent of it.
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And if you watch a video, you remember 20 percent.
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And if there's a live demonstration, you remember 30 percent and ultimately go on.
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If you teach someone else, you remember 90 percent.
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So it's sort of it's this sort of pyramid.
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And even within that, what you read on screen, you retain a lot less than if you read on
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So there's this sort of big pyramid, right?
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So I'm always sort of I'm very wary of the fact that I don't want to only consume content.
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So it is important that if I watch a video on, say, some kind of illustrations, you know,
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digital illustrations, which I did, you know, because I drew a fair bit of the illustrations
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And so it's just watching hours and hours of video is not helpful.
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So I have to sort of break it down into saying that, look, I'm going to pick the top videos
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and then I'm going to basically in increasing order of difficulty, draw illustrations that
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are more and more difficult.
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So similar to how you learn music, you learn Papa Kehte on the guitar as the first song.
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And then you kind of get into, you know, Pink Floyd or something more sophisticated later.
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So it's essentially the same.
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So the second thing is around I had a colleague who was visually challenged.
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And he was one of my colleagues who used to work on some of the applications that we used
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to build some years back.
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And he was working with us to test for accessibility.
#
So are these web applications accessible to people with visual disabilities and so on?
#
And that's when I learned that how they actually use the web is use something called a screen
#
It's this thing that they wear, headphones that they wear, and literally it reads out
#
the HTML code on the page.
#
And so one, so you need really clean HTML code or it will be a mess.
#
And two, so that the navigation and the menu and all of that is there.
#
And by the way, because, you know, and they do not have any other distractions, it reads
#
it at six to seven X, the normal voice to me, it was just complete gibberish.
#
And he said, yeah, he was able to hear it.
#
And he said something rather mind blowing.
#
He said that at six X, right, he can listen to an audio book faster than a sighted person
#
But above average sighted person can read.
#
They said, look, if blind people can read books faster than me, then clearly I think
#
there's some improvements to be made.
#
I wasn't aiming for six X, but I said, okay, you know, let's start with two X.
#
Yours was one of the harder podcasts because I think as Indians, we tend to speak faster.
#
The American podcast, you know, the NPR stuff, et cetera, is what I started increasing the
#
speed to 1.5 and slowly gradually you kind of get used to it.
#
In fact, when I came into the podcast, I realized that I've never heard your voice this slow
#
ever because I've heard your voice for the last two years and I've only heard it at three
#
So that was a funny moment there.
#
So obviously I kind of, you know, therefore I realized that, you know, I could consume,
#
I could learn more, but I also have to do stuff.
#
And then I also have a, I have a very specific style of documenting or noting down things
#
in a way that I'll remember them.
#
So I have all kinds of tools and ultimately just decided on, I mean, I use a Mac, so I
#
It can sometimes be buggy.
#
I've put all those kinds of Google Keep and all of that, just settle down on, just take
#
down notes in under different topic areas in terms of, you know, facts that I, that
#
I think that I want to remember because they would be useful to sort of share when I talk
#
So if I find, so I use the watch later functionality really well.
#
So I say, Hey, it's, it's a one hour lecture by say Daniel Kahneman.
#
I'm going to watch it at some point of time or David Graeber or someone else.
#
And so the other is also in a sense of figuring out the time of the day so that I'm not sitting
#
and doing this like all day.
#
So I need that balance.
#
So there's work and since the pandemic, so, you know, I have childcare duties, you know,
#
I have to spend, you know, two to three days of the week shepherding my son through his
#
He'll kind of get distracted and so on and cooking and all of that.
#
So that, you know, I time box it so that, you know, there's a, I have that constraint
#
And in a sense, there's a lot of synesthesia.
#
I constantly kind of think about what I hear some music and try and see what it reminds
#
me of visually and so on.
#
So I kind of note those things down because I have a terrible memory.
#
So now a lot of it, a lot of management is foundationally about writing stuff.
#
So which is why it wasn't too hard to write this book because I had like a ton of notes
#
Not as completely fascinating.
#
I'm using something I find pretty useful called Roam Research.
#
I, one of my, one of the designers I worked with did recommend, I did see, I have not
#
It's sort of mind mapping and not taking kind of tool order.
#
Mind mapping is one part of it, but it does a couple of things.
#
The first of which many other apps will also probably provide the, the first of which is
#
you can have these nested little sections, which is a good way of organizing stuff.
#
So the second is bi-directional linking, which is useful to me because then it seems that
#
over a period of time, as you input more and more, all of these connections form between
#
And I just find that a much better, like earlier I used to take notes for my episodes on Microsoft
#
And that's just a mess.
#
And you use Scrivener while writing your book.
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
That was actually fantastic.
#
So Scrivener is, before I set out to write, I was like, okay, you know, what tool should
#
I had used Scrivener at the past.
#
In fact, I used to use Scrivener when I was still actively writing my blog.
#
So I used to jot down these ideas, interrelated ideas, because there were several teams that
#
used to repeat across posts and so on.
#
So I used to kind of use Scrivener.
#
So essentially I think what I liked about Scrivener is that it really focuses your thought
#
on structuring how you want to think about the narrative as opposed to the visual.
#
Like one of my everlasting gripes with Microsoft Word or, you know, PowerPoint, right?
#
Is that it forces you in a way to constantly think about the visual representation of something
#
as opposed to purely the flow and the narrative, right?
#
Which is actually why academics tend to use, you know, the tools of latex and so on, right?
#
So it separates it out into two tools.
#
One for writing content, which has no visual representation at all.
#
You just get your white paper down and then you do formatting and type setting only at
#
So in a sense that I think, you know, Scrivener really sort of forces that mindset.
#
So it first allows you to lay down the layout of the book.
#
You dump all your research, lay down the chapters.
#
And I think my favorite part of the fact was the fact that it gamified the entire process
#
of saying that, hey, you know, set a target.
#
You want to write 3,000 words a day?
#
And I'll tell you, you know, how you're doing.
#
And then it sort of, you know, kept me motivated to, you know, really just quickly get through
#
And I think it tremendously helped.
#
In fact, I had to do very little restructuring after I moved out of Scrivener into Word,
#
because that's how Penguin or any other publisher really works.
#
They work on Microsoft Word, but track changes and so on, right?
#
So that's how the industry works.
#
But I think we never really had to do anything major, you know, once I came out of Scrivener.
#
I think it was fantastic.
#
And Justin, in terms of sort of getting your style down, like again, a final sort of question
#
in writing, you know, and you've also said in another interview that you've thought fairly
#
deeply about science writing, especially from when you were talking about the pyramid earlier,
#
where, you know, your 90% of absorption happens when you teach it to someone.
#
I think the phrase you used in one of your earlier interviews was explain it to me like
#
You know, so how hard was it then to like, how hard was the process of writing, or, you
#
know, just relentlessly practicing this kind of writing through the years, did it make
#
it much easier than it would otherwise have been?
#
So there's, in a sense that my first drafts of some of the chapters, I did a fair amount
#
And the reason for that was because I think the tone and the language and the style was
#
very similar to what you might find on my blog, right?
#
So I was always thinking about two things.
#
So there's, you know, there's, there's, there's a style of writing that I keep for the blog,
#
which is sort of humor, snarky, a lot of pop culture references, sarcastic, and so on.
#
And then there's a, you know, the style of writing that I would often do either at work,
#
when I'm really putting down and explaining something to someone, and so on.
#
Or when I'm writing a column, used to write columns for the Hindu and Indian Express back
#
in the day, simple science and technology columns.
#
And clearly, I think the editor then and there said that, you know, don't show off your humor
#
So if you're aiming to educate, you know, focus on that, throw in the odd joke, but
#
the explaining part has to be the important part.
#
And so in a sense, I ended up rewriting the first couple of chapters, because I felt that
#
it was, it was more in my blog style, it was more snarky, more jokes.
#
And then my editor also was like, over time, as I started rewriting, and my inspiration
#
was largely Bill Bryson, right?
#
Bill Bryson, in my opinion, is one of the absolute best writers of nonfiction, purely
#
for a couple of things.
#
One is how he's able to explain complex scientific ideas to people who may not have a science
#
And yet he does it with a tremendous amount of warmth and humor, in just the right amount,
#
In a way that it doesn't get in the way of, you're not trying to show off your humor,
#
In a way that, if I look and read back some of my blog posts from, say, 2008 or 2009,
#
it now feels like I was trying to show off that I was funny, rather than it didn't come
#
So in a sense that I did a first couple of chapters, and then to be in reality, because
#
of my decade long or multi decades long sort of experience of literally breaking, understanding
#
everything only by first principles, it actually came easier.
#
So I ended up being far more productive.
#
I didn't have to stop to think, okay, what joke can I make here?
#
It just came naturally in the sense of, you know what, it's easier for me to explain thermodynamics
#
to you without calculus, explained like I'm fine, than with calculus, which implies that
#
I need to remember some of those things I remember at a higher level, right?
#
I would rather just go right down to the fact that, look, you know, there's heat, there's
#
electrons, there's these particles, they're colliding with each other, they transfer heat
#
and they transfer energy and so on.
#
That's a far more intuitive way, if you will.
#
And I think some of my inspirations were obviously people like Feynman and others who really
#
had a way of explaining things without expecting that you had a science degree, right?
#
So I think that was the general style.
#
No, in fact, I'm glad you didn't cut all the humor out because, you know, the book has
#
these delightful light touches throughout and just to give the listeners a taste of
#
that, I'm going to read out a couple of lines, which I absolutely loved.
#
And here Ashok writes quote, learning to cook by reading recipes is like trying to learn
#
chemistry by only reading equations or the biographies of chemists.
#
Imagine walking into a chemistry lab and finding an instruction textbook that says, quote,
#
bring to a gentle simmer the exotic melange of oxalic acid and the right ears colors of
#
potassium perlanganate.
#
You would probably respond with, quote, can we do a little easy on the adjectives and
#
stick to explaining how and why things work?
#
Stop quote, which is almost like I think a representative summary of the entire book.
#
So at what point did you actually then start thinking that, like, was there a moment where
#
you felt that there should be a book like this and there isn't?
#
So why don't I write it?
#
Or was it rather people coming to you and saying, hey, you write so wonderfully about
#
How did the book kind of take concrete shape?
#
Funnily enough, I sent Penguin to propose it.
#
So you know, Mansi Subramaniam has been sort of pursuing me for a while, right?
#
So I was I was busy at work.
#
I somehow kind of didn't get into the frame of mind to say, commit to this and say, let
#
And actually, to be honest, let's say three or four years back, I still had this sort
#
of weird post digital notion that books are dead and, you know, self publishing.
#
And I'm not a fan of how the publishing industry treats artists, you know, authors and so on.
#
So I had this idea that if at all I do something, I do something very unique, it'd be an interactive
#
It'll it'll be somewhere halfway between a book and a video game.
#
So those are the kinds of crazy ideas that I had.
#
I mean, not that I had time to actually, you know, put it down and so on.
#
Obviously, I mean, those those youthful ideas gave way to the fact ultimately realize that,
#
look, at the end of the day, books are books.
#
Books have been around.
#
Books have been the predominant, preeminent form of transferring knowledge for mankind.
#
I mean, at least widely for the last 500, 600 years, but, you know, since the dawn of,
#
you know, writing and so on.
#
So clearly, I think my first proposal was not for the food science book.
#
It was actually an afterthought.
#
So she basically said, send me some ideas and I'll tell you which ones which I think
#
So my first proposal was a speculative science fiction sort of set in India, you know, six
#
or seven stories whose synopsis had already written a while back.
#
So I kind of said, hey, sort of speculative fiction, near future science fiction, addressing
#
a lot of these very typical Indian themes about how caste might intersect with sci fi
#
So it was an afterthought, she said, I said, I said, be a nonfiction one also.
#
I said, OK, what do I write in nonfiction?
#
You know, what are my areas of expertise if you write, I didn't want to write about software
#
So I said, OK, I mean, the next I could either write about music, which which I've always
#
found is very hard to write about music is, you know, I think Krishna is a fantastic writer,
#
which is why I enjoy it, because I think he's not only talking about the music, right.
#
He's also talking about the social and the cultural and the wider historical aspects
#
And I said, I don't have the background.
#
I mean, I can't write about music in the same way he does.
#
So I said, you know, hey, you know what, I let me combine two of my other favorite passions,
#
science writing and cooking.
#
And let me put together a that was the time when I bought, you know, Kenji Lopez's food
#
lab and, you know, the Lord of the Kitchen, I think Harold McGee and so on.
#
And I was so I was blown away by the fact that they had really reduced a lot of these
#
cooking principles into very simple explained like in five sort of explanations.
#
I'm going to put together a proposal as an afterthought.
#
And and she got back immediately said, I want the food book, you know, we'll do the fiction
#
So so that's that's how the whole thing actually kind of started.
#
I'd love to read the fiction also as well, but, you know, so kindly get down to it at
#
And you've started this book about this really charming story about how you ask your grandmother
#
for a recipe and she gives you the recipe and then she says, there's one ingredient
#
I kind of forgot to tell you about and that is patience.
#
You know, which is both deeply true and also indicative of the way, you know, there's almost
#
this kind of mystical aura about this art of cooking that later in the book, you write
#
court Indian cooking in particular is supposed to be an art wrapped in oriental mystique
#
soaked in exotic history and deep fried in tradition and culture.
#
Western food is supposed to be scientific and bland while Indian cooking, we are told
#
is all about tradition and flavor.
#
What was your process of kind of like, you know, I imagine that you are again as in music,
#
someone whose first exposure to food would be Indian food, but then you're eating everything
#
You know, can you tell me about like, is there an aha moment where you start thinking about
#
food in a different way or when do you sort of start taking that step back and looking
#
at these first principles and looking at it in a meta way and deciding that you need to
#
I think so for me, that moment, obviously, first is it has to be the fact that exposure
#
to other kinds of cooking clearly one, I mean, I grew up in a strictly vegetarian, no garlic
#
household, but my father and my grandmother were like, you know, make sure that you eat
#
everything outside so that, you know, you don't suffer by being too restrictive, right?
#
And so obviously by exposure to food outside my home was pretty much during my high school
#
and college days, eating at Kareem's, you know, kebabs and so on.
#
So that was obviously the first exposure to food outside.
#
And obviously the realization that, so there are styles of cooking that can actually bring
#
about so many other different kinds of flavors beyond just the narrow confines of cuisine
#
And yet, fascinatingly enough, right?
#
And I often tell this to people that Indian vegetarian cooking is not an afterthought.
#
It's not like meat dishes minus meat.
#
It is an entirely original, ultra rich cuisine that has evolved over thousands of years in
#
really extracting flavors without the advantages of the umami advantages of meat from vegetables
#
and all these ingredients.
#
So it's by no means, you know, the flavor profile of food at home was less.
#
My mother was a fantastic cook and as was my grandmother, it was a fantastic cook again,
#
So one was obviously exposure to food outside.
#
And then I lived seven years in the U.S. and then that obviously opened up, you know, a
#
lot more avenues and, you know, had an opportunity to obviously eat Thai food and Chinese food
#
and Mexican food and a lot other, you know, and pizza whenever I wanted it and so on.
#
And also, over time, the realization, the trouble that my grandmother was having writing
#
down the recipe, it kind of stayed with me for a while.
#
She was finding it hard to kind of say how much exactly.
#
I said, well, I just, you know, I just use a sense of, you know, just salt to taste,
#
you know, or so a lot of the Tamil expressions of ingredient sizes are not in spoons because
#
people didn't have spoons.
#
So they're all based on the configuration of your fingers, right?
#
Well, padi is actually sort of what you can hold in your fist, right?
#
And then other words to describe what you can hold in two fingers, other you can hold
#
a small pinch and so on.
#
So there's very specific, there's a language that kind of describes how much you put based
#
And, you know, she would essentially use that kind of thing.
#
And I realized, one, that if she's able to cook without this kind of broad adherence
#
to authenticity or recipe and so on, maybe there's nothing to that, right?
#
So the fact that all food writing is just all recipes.
#
And if you read it, you kind of get a sense that if you put more than that one fourth
#
teaspoon of Dhania powder, it will taste different is fallacious.
#
But a lot of beginners think it is important, right?
#
A lot of beginners think that the sequence is important and so on.
#
So I think the aha moment I think happened over a period of time when I essentially realized
#
that a lot of Indian cooking and I contrasted to specifically baking, which is a lot more
#
You can get the proportions right, you know, and there's no undo button for a cake or a
#
A lot of Indian cooking is in a sense that you can fix stuff, right?
#
You can get to the same kind of rich flavor in a million different ways with different
#
ingredients where you can replace a ton of things, right?
#
And it will still be fine, right?
#
And so and the recognition that no two homes have the same recipe for a biryani or the
#
same recipe for a sambar.
#
And yet people are still crazy about this is the authentic.
#
Oh, you add somebody actually said to me that you add ginger and some we never add ginger
#
What's wrong with adding ginger and some?
#
I mean, many people do.
#
In my home, for example, my mother would not add garlic in Rasam, right?
#
And yet in Tamil Nadu, garlic in Rasam is quintessential.
#
I mean, that's really what really gives out that kind of taste and so on.
#
So therefore, the realization that a lot of these recipes are not quite capturing the
#
kind of better knowledge that is actually useful, they are kind of painting a picture
#
of authenticity and specificity where none existed.
#
And so which is why I said, do you know what?
#
I think there's a way to step back and think, OK, can I instead think of a generic way of
#
making rice, a generic way of, you know, making a gravy, a generic way of making a cooking
#
So that felt like a far more useful thing to really aspire.
#
Yeah, you know, I had done an episode ages back with Vikram doctor about Indian food
#
and you know, one of the things I've realized by reading Vikram's columns and your book
#
also has a lot of that is that pretty much everything we cook with came from outside,
#
whether it is a tomato or the chilies or the potatoes or whatever.
#
So what even is authentic?
#
And you know, and that seems to be a pet peeve of yours because you've come back to it a
#
couple of times in your book about this snobbery, about authenticness, tell me a little bit
#
about your time as a cook, because at one point in your book, you write, quote, cooking
#
is essentially chemical engineering in a home laboratory known as a kitchen with an optional
#
lab code known as an apron, a stop quote.
#
And elsewhere, you speak about the importance of if you want to learn how to cook of doing
#
AB testing where you cook a particular thing one way and then you cook it another way.
#
And sometimes, you know, in the same session, you divide it into two.
#
And you also kind of pointed out that how when a recipe talks about, you know, how many
#
vessels there should be in a pressure cooker does basically nonsense because it depends
#
on what kind of gas you're cooking with and the vessels will be differently spaced in,
#
say, an induction cooker and all of that.
#
So as a cook, were you someone who perhaps when you started going abroad, just started
#
it in a utilitarian way of let me just fix something for myself so I can have something
#
Or did you then get curious and were you always kind of experimenting around and doing AB
#
testing with every meal?
#
So I think the AB testing part probably started a little bit later.
#
I mean, in the early days, it was just just functional, utilitarian, as you said, I just
#
wanted to make sure that I just eating outside or eating pizza burgers every day in the US
#
was not going to be a healthy lifestyle.
#
So and by the way, those are designed to be so addictive that it's incredibly it is really
#
hard to not, you know, eat pizza every day or want to eat pizza.
#
So it started out that way.
#
And obviously, it also started out and remember that this was year 2000, 2001, the way I lived
#
in Texas, there was just one Indian grocery store, which was tremendously expensive.
#
And you wouldn't get all the ingredients that you needed, particularly, you wouldn't get
#
South Indian ingredients.
#
So shop was run by a Punjabi gentleman and, you know, and he would get curry leaves once
#
in like two months and he would charge like some eight dollars for this tiny dried a bit
#
And I kind of, you know, got to thinking about, look, I need to be able to replace these ingredients.
#
It's obvious that if someone says that I cannot make sambar because I don't have this dal
#
or I cannot make sambar because I don't have curry leaves or if I don't have a specific
#
So clearly, I think it started out that way, which over time essentially became this wider
#
principle that look in the best recipe for your dish is is what you bake with the ingredients
#
you have on a given day.
#
It's the technique that matters.
#
It's to an extent, maybe there are some dominant ingredients.
#
I do agree that the flavor of curry leaf is very hard to replicate, although I subsequently
#
did discover that if you have grated lime zest and basil and Italian basil, you can
#
kind of approximate some of the flavor profile of a curry leaf and so on.
#
But yeah, I mean, that's like much later.
#
So in a sense, I think a lot of this was started out utilitarian and then later reached a point
#
where I would say about a decade or so ago, I started writing down every day what I was
#
Broadly, nothing too much.
#
So I made this and just don't know the things that I kind of observed, like, for example,
#
not entirely, not necessarily the entire recipe.
#
So if I'm making chapati, I would say, look, I used about 80 percent water and it turned
#
So the next day, therefore, the next time I would try 90 percent and say, hey, it turned
#
out to be slightly better.
#
So the same thing with all and so on.
#
And then I would try replacements like, for example, if you don't have tamarind, you can
#
I mean, at the end of the day, it's an acid.
#
Vinegar is actually fantastic, and in fact, coconut vinegar and other vinegars are actually
#
fantastically very flavorful.
#
You can actually make rasam with vinegar if you don't have tamarind.
#
So in a sense that also over this time, I started documenting replacements, saying that
#
if you don't have this, you can obviously use this.
#
At the end of the day, this is the function at place.
#
You don't have curd to marinate your meat.
#
Marination does very little.
#
Just use your lime juice and spices and then focus on brining the meat, which adds a lot
#
And that way, you know, you can focus.
#
So it was essentially a lot of daily documentation.
#
I kind of also talk about it in the methodology section, saying that, look, I don't want people
#
to read this book and go, oh, this is the exact way to cook rice.
#
And this is the absolute precise.
#
If I do this exactly in 10 minutes, it will happen.
#
Remember that, you know, it's as much as I say it's a laboratory, it's not right.
#
A laboratory has standardized conditions.
#
They use like standardized equipment, standardized conditions, standardized temperature.
#
And things that work for me in a Chennai climate, you know, 30 Celsius indoor humid all through
#
the year will work very differently in other climates and with other ingredients and so
#
So, but it's better you learn kind of like the method of how you test for different ingredients
#
on different days, do that AB testing and then figure out, okay, this is the way I like
#
And then sort of, you know, tick mark that.
#
So as I said, it's a lot of data.
#
Yeah, you know, it's completely fascinating.
#
And even what you just said about, you know, one of the myths that you busted in the book
#
is that marination is important and actually, you know, nothing seeps through the meat and
#
gives it flavor, even if you keep it for 24 hours.
#
And you pointed out why grinding is much more effective.
#
And what's more important is you pointed it out in chemical terms.
#
So one can imagine the dance of elements and protons and all of that, and come to the taste
#
that one comes to, let's kind of start talking about the book.
#
And I found the first chapter very fascinating because, and it seemed to me that it must
#
have been kind of the toughest to write because, you know, that's where there is so much science
#
You know, it's all about energy and heat and conduction and convection.
#
Then you talk about the four major chemical reactions and all of that.
#
Tell me about, you know, why you decided to start with this subject in your first chapter
#
to begin with and how you tackled the difficulties that arose while you were writing about it.
#
I would say about 30% of the time that I took to write the book was went to the first chapter.
#
The other ones were relatively simpler because they were focused on very specific things.
#
And the first chapter was important because it was, I had to kind of decide how far back
#
do I go in terms of the basics, right?
#
You know, and at the same time, I didn't want it to be gratuitous just to show that I understood
#
The usefulness of understanding conduction and convection in the kitchen is only in the
#
context of you understanding how a stainless steel pan works differently from a cast iron
#
works differently from an aluminium or something else, right?
#
And knowing that is useful because it's less likely that you'll burn your food, right?
#
It's less likely that you'll be able to estimate how much time to cook something, right?
#
And part of the problem is that recipes will tell you, cook for eight minutes or whatever
#
They don't necessarily tell you exactly at what levels of heat and in what material and
#
all of these, all of these actually impact, right?
#
So one, I knew that I wanted to talk about basics of materials and basics of heat transfer,
#
just so people know that in a sense, I really wanted to kind of highlight to people that
#
if there's one skill worth mastering to make you a better cook, forget all the rest of
#
It's master temperature.
#
Get a good sense of what happens when, and trust me, you'll become a better cook without
#
even learning anything else, right?
#
Just understand when eggs cook, when meat cooks, when vegetables cook, starches cook,
#
when water boils, when Bayard reaction happens and when deep frying happens.
#
And that's, that's really it, right?
#
And if you understand this and you can see visually, because I don't expect everyone
#
to have a thermometer, although I recommend that you buy a thermometer, but it's not necessary.
#
You can kind of see, you know, when starch gelatinizes, it kind of becomes softer and
#
When meat proteins denature, they become hard, right?
#
Which is why chicken is so easily overcooked all the time.
#
And so that's the reason why I sequenced the first chapter roughly in the order of what
#
I think was the most important skills you needed in the context of the Indian kitchen.
#
So which is why it starts with heat and materials and pressure cooking and then goes into rice
#
because you know, more people eat, you know, rice is the single most consumed grain, a staple
#
food in the Indian subcontinent.
#
So rice and then wheat and then, you know, vegetables and then wheat and eggs and fat.
#
Because these are things you're going to encounter almost every other day.
#
So you kind of get those basics right.
#
And then of course, I can then talk to you about spices and acids and, and browning and
#
all the other fancy umami and all the other things much.
#
So that's how I kind of sequenced the first chapter.
#
You know, it was, it was quite fascinating.
#
And at one point you, you know, later in the book, I was struck by this pithy quote, cooking
#
is a strategic application of heat to transform an ingredient into a narrow range of acceptable
#
flavors and more importantly, textures, uh, stop quote.
#
And I was struck here by the phrase acceptable flavors.
#
And uh, you know, one of the things that again, where you've taken that sort of meta step
#
back and you looked at is that we tend to assume that, you know, there is something
#
absolute in terms of judgment about X tasting good and Y tasting bad and all of that.
#
And the truth is that all of these are kind of contingent on the circumstances in which
#
And you know, for example, like you've pointed out that, uh, we don't like, you know, alkaline
#
sort of tastes and substances, whereas it's the other way around with, uh, acid they can,
#
and there is an evolutionary reason for why we are the way we are.
#
So there's no sort of, uh, we are basically catering to the way that we are wired in terms
#
of taste whenever we kind of make food, you want to talk a little bit about this because
#
this is sort of a very interesting aspect to me because then what it implies is that
#
figuring out food begins with figuring out human beings, who we are and how we evolve
#
I think, you know, one of my all time favorite books is this book called, uh, neuro gastronomy.
#
Uh, in fact, I read it much after I wrote the book, but I was just obviously struck
#
by, because I'd read a lot of the kind of white papers that he sites in the book when
#
I did the research for my book.
#
But, uh, clearly when I read the book, I think it kind of, you know, it's a fantastic book.
#
Uh, so essentially he talks about how we perceive flavor and it is, uh, um, there are just so
#
So for starters, uh, the fact that flavor is 80% smell, um, it's only 20% taste, you
#
know, from a pure contribution standpoint, and you can only taste five things, right?
#
You know, the salt, sweet, bitter, uh, sour and umami, um, and then what you can taste,
#
you can smell apparently close to 10,000 different orders, right?
#
And so your olfactory cortex plays a tremendous role in how you combine both taste and smell,
#
So for example, something like a cardamom actually tastes bitter.
#
So if you have a cold, if you have a bad cold, right, but you can't smell it, cardamom will
#
just taste bitter, but it's a combination of the taste, the mouth feel and the, and
#
the aroma that really sort of makes the whole thing.
#
In fact, things like say how saltiness and sweetness amplify other tastes, right?
#
So if you actually have cardamom with a pinch of salt or a pinch of sugar, it'll taste,
#
it'll smell more cardamom, right?
#
So there's a tremendous one, a lot of the tasting actually happens in your brain.
#
So that's the fun part, right?
#
And the amazing thing is that it's one of those weird senses where all the experiences
#
happening in your brain, right?
#
And with sensors, mostly in your nose, but the brain needs to fool you into thinking
#
that it's all happening in your mouth, because otherwise it'd be very odd, right?
#
Because it's one of those very bizarre senses.
#
So when you touch something, you know, it's your hand that is touching it, and you know,
#
so that's how other senses work.
#
You see it, you see it with your eyes, so it's not, your brain doesn't perceive that
#
you're seeing it with the back of your head or something.
#
Taste is, flavor is bizarre because you eat with your mouth, and then when you break down
#
these molecules, they go through the back of your mouth into the nasal, retro nasal
#
sort of olfaction as it's called, because most of the taste of food comes from not you
#
smelling inside, but from the molecules actually going from behind your mouth up to those same
#
And then the brain has to combine taste, this mouth feel, and everything else, and give
#
you the illusion that all of it's happening in your mouth.
#
So it's a very, so one, it's very, very individual.
#
There are gender variations.
#
Women have more olfactory receptors.
#
Women have higher density of taste buds, on average, again, there are exceptions, but
#
There are sometimes cultural variations, which also account for things like salt, for example.
#
So one of the common questions that beginner cooks have is that how do I estimate salt?
#
It's very hard because salt is one of the things that you cannot undo, right?
#
All those tricks that they tell you that, you know, hey, if I've over-salted something
#
other than add water, more water, you can't actually fix it, right?
#
So the amount of salt is always a tricky thing, right?
#
So, but Western food scientists have actually figured out that for American tastes, between
#
one and 1.5% by weight of the food is a good place to start, for precision, right?
#
I mean, if you, right, but you're not like going to weigh everything in your kitchen
#
But then again, if you really think about it, right, most of the weight of everything
#
in your cooking pan is the weight of water.
#
Water is the heaviest thing, and it's most of food is water, okay?
#
And so therefore, if you have a mental heuristic of being able to estimate volume and therefore
#
weight of water, you can actually get very, very good at estimating salt and things like
#
If you kind of know that, you know, hey, this, by the way, this cup is 200 ml, that's 200
#
grams of water, because water's density is one, right?
#
Likewise, you know, if you have a pot that has about, say, half a liter of water, then
#
you know a gravy that's about three-fourth is about, say, 350 grams of water.
#
Even if it's a dish or sambar, you can literally just assume that it's mostly just the weight
#
So therefore, you can actually, therefore, use that kind of mental heuristic to estimate
#
salt and so on, and this varies by culture, by the way, right?
#
So Indians clearly like food a lot more saltier, and we are also okay with food that is a lot
#
hotter, right, in terms of chilies, where other people may not have that sensitivity.
#
And likewise, a lot of the aroma, because it's related to nostalgia and so on, some
#
of these things are very hard to fix, like, for example, a lot of Indians find it very
#
tough to deal with the smell of, say, fish sauce in Southeast Asia or the smell of certain
#
kinds of meat in China and so on, because a lot of those smells, let me take another
#
So you take dried fish, which is a quintessential smell in Chennai, if you're near the seacoast
#
Dried tiny fish are essentially the only fish that the fisher folk can afford, right?
#
Because the larger fish tend to be sold to the rich people.
#
The larger, less tastier, largely useless fish.
#
They get the umami bomb, tiny, you know, the dried fish and so on.
#
That one of those sulfurous molecules in fish can be detected in, like, one molecule in
#
That's how sensitive we are, right?
#
But if you are someone from the seaside, you're used to eating fish all the time, your sense
#
of detecting that is going to be at a much weaker level in the sense that you'll need
#
much, much more for you to be able to detect.
#
But people who don't eat fish can smell it from a mile away and they don't like it, right?
#
So there's such a tremendous sort of individual variation, your own state of mind itself.
#
I think, you know, people taste food differently when they are stressed.
#
They taste food differently depending on their moods and many other things.
#
And now, you know, famously with COVID, you can also get anosmia, which is that you lose
#
the ability to smell for a long time.
#
In fact, it has actually affected the careers of some chefs who have taken months to get
#
their sense of smell back and they can't cook without their sense of smell and so on.
#
So in a sense that this is such a, the reason I say that this is a, is that acceptable is
#
because it is acceptable to you as an individual.
#
And why is it acceptable to you?
#
For many reasons, history, nostalgia, your own making, your gender, your conditioning,
#
your culture, a ton of other things, right?
#
That's what, so some people will like brinjal really mashed up and some people find it very
#
slimy and they need it crunchier and some people will find that very raw, right?
#
It's just that there's such a tremendous variation individually that it's, it's just completely
#
pointless being possessive about food in general, because all you're ultimately saying is that
#
I like this food in a very specific taste that I experienced 30 years ago and every
#
other way it tastes is invalid.
#
I mean, that's essentially what you're saying, which is what is silly.
#
But you know, I think humans in some respect must be wired to think of their preferences
#
as being universal in the sense if I like this, this must be good.
#
If I think this, this must be right.
#
You know, so many things to unpack here.
#
One is you're talking about, you know, the sense of smell being so important.
#
I was just chatting with a friend of mine who's recovered from COVID and he had lost
#
his sense of smell and he offered to, I think, sent me some prawn bulge out that his mom
#
And I said, aren't you having some?
#
And he said, yeah, I can't taste anything right now.
#
So that kind of drives it for the sake of my listeners, I'll just give a quick elaboration
#
on the kind of scientific explanation that can form TIL moments in your book.
#
Like when he was speaking about salt, you spoke about how 0.4% of our saliva is salt.
#
And therefore anything less than that, it'll seem bland to us that there is a problem.
#
And like you said, beyond that, Indians can go to 1.5%.
#
You know, in the West, it will largely be around the 1% mark.
#
You also busted that mitki if there is too much salt, put some potato or rice.
#
And what Ashok points out in his book is that no, all that will do is absorb the gravy.
#
It does nothing about, you know, the essential saltiness.
#
And I'm sort of also struck by sort of, you know, one of the delightful things about your
#
first chapter, which, you know, I love things which make me look at what is otherwise mundane
#
and see it as spectacular.
#
And that's what you do with water in the first chapter, where I was just filled with a sense
#
of awe at what, you know, what is this freakish thing that we drink every day.
#
So tell me a little bit about why it is so remarkable.
#
I mean, this was something that actually sort of, it's inspired by something that I heard
#
Carl Sagan say many years ago, I think in the original Cosmos that used to air on Doordarshan,
#
which I used to watch, you know, religiously every Sunday morning.
#
He stayed with me when he basically said that water is just magical, right?
#
There is no reason for water to behave the way it does.
#
And if it didn't behave the way it does, there would be no life.
#
I mean, we are mostly water.
#
What we eat is mostly water.
#
Our planet is mostly water.
#
In fact, so much so that even, you know, people who search for extraterrestrial life, there
#
is, it's not like they open their minds and say, let's look for hydrogen sulfide based
#
No, for most part, it has to be carbon based and it has to be water based.
#
So therefore the variety of life per se is, cannot be beyond the fact that it's carbon
#
based and it is, is water based because both of these are just magical in their own way.
#
And water particularly.
#
So you think about oxygen is a smaller atom than sulfur, which is a heavier atom.
#
In general, if you look at the periodic table, larger atoms in general, you know, tend to
#
be solids and smaller atoms tend to be gases, broad rule, but there are exceptions and so
#
So you would expect that H2O would also be a gas like H2S, which is just right below,
#
Sulfur is also like oxygen, but hydrogen sulfide is a gas and water alone because of just the
#
way is just a, it's one of those, you know, Stephen Hawking's, you know, anthropic principles,
#
you know, it's like, if it was any different, we wouldn't be here to talk about it.
#
So there is no debating why it's just the way it is, right?
#
It's just that liquid water's ability to form bonds outside of just its own hydrogen and
#
oxygen and so on gives it the property where it is actually denser than ice, which is remarkable
#
because all solids tend to be denser than liquids, but water alone is denser than its
#
And then the fact that it can keep forming these bonds also means that it can form these
#
bonds with the proteins and other things that, that make up our body, which is how the spectacular
#
diversity of all our biochemistry literally comes from water being involved in every single
#
reaction, every protein synthesis, everything that keeps you alive.
#
There is water involved in those reactions without water not happening.
#
So in a sense, it is essentially that, right?
#
And in fact, the fact that we use it in cooking, right, is in a bizarre way, also a slightly
#
Water boils at 100, but the tastiest flavors in food come after 110 Celsius, which is when
#
Maillard reaction happens.
#
So you can't have Maillard reaction as long as water is around.
#
So a lot of cooking is about getting that balance right.
#
So if it, you can't have it all dry without water either, but at the same time, so which
#
is why restaurants and so on almost always deep fry or saute's ingredients separately
#
brown it and then add it to the gravy, which is mostly water, because once you add it to
#
the gravy, it will never get the brown color.
#
So you do it ahead of time.
#
At home, you know, you normally won't do that.
#
You will kind of, you'll be making them aloo gobi, you're going to put the aloo and the
#
gobi and put the gravy and kind of cook it.
#
It's not going to taste like the restaurant one because the restaurant one will involve
#
that being deep fried in oil, which is sort of brings me to another aha moment, which
#
I kind of realized later, which is that oil in the context of frying plays the same role
#
The only difference is that what water does is that it transfers heat evenly to your food.
#
It's a medium for convection, it's for heat transfer, right?
#
Because if you put something directly on a pan, only the bottom is going to get hot and
#
the top won't get cooked and all of that.
#
Whereas if it's in water, water has this property where it will all get to the same temperature
#
and it will transfer heat to your food evenly, right?
#
So that's the reason we use water in cooking.
#
We use oil for exactly the same reason, because you want to transfer heat, but at 170 Celsius,
#
which is when it browns, right?
#
So literally fats play the role of water, except at a higher temperature.
#
Fats don't chemically react with the food at all.
#
So you think they do, they don't, right?
#
So it's the amino acids and sugars that react.
#
They get broken down only by your intestine and no where, they start breaking down in
#
And because we're mostly water and fats don't mix with water, your body turns it into a
#
I mean, imagine that picture, right?
#
So your liver literally uses bile to emulsify all the fat that you eat.
#
So what's actually going down through is like an emulsion.
#
It's like mayonnaise where it's ultimately broken down only your small intestine and
#
the fats are absorbed and the water as well.
#
So water for me is always been this, if you can understand water, if you can understand
#
one, what contains, most things contain water, right?
#
Cucumber, for instance, cucumber is 95% water.
#
Cucumber contains more water than some really hard water that comes straight out of your
#
tap, which is probably has a ton of dissolved minerals, right?
#
This is a very non-intuitive thing.
#
Carrot contains more water than milk, right?
#
But we don't intuitively think about it.
#
And understanding that can also mean that, by the way, you could pressure cook carrots.
#
You can pressure cook some of these root vegetables without adding water, just add butter.
#
And that way you can actually pressure cook at a higher temperature.
#
You can caramelize them and you get fantastic carrot soups.
#
If you actually pressure cook carrot without water.
#
You have to be careful.
#
You have to add a fair bit of butter and all that.
#
But you don't need anything else.
#
Just salt, carrots and butter will get you an amazing soup because caramelized or Maillard
#
reaction based carrot is just so tasty, right?
#
What I also found interesting is how you, you know, you'll talk about these principles
#
in the context of cooking and then suddenly you'll take a step out and go somewhere else
#
like another quote from the chapter quote.
#
It's because we have so much water on the surface that a place like Mumbai has mostly
#
predictable temperatures while Bhopal can swing wildly, not just across seasons, but
#
in a single day, stop code.
#
And one more PIL moment for me was how microwaves work.
#
Like of course they are safe and they don't cause cancer and all of that nonsense, but
#
they actually work just by heating water and because all food contains water, it kind of
#
Kindly don't laugh at this, but you know, sometimes I'll put a dish inside the microwave
#
and the dish will get hot before the food does, but the dish has no water.
#
So how does that happen?
#
It is, so there are some materials.
#
So microwave mostly heats water, there are some materials, Bakelite and melamine is one
#
of them, which is why not all melamine is microwave safe, right?
#
Some fats, for instance.
#
So if you think about the principles of how a microwave works, right?
#
So the funny thing is that it's actually a fair bit of complex quantum physics, right?
#
So it's like microwave as radiation is incredibly weaker than even visible light, right?
#
It's actually between radio and infrared.
#
So what's actually happening there is that it just so happens microwave at the frequency
#
I think it's some 2800 some megahertz, I forgot what it is.
#
That specific frequency has just the right amount of energy to heat, to in some sense
#
flip a water molecule, right?
#
And because they keep changing the direction of the microwave, it will keep flipping back
#
It's a magnetic pole because water again, hydrogen bond, it's polarized.
#
So it has a, you know, it'll align itself to an electromagnetic field.
#
And so that's how it's getting hot, right?
#
Some materials end up having very similar properties sometimes, which is why some materials
#
can suddenly get very hot.
#
Otherwise in all other situations, the material gets hot because the water gets hot and then
#
it transfers the heat to the material, which is why, you know, metals, you don't use metals
#
because you know, they will start sparking, right?
#
And so that is, so which is why you use microwave safe sort of materials are not great conductors
#
So that all the heat of the water is not transferred to the material, but it's just mostly transferred
#
So you know, before we go on to our commercial break, after which we continue our sort of
#
deep dive into your book, a couple of broad questions, which kind of came up from what
#
you were saying earlier, when you spoke about how certain Western foods are designed to
#
So I'd like you to elaborate on what you mean by this and also whether there are Indian
#
foods, which are also like this, like elsewhere in the book, you've pointed out, you pointed
#
to a swiggy statistic about how biryani is the most ordered food, like every second there
#
are 8,000 biryanis being ordered or some nonsense like that, you know.
#
So what is this sort of addictiveness in food, which obviously then, you know, the food industry
#
So can you elaborate on that?
#
So obviously, I think, you know, as animals who evolved at a time when the availability
#
of sugars, which are the most, you know, easy, you know, energy currency for the body, right,
#
was always historically hard, right?
#
I mean, the availability of easy availability of sugar is a very modern phenomenon, right?
#
So our wiring is essentially built on being starved off carbohydrates in general, right?
#
And you remember before most of our evolution happened in the pre agricultural era, right?
#
So a lot of our brain wiring is still from that pre agricultural era, the agriculture
#
is only some five, 6,000 years old.
#
So we haven't actually adapted to the fact that we are eating a high grain, high carbohydrate
#
Evolution works on a much longer time scale.
#
But we were largely just we were on a diet that was almost entirely meat and the odd
#
fruit, like during some season, some berries, like, you know, like any other apes or monkeys,
#
I mean, they're omnivores, right?
#
We are omnivores as well.
#
And it is essentially that we have not had time to adapt our wiring to the fact that
#
we now have an unlimited supply of carbohydrates.
#
And so the way we've evolved is that one evolution selected for people who were just crazily
#
addicted to sugar, right?
#
And the brain rewards you instantly the moment you eat sugar, right?
#
The dopamine and all of that, right?
#
Because you want that kind of person is more likely to have eaten any kind of fruit, any
#
ripe fruit, overripe fruit, even if it is marginally rotten, he would have still eaten
#
it and survived, as opposed to someone who did not like the smell, it did not eat and
#
therefore start, right?
#
So therefore, in a sense that we ended up selecting for people who are naturally we're
#
all naturally addicted to sugar, right?
#
So that's the first natural thing.
#
So therefore, the food industry's first thing is anything with sugar is going to be addictive,
#
So cookies, what have you, incidentally, even your namkeen is addictive because it has sugar.
#
If it did not have any sugar, it wouldn't be as tasty.
#
So there's there's that as well, right?
#
Likewise, I think we're also kind of adapted to want a certain amount of salt, not over
#
salt, but a certain amount of salt is absolutely important.
#
We don't like food that is not salty.
#
And it is fascinating because the reason we need food with salt and by the way, you know
#
what, if you notice like animals, carnivores and so on who don't get access to salt naturally,
#
enough salt in their diet because all they're eating is meat, they will in fact go find
#
places where rocks have salt and lick to actually get enough salt for themselves.
#
And the reason all animals, including us, need that salt is because all of us evolved
#
from ocean going creatures, all of us came from fishes, right?
#
And so all our organs are evolved to deal with a certain amount of salt.
#
And that's why all ourselves need a certain amount of salt.
#
And that's why we need to eat salt, right?
#
So it's just that although we are now land going and there's no salt all around, it is
#
basically remembering our fish ancestors, the fact that we are used to that sort of
#
So salt again is something that we are all wired to want, right?
#
So both sweet and salt.
#
Couple of other things that the food industry obviously uses is obviously umami.
#
Umami is one of those, although we understand it technically more recently, but humans have
#
understood it for a long way, right?
#
The reason tomato is such a tremendously common base in so many dishes is because it's very
#
high on glutamates, right?
#
The very same glutamates found in MSG, by the way.
#
So our parmesan cheese, cheese, for example, is another one.
#
Meat in general has a lot of glutamates and so on, right?
#
So umami's advantage is the fact that it actually amplifies other tastes and makes it linger
#
So when you eat like ramen, right, you get that savory feeling lingers in your mouth
#
So umami is one of those things that amplifies other things and makes it linger, right?
#
So which is why Japanese food can actually be very minimalist.
#
So if it's umami based, you can actually simply just go with very few other spices and other
#
It can be very minimalist because it's still going to taste really, really good, right?
#
It's still an acquired taste.
#
So there's umami as well, right?
#
And then the food industry has figured out a couple of other tricks, right?
#
We absolutely also like fat for no reason other than the fact that it is the densest
#
nutrient available, right?
#
So if carbohydrates are like, I think four calories a gram, I think fat is like nine
#
It's the densest food we can eat, very, very nutrient dense.
#
And so therefore, you know, we have evolved a taste for fatty textures and fatty foods
#
So if you combine all of this, the food industry also uses tricks with acids, right?
#
So for example, Coca-Cola or any carbonated beverage, right, is tremendously acidic, because
#
of the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide and also a couple of phosphoric acid, a bunch
#
It's very, very acidic.
#
A Coca-Cola is more acidic than vinegar, but you can't drink vinegar, but you can drink
#
Because they add nine teaspoons of sugar into it.
#
So the nine teaspoons of sugar actually mutes your experience of sourness.
#
And in a sense that restaurant food essentially does the same thing.
#
So they add extra salt, but since you'll perceive the extra salt, they'll add extra sugar.
#
And because they add extra sugar, they can add more acid.
#
And because they add more acid, the acids will make you salivate more.
#
They're able to add a lot more of other things, right?
#
So in a sense, it's just ultimately about picking your reward circuits for essentially
#
sugar is the primary thing and then salt and a bunch of these others.
#
But that's largely how a lot of this addiction works and how food companies take advantage.
#
Yeah, in fact, in your book, I think you described it as taking the volume dial to 11, what the
#
restaurants do with the kind of sugar and salt that to balance one, they use the other
#
and they keep, they take it all the way to up.
#
And the flavors are so accentuated in restaurant food for that reason.
#
So kindly eat more at home people.
#
But why biryani in particular?
#
And I'm asking because I'm also trying to understand my own regular cravings.
#
So biryani again, I think it's one of obviously one of the subcontinent's great dishes.
#
I mean, you know, if we do a Voyager 3, you know, I think definitely, you know, the recipe
#
for biryani ought to be sent out to deep space, if you will, it's one of mankind's.
#
It's not just one of our best dishes, there's many of our best dishes because there's so
#
many different varieties.
#
But the broad principle of essentially being a sort of a starters, it is actually in a
#
utilitarian fashion, it is an absolutely dead simple, basic one pot dish.
#
I mean, you can make, of course, there are sophisticated variants where you can, you
#
know, but at the basic level, if you're a poor guy with this giant tin, you know, your
#
your audiences, you know, construction labor and so on, you can just take rice, you can
#
take meat, you can take spices, and just slow cook it.
#
And you can't go wrong with it.
#
So you got carbohydrates, you got proteins, there's nothing more you need.
#
So this is a one shot meal, you don't need anything else.
#
Anything else is primarily I mean, if it turns out to be too dry, you have a raita or whatever
#
But you know, your average construction labor guy is not like eating it with raita on it.
#
He's just eating the rice and the meat for him.
#
It is the quickest, the high dense, nutritious meal in that sense.
#
So if you leave aside that utilitarian aspect for why it is so ubiquitous, like literally
#
every Chennai for instance, every street corner has a has a biryani.
#
I think it is Chennai is probably one of the largest consumers of biryani per capita and
#
The second thing is the fact that, look, you know, one, it's an aromatic kind of rice.
#
So the better the rice, you get that right.
#
Meat has slow cooked meat, has a ton of all those meat juices, all that umami actually
#
suffuses the entire dish for starters.
#
And then you're using all of these subcontinent's favorite spices, I mean, it could be ginger
#
garlic, you know, cardamom, you know, and all the things that kind of go into a biryani
#
All of these are tremendously sophisticated spices.
#
And then some of the most fancy biryanis that you have, the top note is actually things
#
like saffron, which again is tremendously complex, right.
#
Just saffron apparently has some 3000 or 4000 different unique aroma molecules, which is
#
why it is nearly impossible to synthetically synthesize a saffron, but you can synthetically
#
synthesize, you know, vanilla, for example.
#
And so it is in a sense that, and there are so many variations, the sequencing, the kind
#
of rice you use, the kind of meat you use, the kinds of spices you use, how you marinate
#
So there's just so many varieties.
#
And it is also at home, so also it's obviously a, it's a special day dish, right.
#
I mean, it's something that you cook on a special day, like, you know, imagine having
#
to make chapatis or 20 side dishes for a, for a family gathering.
#
I mean, you want to make one biryani, I mean, it'll feed everyone, right.
#
I mean, there's that practical nature to it as well.
#
So for me, I mean, I've always been fascinated by, I like biryani, I'm not like obsessively,
#
I don't tend to crave it because I tend to, I don't tend to eat too much rice in general.
#
So I have a rice day and then a wheat day and a millet day and things like that.
#
So I tend to kind of do that.
#
So, but, you know, on rice day, biryani is almost always welcome, I mean, because there's,
#
It's, it's umami, it is high in carbohydrates.
#
It's got a ton of that flavor from, from the meat, the kind of the meat juices that are
#
not lost anywhere because, you know, you're sealing the whole thing.
#
And if it's cooked well, you're not going to overcook the meat.
#
If it's brined or marinated well, then, you know, it's going to be succulent.
#
And the spices, because you're doing the dum, all of the aroma is not lost, right.
#
So it's all getting sort of amplified.
#
So I think it's, it's one of the great dishes.
#
No, I mean, I shouldn't have asked you the question because now I'm craving a biryani
#
I had a couple of years back.
#
I went with a bunch of friends on something we call the spice trail where we went on this
#
long food trip and one of the places we went to was Mysore.
#
And there we went to a joint where we had pork biryani.
#
And that was the first time in my life I had pork biryani, I've had, you know, all other
#
kinds and it was just so mind blowing, you know, the fat and the succulent flavor and
#
Which reminds me, right.
#
So the fat is actually quite important.
#
So aromas, as I get to talk about the flavor chapter is that are not soluble in water.
#
Most of those volatile flavor molecules are not soluble in water.
#
They're soluble in fat, right.
#
Which is why almost all cooking starts with oil spices.
#
So you first you do it before all the spice flavor escapes to the air, you kind of get
#
And it's that oil that flavors your dish, essentially.
#
That's the bulk of the flavor that you get to the dish.
#
In a biryani, it's, it's amazing because there's going to be that's why almost a biryani cut
#
even if you're making like chicken biryani, right.
#
You're almost always going to ask for leave skin, right.
#
Because you want that fat.
#
You don't want lean meat, because that fat when it renders is first and foremost going
#
to absorb all the saffron and the cumin and the star anise and all the rest of that.
#
And just that fat is going to be so flavorful, right.
#
So I think that plays a huge role in why a biryani is amazing.
#
Now for the other question before we go into the break, which again came from something
#
you said in passing a while back where you said that, you know, the taste buds of women
#
so to say are developed differently, they taste food differently.
#
So you know, why do you think that is and, and, you know, are there evolutionary reasons
#
for that, that in a sense continue into the culture, for example, you know, men and women
#
respond differently to temperature, you know, which is why, you know, our modern air conditioning
#
is designed, designed in the fifties and sixties where offices were full of men.
#
So they were designed for the optimal sort of male capacity while, you know, women feel
#
colder much sooner and therefore you could say that that's an example of sort of a world
#
designed for men, so to say.
#
And I'm very intrigued by this because typically, and I'm sure, and this is obviously not just
#
in India where, but in India, especially where men expect fresh food three times a day.
#
Like you said, as a woman who are doing it, it's a very functional thing.
#
So why do you think the taste buds have evolved separately?
#
Are there, are there sort of deeper insights into humanity here?
#
So I say, you know, if you think about evolution itself, right, nothing much has evolved in
#
the last five to 6,000 years or very little has, right.
#
That's very short a timeframe.
#
So most of our changes, most of the differences that we see, you know, are go back much longer,
#
And in a sense that, you know, because of the traditional gender role, you know, distinctions
#
between, you know, men go out and hunt and women kind of, you know, sort of, you know,
#
take care of the cave and take care of, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And obviously I think closer environment, naturally you have to be a lot more sensitive
#
to smells, to toxins, to things that could kill you, to food that could be rotten and
#
Whereas the great outdoors is different.
#
So you end up building different muscles, more to do with hand-eye coordination and
#
being able to triangulate, you know, whether this thing is, you know, where you shoot your
#
So in a sense that on an average, a lot of our differences kind of come from that, right?
#
So professor, I think Linda Bartos-Shukri, who's sort of this professor, she's the one
#
who coined the term supertasters.
#
So what she says is that the ability to sense flavor is a spectrum, right?
#
In that, there's a bottom 14% of the population that have very low taste bud density and they
#
are terrible at, so they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a very tannic
#
wine and a, and like a reasonably decent one, right?
#
So they wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
#
And then you have the Biddle, which is essentially average people, mostly people like us.
#
And then there's a 14 or 15% at the top end who are actually supertasters.
#
Supertasters are, so Padma Lakshmi, for example, is an example of someone who underwent the
#
So there's a test you can go undergo for it, by the way.
#
So there is apparently one specific molecule that you cannot smell unless you're a supertaster.
#
You cannot taste it unless you're a supertaster.
#
If you're a supertaster, it will taste bitter.
#
If you're not a supertaster, you won't taste it, right?
#
Some propylthiouracil, some sulfur-based molecule, right?
#
And you can, so you can actually undergo this test.
#
And there they found out that on an average, women tend to be supertasters more often than
#
And so, so there is that, right?
#
So, I mean, but the fact that more men are chefs and all that has more to do with patriarchy
#
But in general, you know, for example, I realized it pretty quickly at home as well, that my
#
wife would be earlier to detect that something is burning, minutes ahead before I sense it.
#
She would sort of detect if something needs to, when you taste something, right?
#
A common mistake that I would often make is that, so you have, your taste buds work ideally
#
between 20 and 30 Celsius.
#
They work at a peak at that temperature.
#
At higher temperatures, they don't work as well, and at lower temperatures, they don't
#
So, which is incidentally why hot coffee is acceptable, room temperature coffee is atrociously
#
Because when it's that hot, you can ignore the bitterness and enjoy the aroma.
#
But the moment it's room temperature, then the coffee will only primarily taste bitter
#
So likewise, they also have more temperature sensors in their mouth, which also makes it
#
a lot more sensitive for them.
#
So I will just take a spoon directly from the boiling pot and then I will taste it.
#
And then I will say, can you please taste it?
#
And you can say, wait, I've burnt my mouth several times.
#
So obviously, they're more sensitive to higher temperatures, therefore more sensitive to
#
So chilis essentially are basically fooling you into thinking that it's temperature, right?
#
So this is just possibly why they're better tasters and so on.
#
Yeah, I want to discuss chilis in detail after the break because it's absolutely mind blowing
#
It was like a TIL moment for me and I was like, oh, that is why I am being fooled by
#
And you know, and since your wife is so much more sensitive about this, she should have
#
Why did you write the book?
#
Well, you know, so that's why I credit her right up front and she's one of those utilitarian
#
I'm not going to sit and follow your methodical scientific A-B testing instructions, you know.
#
She's somebody who cooks, you know, with her gut and as I said, she makes a better rasam
#
You know, I'm like measuring, you know, testing sourness and doing all of that stuff.
#
And she's like, yeah, that's also the, at the end of the day, it's also about recognition
#
that of the fact that for a lot of, I was very aware for a lot of women in India, cooking
#
is not some, I can't force you to think of it as some amazing adventure that you can,
#
you know, do all of this, understand all of the science because you just want to feed
#
your family in as quick a time as possible.
#
So you can actually get back to your career, you can get back to your studies and do other
#
And I think it's a very conscious mindset that this cannot be a gratuitous exercise
#
in saying, hey, you can do all these fancy things.
#
I mean, I can't, I can't ask, I don't want to ask people to do something in a more elaborate
#
way because the flavor will be better if I don't give them a more efficient way to do
#
Because at the end of the day, it has to be utilitarian in that sense.
#
It can't be just for the sake of it.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break in which time you will no doubt whip up something mind
#
blowingly tasty and you know, eat it in front of me on the camera and just drive me nuts.
#
So we'll be back after a minute.
#
As many of you know, I'll soon be coming out with a four volume anthology of the Seen
#
and the Unseen books organized around the themes of politics, history, economics and
#
These days I'm wading through over three million words of conversation from all my episodes
#
so far to curate the best bits.
#
And for this to happen, I needed transcripts.
#
And that was made possible by a remarkable young startup called TapChief.
#
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#
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#
Maybe they could solve your problem too.
#
Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Krish Ashok about his remarkable book Masala Lab.
#
And you know, I learned so much from that book about food and the way it works, especially
#
about chilies where I felt kind of cheated and manipulated.
#
Let me, you know, in my own words, very briefly try to kind of explain what happens that,
#
you know, one of the things you've pointed out, which I will ask you to elaborate on
#
later, because it's endlessly fascinating to me, is that all flavors are the defense
#
mechanisms of plants which do not want to be eaten.
#
And you know, that's where chili also comes from, you know, where they release this substance
#
that fools our brain into thinking that our mouth is literally on fire.
#
Now technically this should be enough reason to stop eating anything, but our brain responds
#
by releasing a flood of endorphins to counter the pain.
#
And these endorphins then make, you know, the food that we are eating appear tastier
#
than it is, which is why we keep on eating.
#
And it is eventually a vicious circle to the point where you're like putting chulakias
#
and everything or not exactly, but that's why we kind of eat a lot of chili food and
#
you had an amusing anecdote from Sri Lanka, in fact, about coca-cola.
#
So tell us a little bit about chilies and what it, I mean, it's crazy, man.
#
So it's, I've been endlessly fascinated by chilies, obviously as a, as a South Indian,
#
obviously we're generally eating above average hot, hotter food than most parts of the planet.
#
And particularly, I think my mom's cooking was particularly spicier than normal.
#
My father used to have mouth ulcers very regularly, but he wouldn't complain.
#
So I would just quietly take, you know, a riboflavin, you know, to deal with the ulcers.
#
So she clearly had a, she had a taste for chilies and I think all of us ended up sort
#
I don't think you inherit it, you just get used to it.
#
So because the way this works is that it's a, it's basically a nerve receptor in the
#
mouth, which is why it's not a taste, it's a sensation.
#
So heat is not a taste, heat is a sensation.
#
So taste comes from the taste buds, right?
#
So taste buds essentially work by very specific sensors that detect for something, right?
#
So salt sensors detect sodium.
#
So anything with sodium will taste salty.
#
So that's just why salt is salty, sodium chloride is salty, monosodium glutamate is also salty,
#
not as salty, but you know, still salty, right?
#
And other things in these, that family, even potassium chloride, it will taste mildly salty
#
And so, so there is, so heat is actually a sensation.
#
So the distinction is that the taste buds are actually very specifically detecting for
#
Taste buds are actually primarily to warn you against things like something, you're
#
eating something too acidic, you're eating something that is too hot, right?
#
So obviously I think we needed warning because you know, your entire digestive tract is very
#
So if you're putting something that's really hot or very acidic, like a concentrated citric
#
acid or something, it is going to burn you all the way down.
#
And so it's a warning mechanism that has evolved to prevent us from eating that things that
#
And so the entirety of our digestive tract has those sensors that detect for temperature,
#
And so plants are basically nature's absolutely biochemical magicians in the sense that, forget
#
animals, in terms of the sheer diversity of molecules that plants can synthesize, nothing
#
comes anywhere close, right?
#
Which is why there's still a ton of drugs that you cannot simply use a simple laboratory
#
chemical process to synthesize them because they're just too complicated.
#
You need to genetically modify a bacteria or something else or a fungi to be able to
#
generate what you need because you need the kind of protein synthesis apparatus that plants
#
have is just otherworldly.
#
And obviously they've been around for billions of years longer than we have.
#
And so they have amassed an arsenal of variety of tricks, right?
#
So chilies in this entire thing have figured out a trick by which they produce a family
#
of chemicals called capsaicinoids, which happen to fit into the heat receptors that are there
#
And in your digestive tract, right?
#
And so the moment they fit in, the signal goes to the brain saying that, yeah, this
#
And the brain is like, oh, your mouth must be on fire.
#
So immediately it will start sending more blood because it wants to cool down your face.
#
So you get that flush, you start sweating to cool your body down, that all the things
#
that you get when you bite into a chili, right?
#
So it's basically all of that.
#
And because you have now the body thinks you will now be in pain, although the whole thing
#
is completely phantom, right?
#
The brain also thinks that let me start the reward circuits so that the guy is not incapacitated.
#
So that's important because the slightest amount of pain cannot incapacitate you because
#
then otherwise a moderately injured human being would have been eaten by a predator.
#
So you need to be able to actually operate better under a slight amount of pain so the
#
endorphins and all of that actually give you that sort of second wind and you are enthused
#
to sort of sit and run or get up and run.
#
So that's why when you eat chilies, those endorphins get released and that in turn makes
#
the whole eating process a lot more pleasurable within a certain margin, right?
#
But varies by individual.
#
Some people are very sensitive, some people are not as sensitive.
#
And also you have these senses all the way down your track to varying this thing, which
#
is why you feel the heat in your mouth and then a little bit later in your stomach and
#
the next day morning somewhere else, right?
#
Because it is, you know, so you're going to feel that all through, right?
#
And this is also why capsaicinoids in general are used in pepper sprays for women to protect
#
Because what you want is something that incapacitates you without permanently damaging, that you
#
don't want a chemical that will make the guy go blind.
#
You want something that fools the brain into thinking your eyes are on fire.
#
So please shut everything down till everything is okay so that you can escape and then you'll
#
So it does no long lasting damage to the person's eyes at all, right?
#
So you know, that's, so chilies would be an endlessly fascinating, right?
#
So and the fact that we've, you know, agriculturists have managed to figure out how to make hotter
#
and hotter ones than just the natural ones.
#
So there's the Bhujulokia, which is one of the most hottest natural varieties, but you
#
know, there are now competitions where, you know, there's a guy in North Carolina who
#
makes this variety called the Carolina Reaper, you know.
#
So the last time I went abroad, I did buy two of them.
#
It's sitting in my freezer, you need to use gloves to handle them.
#
So they're like 1.4 billion Scoville units.
#
So you can use one to flavor, you know, a big tub of food, right?
#
And so yeah, chilies have been endlessly fascinating.
#
And you also point out how, you know, fat, you know, mitigates the effect of that kind
#
of heat, which is why in something like gunpowder, you will also have some ghee or whatever along
#
And, you know, alcohol mutes it as well, which is why when you are on a drinking binge, you'll
#
have a lot of, you know, your snacks can get spicier and spicier, but acid amplifies heat.
#
And therefore, if you, you know, sort of have that heat and you drink some Coca Cola, you
#
I mean, which is why so fat actually dissolves the capsaicin.
#
So it's easier to wash it off, right?
#
So which is why drinking water, although you think it helps, it doesn't help as much.
#
So in fact, I think it's that there's this famous YouTube show where this guy gives people
#
hot wings, increasingly hotter after each other celebrities and ask them questions.
#
And he saves the toughest questions when the guy is eating like the spiciest wings and
#
people give incredibly candid answers.
#
So it's a fantastic show.
#
And so he gives everyone a glass of milk.
#
So if you feel very hot, you just drink milk, a kind of, you know, gargle it and you could
#
spit the milk out, right?
#
So that way the milk will wash all of the, the milk fats will wash all the capsaicin
#
from your mouth and you can get rid of it.
#
And elaborate a bit on, you know, flavors being defense mechanisms of plants.
#
Like you've described this sort of apocryl battle where plants come and they do all these
#
processes over thousands of years and they evolve a certain way to get energy from the
#
And then these lazy animals, you know, just come around and chomp them up and get their
#
And then the plants have to fight back and all flavors and food arise from that.
#
So it's a rather quite fascinating aha moment for me was this realization that plants are
#
biochemical superstars again, largely again, because they don't move, they don't have
#
And the reason they don't have the ability to move is because photosynthesis is ridiculously
#
And amazingly enough, I don't get into the details of this because it wasn't relevant,
#
but I did write a Twitter thread about it.
#
Photosynthesis is inefficient for another really fascinating reason, which is that one
#
of the steps in photosynthesis, like one of hundreds of steps in converting sunlight
#
One of those steps apparently required a low oxygen atmosphere because plants were living
#
in a completely low oxygen atmosphere.
#
Unfortunately, we live in a high oxygen atmosphere now.
#
So which is why photosynthesis is the entirety of photosynthesis and the fact that we don't
#
have walking trees is because we have too much oxygen in the in the atmosphere.
#
So it's quite fascinating.
#
So one therefore plants, their mechanism is fundamentally therefore it to evolve chemical
#
defenses against predators.
#
Plants on the other hand, their biggest trick is essentially their ability to move, right?
#
If you can move, then you can essentially eat other things.
#
And if you can eat other things, then you let that thing do all the hard work of turning
#
sunlight into energy over months.
#
And you get those calories in literally, you know, in a matter of hours, right?
#
I mean, a potato takes months to grow, right?
#
I mean, you can eat that potato in literally a few seconds and you get a ton of energy
#
We are tremendously more energy efficient, our metabolic rate is so much higher than
#
So therefore, which is why we are not biochemistry superstars at all, we didn't need to.
#
So a lot of the animal evolution has been different ways in which we could move, right?
#
Fly and, you know, and four legs and, you know, all kinds of swimming and all kinds
#
of other mechanics to move and then ultimately obviously brain development and so on.
#
But plants therefore, over three billion years have evolved fantastic mechanisms, a variety
#
of mechanisms to prevent animals from eating it.
#
And it's a two way battle, right?
#
So like, for example, chilies, fantastic example is chilies itself.
#
Birds don't have that sensor.
#
So in the sense that capsaicin doesn't affect them, right?
#
Which is actually quite fine because the way it's worked out is that they end up pollinating.
#
So it's just that this is not a one way thing, right?
#
So it's just a very complex ecosystem thing that constantly happens and it's sometimes
#
very hard to kind of work it out after the fact also, right?
#
And sometimes you tell yourself one story and then five years later you'll discover
#
some fossil record that says, no, no, this is actually completely different and this
#
is not what it was and so on.
#
So fascinatingly, plants have evolved a bunch of different mechanisms broadly from the point
#
of view of what is relevant to food.
#
So there are two things, situations where the plant wants you to eat it because it wants
#
you to pollinate, spread the seeds somewhere else.
#
A fruit is basically, you know, the pinnacle of plant biochemistry in creating something
#
that requires no cooking.
#
It is just you take it off the tree and you eat it and it does not get any more delicious
#
And, you know, you take a perfectly ripe mango, right, or a perfectly crisp apple.
#
I mean, you can realize the fact that it's really billions of years of evolution of figuring
#
out exactly what it is that animals or others want to eat, right?
#
So likewise, defense mechanisms are again one of many.
#
Mostly they have to do with use of things like sulfurous, mostly sulfurous molecules,
#
And that's actually why most of our tastiest spices have sulfurous molecules in them, right?
#
Garlic, onion, asafoetida, you name it, like curry leaves, all of these primarily have
#
sulfurous molecules because you try feeding that to a cow or a herbivore, they find it
#
We, on the other hand, can tame that by cooking it, right?
#
It's hard for us to eat a raw onion or a garlic, but once you cook it, we're taming a lot of
#
those reactions so that we are able to actually eat it.
#
So it says that for us, we've managed to kind of figure out how to get past the defense
#
And now there's actually another, so I was reading Michael Pollan's book, I think it's
#
The Botany of Design, right?
#
And he kind of says that, you know, I think we see it from a very anthropocentric view,
#
See, when you think of the fact that whether it's the humans who are growing apples or
#
growing corn all over the place, or is it that has the plant actually biochemically
#
got you addicted enough to the point where there's actually more biomass of corn today
#
So if aliens, there's this joke about aliens coming to planet and figuring out who's the
#
dominant species, will they go walk up to a stalk of corn or rice or will they walk
#
up to a human being is something that we'll have to figure out because purely from a pure
#
play of evolutionary success, they've been tremendously successful because they've convinced
#
us to grow them and also kill all their competition.
#
So we do bono culture by not letting any other plant grow for acres and acres.
#
And so in that sense, the plant is actually successful in that sense, right?
#
So there are many defense mechanisms, different spices.
#
So the stronger the spice, the stronger the defense mechanism.
#
So that's essentially how all of these.
#
So you take ginger, onion, garlic, all of these are strong antibacterial or antifungal
#
or anti sort of anti, you know, animal eating kind of mechanisms.
#
And that's essentially how we got all our spices.
#
So that's a that's a lovely insight that you just quoted from Pauline as well, like there's
#
a famous Douglas Adams quote, I think about imagine a puddle of water.
#
And one day the puddle of water wakes up.
#
And this is, of course, also an anthropocentric view of a puddle of water, because puddles
#
But the puddle of water decides that, hey, you know, this universe must be made for me
#
because everything is such a perfect fit.
#
And it keeps sinking that gradually one day it is no longer there, you know.
#
So now tell me a bit about spices, we've basically and this is obviously for two, it is I don't
#
think it is that, you know, that there was any sense when these defense mechanisms were
#
evolving that they will actually help, you know, spread this stuff about.
#
But before that, I just want to I found a thought of, you know, walking trees in an
#
atmosphere with less oxygen.
#
And so you have a lot of things you have the answer.
#
So that's the yeah, yeah, except the answer that along with hobbits and humans, and that's
#
obviously not possible.
#
It's one or the other exactly.
#
And I think I'd prefer the walking trees.
#
So tell me a bit about spices.
#
Now you've elaborated on spices in great detail.
#
And to be honest, I am going to reread this and sort of take my time to process it.
#
And you know, like I cook a little bit, but my cooking is all the kind of cooking that
#
you would really frown upon.
#
It is basically I'll have a recipe which I've mugged up and something has worked for me
#
in the past and is very functional and I don't kind of think about it.
#
But you know, after I read your book, I figured that, listen, this is like so fascinating
#
and I've got to kind of play around a bit.
#
Now you point out that, you know, you divide spices into four broad buckets.
#
I mean, obviously there are, there's a much subtler gradation, which you also describe.
#
But tell me a bit about these four buckets and tell me how we should think about spices
#
Yeah, like especially all the people who are in India right now.
#
And we cook here and we have kitchens and we have access to all of these spices.
#
What do you think about them?
#
So, so first, I think, you know, let me start by saying that first and foremost, there's
#
no such thing as a wrong way to cook or a wrong way to approach cooking.
#
I think that's rule number zero, right?
#
Is that you cook, it feeds you, you like it, you know, that's basically great.
#
So I think the first and foremost thing is to get this whole sense of superiority about,
#
yes, it's actually it's perfectly fine to learn from recipes and cook, you know, everyone
#
has their own mental model, if you will.
#
So getting to spices, right?
#
So spices are actually quite fascinating because they're rather central to Indian cooking.
#
There's also this other, there's this gentleman called Ganesh Baglar, who's, I think, triple
#
IT and I read this talk of his, he's written a paper on how a lot of traditional science
#
about how flavors combine in the West, right, is predicated on what we call sharing flavor
#
So the things that share flavor molecules, like if something has three flavor molecules
#
and this one has four flavor molecules and two of them are common, then the general theory
#
is that if you combine both of them together, it will taste better because they'll kind
#
of, you know, harmoniously go together.
#
So, so they've worked out a lot of these combinations, which is why you kind of have this, you know,
#
there's a, you know, a steak and butter sauce sort of thing, because there's some molecules
#
You can have cranberry sauce and lagerberry sauce and meatballs for some, you know.
#
So you have these standard combinations in the West, which are all based on this idea.
#
You know, what Ganesh Baklar actually says is that Southeast Asian and South Asian cooking
#
actually takes a fundamental opposite approach.
#
A lot of our cooking actually works by taking things that you would not believe should work
#
together by that, that original sort of Western idea and they work together fantastically.
#
And that thinking is now going back into the West.
#
So there is now, there's actually, there's a, there's a book called Art of Flavor, I
#
It's actually written by a perfumer, which again goes back to the fact that a lot of
#
taste, a lot of flavor is actually aroma.
#
It's a guy who makes perfumes and a chef, and they've kind of got together and tried
#
to concoct these completely new contrasting combinations.
#
I'll give you one odd example before we get to spices, right?
#
One of the fascinating examples he says is that if you take some coffee beans, like whole
#
coffee beans and put them in a baking tray and put cut chopped, cut carrots and then
#
drizzle some olive oil and let it bake for like, you know, 30 minutes.
#
He says that the, I mean, coffee is fantastically complex, right?
#
There are many of these flavor molecules that for some bizarre reason work fantastically
#
And that carrot will taste like nothing you've ever had.
#
And this is just literally just carrot and, you know, and coffee, coffee beans, and you
#
can just add some salt.
#
Obviously you need some salt.
#
Carrots anyway are sweet, right?
#
So kind of coming to spices, right?
#
Indian subcontinental cooking is, is, you know, so I often say that Japanese cooking
#
is umami centered in that the basic principle is to create a umami laden broth, either by
#
use of seaweed and kombu and dashi, you know, tuna flakes and all these other things.
#
You create a very umami laden broth, then all the other ingredients can be very minimalist.
#
You can literally just drop raw meat, raw, this thing's raw, just mildly cooked vegetables
#
The, the broth is going to be so flavorful that that's really what centers the whole
#
India has a fat and spice base in the sense that you, you basically all cooking starts
#
by eating fat and putting some spices into it.
#
You can't say this for Western cooking, not all dishes start by eating oil and putting
#
You can start either by baking, you make a batter or you roast vegetables or you sort
#
of, you rub something on meat and you oven grill it.
#
So it's, it's not, it's not like, right here on the other hand, it is, it is very much
#
a fat and spice driven world.
#
And I often sort of, I realized that a lot of Indians were kind of looking at spices
#
in the wrong way, right?
#
One is the fact that not realizing that spice flavor is volatile, that it is largely soluble
#
only in fat and or, or alcohol, right, very little in water, right?
#
So this should therefore tell you something, right?
#
Any spices after you've added water, right, you're, you're going to start to lose it
#
So therefore, when you add powdered spices to a gravy, the earlier you add it, the more
#
flavor you're going to lose, which would therefore tell you that literally any recipe that basically
#
says that you heat the oil, you add some spices, you add your gravy, you add tomatoes or ginger
#
Then you add water, some kind of gravy, and then you put dhania powder, jeera powder,
#
and something like that.
#
The earlier you use it in the cooking process, the more flavor you're largely going to lose,
#
which is okay, because how people adjust is by adding tons of it, right?
#
So people will say add a tablespoon of dhania powder.
#
On the other hand, I realized that you know what, if you get freshly made dhania powder
#
and you add it right at the end, just like you would add garam masala, you'll get the
#
same effect and you just need to add a quarter teaspoon.
#
So there's a simple economics thing here as well.
#
If you understand why you're doing what you're doing, you can actually be much smarter about
#
And the second thing is about the fact that because they're so volatile, a lot of these
#
spices, which are again expensive, you know, on a per gram basis, you don't want to buy
#
powders and just keep them at room temperature, right?
#
Indian climate is brutal.
#
I mean, they're going to oxidize and they're going to taste like sand, right?
#
So you want to freeze or refrigerate powdered spices because you know, you're buying chana
#
You're going to use like a tablespoon or so and a hundred grams are going to sit around
#
So you want to refrigerate or freeze or what I tell people is that, look, get yourself
#
a cheap coffee grinder and make a ton of these things that you do otherwise very regularly.
#
You can make relatively decent sized batches of say dhania powder or jeera powder literally
#
And that way that taste is just way better because the whole spice does not lose aroma.
#
Whereas your powdered spices lose aroma, right?
#
So this is another kind of, you know, key insight in terms of, you know, how spices
#
And then the distinction between so how wet the fresh spices work, like your ginger, onion,
#
garlic, and those kinds of things, you know, and how herbs, leaves in general, like garnishes,
#
So because you don't cook them for long, right?
#
Because they lose a lot of the aroma very quickly, right?
#
Whole spices work in a essentially by you want to either powder them and add them later
#
or you want to add them to your oil upfront so that you get all the flavor into the oil.
#
So that's basically the broad principles, right?
#
And also remember that there are certain standard combinations that really work, right?
#
So and they kind of evoke a very specific region, right?
#
So if you take ajwain or radhuni or fenugreek and nigella, mustard and cumin, and you fry
#
these in mustard oil, no matter what you do after that, it will evoke Bengal, right?
#
If you take coconut oil, then you kind of put garlic and red chilies and curry leaves and
#
mustard and so on, it will evoke Kerala, you know, no matter what you do after that, right?
#
So in a sense, the realization ultimately, therefore, is that this spice flavor and the
#
fat combination pretty much really just determines the regional flavor profile of all all Indian
#
What you choose to do and how and what kind of mixes you choose to use, what whole spices
#
you use and what powdered spices you use, it literally determines all the rest are actually.
#
So therefore you can mix and match, right?
#
Nothing stops you from making a taking, for example, a shukto in Bengal is very similar
#
to an aviyal in the way it's made, except that the fat is different, the spices are
#
And the starch binder is different, right?
#
Otherwise, you know, you could you could mix and match and really, so I think in a sense
#
understanding spice as well will actually make you a more experimental cook because
#
then you are not worried about the other ingredients, you can make anything with anything.
#
In fact, you have a delightful video on the making of shukto as well, I'll link your channel
#
from the notes so the listeners can discover that and I watched it at double speed, actually
#
I must confess, but that was enough for me.
#
So yeah, if I want to actually make it, I'll have to obviously watch it at regular speed
#
and take notes and all that.
#
Another interesting thing you pointed out, like, you know, when you spoke about make
#
your own spice mix, I was like, yes, I am going to do just that.
#
But then you said that don't use a blender, use a mortar and pestle because the blender
#
will, you know, the thing rotates so fast that it will actually start cooking the spices
#
as it is grinding them.
#
And the lazy bong in me immediately responded to that and said, what I have to do so much
#
work, you know, which is something in Indian cooking, right, like Indian recipes seems
#
so daunting to me sometimes because there are like 84,000 ingredients in every one of
#
them and yeah, is that a bit of a stumbling block or is it not really as hard as it seems?
#
If you understand the function, each one of those families of ingredients play in a dish
#
and therefore mentally you can kind of figure out what is absolutely mandatory and what
#
is not and what you can replace with whatever you have, a common mistake is to take a recipe
#
which has like 20 ingredients.
#
First thing you go, go to a store and buy like 200 grams and 250 grams of every one
#
of those things, which you're going to use a tiny portion of and then the rest of it
#
I think the amount of waste generated in a country that is famously frugal in how we
#
weigh spices is just quite crazy.
#
And that too comes from this traditional idea that some of the refrigerator is bad and that
#
things that you keep in the refrigerator are not fresh, which is very counterproductive.
#
Actually things kept in the refrigerator stay fresh because the very definition of freshness
#
is the fact that if you stop biological activity, which stops at a couple of Celsius below zero
#
or really slowing down biological activity, that's freshness.
#
Which is why I kind of say that frozen vegetables are actually fresher than actual fresh vegetables
#
in cities because the frozen vegetables were frozen very little after they were harvested.
#
The actual fresh vegetables have been outside for a much longer time before they got to
#
So therefore coming back to spices, so the thought process was not to say that you must
#
use a mortar and pestle, but it's to understand why we use that.
#
One is that historically we use mortar and pestle because it is a gentler way of actually
#
breaking into and sort of extracting flavors out of these things without generating heat.
#
Whereas the rapidly spinning blade is going to end up generating a ton of heat and heat
#
means that the volatile molecules are going to escape.
#
So you want to lose a little bit more of the aroma.
#
And some of that stuff at high temperature will also oxidize.
#
And so therefore that's going to lose a little bit of flavor.
#
So which is why, for example, my maternal grandfather was a notorious patriarch in terms
#
of he would ask us, my grandmother was a fantastic cook, the one who's quoted at the starting
#
So she was a great cook, obviously, because he was very demanding.
#
And he would say that chutney made for idli, not in a mixie.
#
He did not buy her a mixie for many years because he felt that the taste that you get
#
from a mortar and pestle is better than what you get from mixie.
#
He was right about the fact that you get better taste, but obviously is a terrible choice
#
to make because she was sleeping in the kitchen day in and day out.
#
And sometimes you have to make these compromises based on how much time you have.
#
So therefore, if you think, if you don't want to mix your own spices, etc., by all means
#
buy spice powders, but freeze them, not refrigerate.
#
Four or five Celsius still has a ton of biological activity happens.
#
It's only under 15 or 16 Celsius below zero that you are genuinely keeping stuff for months
#
So you need to put them in the freezer.
#
But if you're fancy up to it, then get yourself a spice grinder, you'll save money on the
#
But if you're really artisanal and you have the time and effort and you want to make,
#
say, the greatest chutney you possibly can, then you should use a mortar and pestle.
#
So it's just understanding why what each of these things does.
#
And I guess some of it is psychological, like you've pointed out.
#
I think you had a lovely, you know, when you talk about 80% of taste being the nose, you
#
had a lovely drawing alongside it where you also talk about how site matters, you know,
#
how the food is presented will matter what you think about it will matter.
#
I remember reading long ago about some blind test involving wines, fine wines, and people
#
couldn't make out the difference between thousand dollar wines and ten dollar wines when they
#
So beyond, in fact, if you think about the role of nostalgia, the role of memories and
#
all of that is very, very, very important in how you perceive flavor.
#
And people mostly fail tend to fail blind taste tests when it comes to very specific
#
things about, oh, I can tell the difference between like, for example, people actually
#
fail a blind taste test between synthetic vanilla, which is twenty five rupees a bottle
#
and real vanilla, which is insanely expensive.
#
And in many cases, as part of cakes and desserts, people regularly choose the synthetic vanilla
#
as tasting better and more natural.
#
So it is it is just that, you know, people have these crazy notions.
#
I mean, and the difference between the two is that, you know, the real vanilla is manufactured
#
by a kind of random process through nature.
#
And this one is manufactured much more sort of directionally as it was.
#
So, you know, which one is likely to be better?
#
And not to mention the sustainability of the fact that it grows only in Madagascar and
#
all the other attendant problems of that.
#
Let's and you know, you spoke of nostalgia and that's, you know, one of the sort of another
#
of the moments in there for me, like it was when you were talking about Maggie Masala,
#
the instant noodle kind of mix where you point out that so many people like it so much because
#
it has such a combination that it will remind everybody of something of the spice mix they
#
It is actually so, you know, I spent a lot of time looking at the analyzing the the Maggie
#
Masala incidentally, it's not just an Indian thing, right, so Nestle is basically kind
#
of crack the this whole idea of this some kind of umami or a flavor sachet or a cube
#
or whatever it is or a sauce.
#
So this is so this whole Maggie flavoring Masala in India, cubes in the West and sauces
#
So they have one for every and they nail down exactly what evokes that kind of so they're
#
I mean, somehow whoever came up with that.
#
And so, for example, there is a there's an equivalent of this sort of cube or whatever
#
you get in, say, Nigeria, that Nigerians are absolutely addicted.
#
And likewise, the Maggie seasoning sauce, Indonesia, you will not find that's the last
#
thing that goes on any, you know, Mee Goreng or Nasi Goreng is that Maggie seasoning sauce,
#
which is very high umami in soy sauce kind of mix, right.
#
So likewise in India, clearly, what they've done is they've kind of taken a combination
#
broadly of Garam Masala, which is a very reasonably universal mix of some very common, you know,
#
fancy spices, you know, black cardamom, green cardamom, cloves, pepper, the expensive ones,
#
And basically sambar powder, which is essentially coriander, chilies is what ultimately sort
#
of the primary flavor profile of and fenugreek is the primary flavor profile of sambar, right.
#
And you kind of combine both together and then then you add the garlic powder and dried
#
garlic powder, dried onion powder and dried ginger powder, which incidentally, you know,
#
since we spoke about the whole addiction thing, these are three of some of the most addictive
#
spice mixes that most Indians don't tend to have in the home kitchen, because one, they're
#
And so people don't think about storing them in the in the refrigerator.
#
But trust me, consumer snacks are addictive because they use onion and garlic powder.
#
These are actually dehydrated.
#
So they are super concentrated umami bonds, right.
#
And if I mean, they just so you bite into a chips and you get all that rich flavor is
#
not by by by frying real onions and getting that flavor, it's dehydrated onions, right.
#
And so dried onion, garlic and ginger powder is generally tends to be there in all snacks.
#
And then you need some element of sourness is typically kind of an arm chew.
#
And then you need some kind of a starch binder so that, you know, if you make a mistake by
#
adding a little bit too much water to your Maggie, the Maggie masala will make sure that
#
So they've really thought this through fantastically.
#
So I'm a huge fan of I mean, you can literally take any ordinary dish, just sprinkle some
#
And people will say, Oh, wow, how did you make it?
#
You know, what you should tell them is I spent eight hours today with the mortar and pestle
#
just getting this just right.
#
And and speaking of chips, you know, I'm reminded of another of the sort of sort of revelations
#
of your book, which is the reason we've evolved to like things which are crisp is because,
#
you know, back in prehistoric times when we lived in caves and all of that, you know,
#
anything which was fresh was crisp and therefore we associate that as, you know, good to eat
#
So crunch, the ability to distinguish crunch is the difference between eating a fresh fruit
#
versus a rotten fruit that could kill you.
#
And I think, you know, so so clearly we have a preference for and the way we detect crunch
#
is a combination of actually sound.
#
And the other rather interesting thing is that a lot of that crunch that when you bite
#
into a potato chip, right, or a panipuri or for that matter, is essentially that a lot
#
of that sound is actually the ultrasonic range.
#
It's not the audible range.
#
There is some in the audible age.
#
But a fair amount of that sound is actually in the ultrasonic range, which you can't hear,
#
but you can feel it in your bones, which is why even congenitally deaf people can still
#
experience the crunch of a potato chip for without any loss of taste.
#
So we are actually responding to food with our bones.
#
Let's now go on to, you know, the next chapter in your book, which is about the magic color
#
And you begin this with this sort of beautiful quote by Sidney Smith, which I loved.
#
I love the quotes at the start of your chapters, by the way, and this one goes quote, let onion
#
atoms lurk within the bone and half suspected animate the whole, which is fantastic.
#
So, you know, and then you of course have, you know, another quote shortly after by Julia
#
Child talking about how it's hard to imagine a civilization without onions.
#
And you know, tell me a little bit about onions, because after reading this chapter, I felt
#
that, hey, what is this?
#
I don't appreciate onions enough.
#
It is enough to make me cry.
#
You know, the other funny thing is that, you know, as I say in the book, India, we don't
#
even get the best tasting audience.
#
The variety of onions we grow are actually great for salads in the West.
#
They're not considered to be cooking audience at all.
#
So they use the more golden ones that actually are tremendously more flavorful, but slightly
#
sweeter, which I think probably works for Indians.
#
But then, you know, our one of the things about Indian cooking is the realization that
#
you can take subpar ingredients and make great food, right?
#
You know, unlike diametrically opposite Italian food, which if you don't have great quality
#
ingredients, you can't make great Italian food.
#
And so onions are very central.
#
And you know, we know famously, they're all over the news.
#
The moment the onions prices rise, you know, there's chaos, there's riots and there's,
#
you know, all kinds of it's all over the news, right?
#
Because literally every part of India, you know, onions, first thing that goes into the
#
oil, pretty much, right?
#
Just despite the fact that on religious days, many Hindus will not eat onions.
#
And there are obviously, you know, many Brahmins, Orthodox Brahmins will not eat onions at all
#
as they grow older and so on, right?
#
And definitely not garlic, but definitely onions are also a part of that tamasic list,
#
So onions, first and foremost, are mostly water and they have a ton of flavor without
#
So it's a very unique package in the sense of garlic, for instance, is quite dense.
#
It has a lot less water, which is why a garlic is usually added after because it is more
#
likely to burn in the pan because it has less water.
#
And onion, on the other hand, is just a lot of water, which is why it takes a ton of time
#
for it to actually brown, right?
#
Because it has to lose a lot of that water.
#
Only then will the sugars and the proteins in the onion combine to make those brown colors
#
as part of the Maillard reaction, so on.
#
And most people don't have that patience, just get it to translucent stage, which is
#
essentially when the cell walls lose their structural integrity, that's when it becomes
#
so it loses the crispness.
#
So that's when it becomes translucent.
#
And then you leave it at that, which is mostly fine, you'll get a mild oniony flavor.
#
But if you take dishes like, say, a bhuna, especially like mutton in onions, that onion
#
needs to be really, really, really brown.
#
And that, again, it's a classic combination.
#
So there's one of the things I talk about in a subsequent chapter is this idea that
#
although the Japanese kind of, you know, are focused on umami, intuitively humans have
#
known about umami pairings globally, right?
#
Mutton and onions are actually a fantastic umami pairing.
#
The reason I call it a pairing is that they're glutamates, and there's another family of
#
molecules called inosinates.
#
When you combine glutamates and inosinates, the effect is double that of just one of them
#
So that's why, you know, people are just so crazy about a really dark, well cooked
#
mutton gravy, because it has such that lingering kind of flavor profile.
#
And it largely, again, doesn't come as much from the mutton as it actually comes from
#
the completely browned onions there.
#
And so therefore, onions are very, very central.
#
And essentially, the longer you cook them, the better they taste.
#
But then you may not want that if you're making a very milder dish.
#
By all means, you know, cook it lightly.
#
But the further you get, the browner it gets, the more taste it is, but also dangerous,
#
because it will also burn pretty quickly.
#
And you can actually take it to the logical level.
#
And you can almost make it a jam, like an onion jam, right, a caramelized onion jam,
#
which by the way, is a fantastic continent.
#
You know, I realized that, you know, when I was in Australia, I realized that they were
#
So all burgers in Australia, one of the ingredients there will always be caramelized onion jam.
#
Which just adds so much flavor to the burger.
#
And yeah, you kind of did point out the technical distinction that what you call caramelized,
#
what we call caramelized onion is actually melarded onion.
#
And you know, you had a lot to say about sort of the magical Melard reaction.
#
Tell me a little bit about that and why it is so central to food.
#
So basically, we've known for a while that if you cook food above the boiling point of
#
water between a certain range, food becomes brown, right.
#
It takes on these brown colors, right.
#
For a long while, we didn't quite know what's exactly happening.
#
We kind of knew that there are some clearly some chemical reactions happening.
#
So you know, you have to realize that as long as you're cooking inside water, right, a lot
#
of the changes are not major chemical reactions at all.
#
In that, see, gelatinization is more a rearrangement of structure rather than a major chemical
#
Melard reaction is actually where things are breaking down into other bunch of families
#
of molecules, because that's when you have enough heat to actually break down stuff.
#
So as long as water is there, none of that is happening.
#
So what happens between 110 and 170 Celsius is what this Louis Cabel Melard, this French
#
chemist, he kind of started documenting that he found that a family of six or seven families
#
of molecules, which are fantastically aromatic and also lend that characteristic brown color
#
And then depending on and the fact that you can only do this if your food has both proteins
#
and sugars, which is why you can't deep fry just a raw piece of chicken.
#
Deep frying is also Bayard reaction.
#
It's just that it's happening at the higher end.
#
So you want to instantaneously dehydrate, but you're still browning, right.
#
Just chicken does not have sugars.
#
So that's where you have to bread it.
#
So you have to take it and then you have to add it some kind of starch, which is against
#
sugars, which therefore will then react with the protein and the meat.
#
And then that's how you make fried chicken.
#
That's why we use batters in general.
#
So anything that does not have enough of either proteins or starches will use a bad, right.
#
So that, you know, you are able to, or egg for that matter.
#
So you can use egg plus bread crumbs or whatever.
#
So basically the Bayard reaction produces a family of molecules that can take very,
#
very seemingly boring ingredients like, you know, as I describe a cabbage, right, which
#
everyone hates because if you steam a cabbage, it smells very bad because it generates hydrogen
#
And that's why you should not steam cabbage and it will naturally steam.
#
If you have a small vessel and you're cutting a ton of cabbage, it will steam.
#
So unfortunately, the only way to cook cabbage in a way that is not steam is to cook a small
#
amount in a big pan, which is usually impractical.
#
So almost always cabbages is going to smell bad.
#
But on the other hand, if you actually cook cabbage to well past hundred and ten Celsius,
#
right, as it starts to get caramelized, caramelized or, you know, may added, you know, cabbage,
#
if you will, is just insanely tasty.
#
So in fact, I learned this from a Russian recipe where they actually say the way they
#
eat cabbage is by caramelizing it for like half an hour, 45 minutes it takes in just
#
olive oil or some oil and just let it slow cook.
#
And then it will slowly lose all the water, get really brown and it will produce fantastic
#
So, so this is, this is definitely, this is essentially the realization here is that you
#
can simply become a better cook by learning something that restaurants tend to do.
#
If you're making a gravy, realizing that you can't get the reaction going because it's
#
So to get the advantages of all of the flavors, the core ingredients are sauteed or fried
#
separately and then added because they're brown.
#
And so they bring all that flavor and then you add it to the gravy.
#
So aloo gobi made in a restaurant is aloo and gobi separately deep fried and then added
#
So likewise, pretty much anything else.
#
So I think so that's one key thing and also the realization that deep frying is also the
#
bad reaction, except very rapid with the intent of actually dehydrating the surface so that
#
it becomes crisp and prevents oil from getting inside.
#
Otherwise it'll be greasy.
#
So which is why if you're making puri and the temperature is well below 170 Celsius,
#
the outside is not going to dehydrate fast enough.
#
So the oil is going to get inside.
#
But if you precisely keep the temperature at between 175 and 180 Celsius, it will just
#
get perfectly crisp on the outside.
#
And so that the inside does not undergo the reaction.
#
It's only undergoing steaming.
#
So that's exactly what you want.
#
So deep frying is mad reaction only on the outside and starts gelatinization inside.
#
So that's basically what the principles of reaction pretty stunning.
#
And what you said about cabbages, I mean, I totally empathize with that because I've
#
hated cabbages all my life, though, if I ever have the patience, I might attempt them this
#
But I was kind of struck.
#
And the reason we've hated it, obviously, is that one, you know, we cook it the wrong
#
way and often we overcook it.
#
And there's a quote from this chapter, which is a little bit of a tangent, but I did want
#
to ask you about that, which is, quote, we overcook vegetables, cook meat till it's drier
#
than the surface of the moon.
#
And we like our eggs boiled harder than Pantera's music.
#
However, we compensate for all of that with a flavor bombing strategy that has no parallel
#
anywhere else in the world.
#
And it struck me when I read this, that this flavor bombing strategy as such, though we
#
made a feature out of it and not a bug, maybe a jugado way of covering up for bad cooking.
#
But are we kind of stuck here?
#
Because now because of nostalgia, I won't say our tastes have evolved because, I mean,
#
I obviously don't mean the technical sense of the term.
#
But we have grown to like certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food which are flavor
#
bombed food have become our comfort food, so to say.
#
Is Indian cuisine, therefore, stuck in this equilibrium where it doesn't matter how you
#
cook something as long as you get the spices right?
#
Now, I think, so one is that it's important to note that this strategy per se made perfect sense in a pre-refrigeration India, all right?
#
Which is essentially 30 years ago, till 30 years ago, for most part, refrigerators were
#
And so, and refrigeration was not common, not just in your home, it wasn't even common
#
So in general, if you're in urban India, you have absolutely no guarantee how fresh the
#
vegetables are, how fresh the meat is, how salmonella laden the eggs are, and what pesticides
#
were used to cover the palak or the vegetables to prevent them from being completely mauled
#
by those insects so that they survive till they actually get to your table in a city.
#
And the nearest place where they're growing the crops from your city is several hundred
#
So in that kind of world, right, urban Indian middle class kind of cooking, since all of
#
these are unknown and you have no control over all of these, I think the strategy makes
#
So you do not want underboiled eggs.
#
You absolutely want to make sure till it's green between the yolk and the whites.
#
So likewise, you do not want to undercook vegetables.
#
You do not want to eat salads because you don't know what pesticides went in, there's
#
And again, there's a theme from your podcast that I've heard so many times, look, state
#
doesn't have the capacity to ensure these kinds of things, right?
#
And in a sense that so, and we're a very low trust society, so we don't trust any of this.
#
So the only way to, so it might seem jugadu, but it makes perfect sense in that sense.
#
You're right in the sense that it ends up building a memory and a fondness and a nostalgia
#
for a specific kind of cooking, if you will, right?
#
But that's not too different from, say, the Chinese idea of stir-frying food, right?
#
I mean, you know, you heard the fact that the reason they end up stir-frying food is
#
because they had a fuel shortage, cooking fuel was short, and so all cooking had to
#
happen at ultra high temperatures in very short amount of time.
#
You know, they didn't sit and do, you know, broths like the Japanese did, you know, and
#
So a lot of that cooking had to happen in a flash, right?
#
And so, but you would argue that, you know, a lot of Chinese cooking has in some sense
#
taken that constraint and evolved that way, although they have no such shortage, no.
#
So I think that it's possible to take this strategy and still make great, adventurous,
#
creative, new Indian food by perhaps using great, fresh organic ingredients, but toning
#
down the spices and really over time building that taste.
#
And I can already see this in some of the experimental restaurants that are definitely
#
coming up outside of India, definitely in the likes of London and Toronto, where there
#
are tons of Indians, the Bay Area, New York and so on, Australia and others, Singapore
#
for that matter, but also in the likes of Bombay and Delhi, at least catering to the
#
You're starting to see this wave of I don't want it, you know, this oily and this high
#
In fact, a lot of the common complaint about the restaurant food, it's too spicy and it's
#
They're both that way because one, you know, anything less would have been unhealthy, would
#
have killed you, could cause you food poisoning and so on, right?
#
So in that sense, I think we can still evolve over time, definitely as people are more conscious
#
about it and perhaps people move towards hopefully trying to see if they have the privilege enough
#
to be able to source fresher ingredients, you know, local, all of these, you know, that
#
you have urban farms are now a common thing with Chennai, a ton of these places that literally
#
just 10 kilometers away, there are people growing stuff in greenhouses and shipping
#
it to you, you know, weekly subscription and I get a bunch of these leaves and small cucumbers
#
and carrots, which are tastier than the giant carrots that I get in the supermarket.
#
I think as slowly as we develop a taste for that, we'll do that.
#
But I would also say that if you look at rural India, that's not the case.
#
I mean, you know, a lot of rural styles of cooking, one of my favorite, I often follow
#
a lot of these YouTube channels, these rural, you know, this is 90 year old grandmother
#
cooking, say this sort of a goat in rural Andhra and so on.
#
And you're struck by the fact that they don't overcook at all, right?
#
That actually they use absolutely literally they walk over, you know, grab the coriander,
#
they grab the gongura, literally fresh spring onion from the ground and so on.
#
And they wash it and it's literally made.
#
They don't overcook in that situation.
#
So I would think that this is a very urban phenomenon, but I'm sure we can probably get
#
No, but also, I didn't mean to come across as too judgmental when I spoke about it as
#
being a Jugaru because another way of looking at it, like you spoke about how all Chinese
#
cuisine might have evolved from this original set of constraints and this delightful diversity
#
of cuisines that we have across the world is, in a sense, comes about as a response
#
to the different kinds of constraints that operate everywhere.
#
So, you know, you know, would we have learned to use spices in such subtle and delightful
#
ways if not for these constraints?
#
And plus the fact that almost all of the spices in the world grow in a very tiny part of the
#
Literally the Malabar coast and a few islands in Indonesia.
#
And maybe now Vietnam and Thailand are also starting to grow pepper and a few other things.
#
But so in a sense that the very fact that they are now, the fact that pepper is now
#
a common ingredient literally everywhere in the world is by itself a fascinating story.
#
And the fact that it is the the expansiveness and the impracticality of growing pepper all
#
over India is apparently one of the reasons why chilies became popular, right?
#
So, you know, so one of the things I often am fascinated about is that once a year we
#
have this, so it's one day, one religious festival in my family where it's pretty common
#
here where you kind of remember your ancestors, right?
#
So three generations of ancestors, you remember them.
#
So there's a there's a haven that's done and so on.
#
And the food that is cooked on that day is very special.
#
There's a very specific set of recipes, which they say is that we've been doing this on
#
And the recipes are quite fascinating because they don't have tomatoes, chilies.
#
In fact, they actually don't have any ingredients that were not available in India 300 years
#
So it's very yam based.
#
It's colocasia, it's ginger and pepper, turmeric, heavy kind of food.
#
It is the flavor profile is just entirely different, right?
#
It's it's actually quite kind of burns your throat because it's mostly ginger and pepper,
#
No garlic, no onion, no none of the, you know, new world spices, you know, chilies and tomatoes
#
So they use a raw banana and these other native yams and starches.
#
So what is fascinating is that when I go to my wife's hometown, their houses actually
#
have these big jackfruit trees and other trees.
#
So some of them actually have the pepper vines growing around those trees.
#
So pepper is actually vine, right?
#
So it doesn't like you can't cultivate like that.
#
So it literally has to grow around a tree.
#
And the green pepper, which comes straight out of the wine, is actually pretty sharply
#
I mean, it has the little bit of the heat that you would associate with the green chili.
#
But then you sun dry it.
#
And then what you ultimately get is that shriveled black thing that has a different flavor profile.
#
It has a slightly more smokier, different flavor profile.
#
But the fresh green pepper is actually a way to add actual heat to food, except that it
#
was, you know, out of it was very expensive.
#
It would only grow in a specific season, not available unless you're living in that part
#
Chilies on the other hand, can grow anywhere in India.
#
It's a plant from Mexico.
#
You essentially plant it and one chili plant will give one household more chilies than
#
You know, I'm growing chilies in the terrace and we don't know what to do with those chilies.
#
It is just incredibly sort of productive plant as well.
#
So it's actually quite fascinating how sometimes these plants also, right, I mean, having traveled
#
all the way from here, they find this new home and they completely dominate and change
#
So in a sense, I'm thinking of coronavirus, like I would imagine that chilies have a very
#
Let's move on to your next chapter, which is about acid and sourness and so on.
#
And here again, I was struck by this sort of delightful metaphor of music that you use,
#
where you spoke about salt being like a volume knob and sourness being like the bass guitarist
#
That before that you have maybe salt and sweet and you have singer and your regular guitar,
#
but it's not fun and then suddenly you have a bass guitar and the mix and the whole thing
#
So tell me a little bit about acid, about sourness, how we evolve to kind of like it
#
and how we should think of acid in fact.
#
So obviously, I think one inspiration obviously for this particular chapter was Samin Nasrath's
#
fantastic salt fat acid heat, which kind of explains the four key things that you need
#
to understand about good cooking and so on.
#
Acid is often people tend to understand salt, people tend to understand fat, people tend
#
to understand heat, often don't think of sourness.
#
The average person does not associate sourness with acid at all, right?
#
Because acid is always that dangerous sulphuric acid and it has that sort of image, right?
#
So obviously what I wanted to sort of say that actually it is one of the single most
#
important things in cooking simply because if your food does not have that slight amount
#
of sourness, in three scientific terms, if the pH is not less than seven, it's actually
#
going to taste bland, right?
#
Your grandmother knew this because she would make dal, which is notoriously bland, then
#
she would squeeze lime juice right at the end and that will just elevate the whole thing.
#
You make a pulao, which is just rice, then you would squeeze lime juice at the end and
#
it just magically changes the whole thing, right?
#
Even when you marinate meat, for instance, the acid acts as a tenderizer, right?
#
So it sort of, you know, breaks the structures on the skin of the meat that makes it easier
#
for the flavor molecules to stick to it, right?
#
That's why we squeeze, that's why we use yogurt, which is an acid, right?
#
And I think, you know, so part of what I wanted to do is to first and foremost kind of get
#
into people's heads that look, many of the things that you commonly use, everything from
#
tea to coffee to yogurt to tamarind to lime juice to vinegar, they're all acids, right?
#
In varying strengths, your sulphuric acid is the one extreme end of the spectrum, right?
#
And the reason why we have such a tremendous bias towards acids is because the base or
#
the alkaline side of it is associated with poisons, is associated with bitterness.
#
So sour and bitter are opposite tastes, right?
#
And because we have evolved taste buds to detect alkaloids, which is essentially what
#
bitterness is because they're poisonous, we therefore have evolved a bias against most
#
Which is why, you know, baking soda, if you overuse baking soda in something, you get
#
that nasty metallic feeling because it's the kind of taste your body is not used to liking,
#
Also why people have this thing against baking soda as well, right?
#
But if you use it in the right amount, it's quite useful.
#
But yeah, so therefore acids essentially is about adding sourness, right?
#
And sourness has a fantastic, the reason I use base guitar as a metaphor is actually
#
I mean, I grew up in the 90s, like you did, you know, I, as someone who sort of, I was
#
living in North India, so I was listening to Anumalik on the one hand, and I was listening
#
Rehman and Ele Raja on the other end.
#
And it struck me, no one refused to frustrate me that Bollywood music in the 90s had no
#
Or it was inaudible, for the most part.
#
If at all they were using a base guitar, it was a synth and you couldn't really hear it.
#
And music without a base guitar is just, is missing the meat, if you will, right?
#
It's somehow, you don't get those base notes, that's what really anchors you.
#
Is the bridge between your melody and the percussion.
#
And if you don't have it, the drums sound tinny and cheap, and then your melody just
#
stands out, you know, it doesn't really mix together, right?
#
And given the fact that Ele Raja was like a god of using base, and particularly base
#
guitar, he would never use synth bass, he would almost always use an actual base guitar.
#
And again, mind you, that it was at a time when cassette players and so on, were tiny,
#
And to hear base, you need large speakers, right?
#
It's a size thing, right?
#
So you need the larger tweeter or subwoofer to be able to hear base.
#
And so it was quite natural that a lot of musicians would compensate by using a higher
#
frequency so that you can actually at least hear it.
#
And Bollywood music directors just skipped it, saying that you can't hear it anyway,
#
I'm not going, I'm going to skip it.
#
Ele Raja, on the other hand, would use bass tuned one octave higher so that you could
#
Even on your Walkman or a shady transistor radio, you could still hear that thing that
#
kind of connected between the melody and the percussion, right?
#
And so in that sense, for me, the reason I'm particularly attached to that sort of metaphor
#
is because sourness is exactly that, right?
#
Because sweetness and saltiness are very one dimensional, right?
#
Something that's just sweet is just cloyingly sweet.
#
Something that's just salt is, you know, it's a one dimensional taste.
#
But something with these two and a bit of acid is just something else altogether, right?
#
And often I think, you know, the best example I often like to give is that when it comes
#
to Indian cooking, we are an absolute, we understand acids better than most cuisines.
#
We use more variety of acids than most other cuisines, right?
#
And nothing represents the pinnacle of the creative use of acids than chart, right?
#
I mean, chart, in fact, not just acids, there's the heat as well, which sort of gives you
#
the dopamine because chart is spicy for that reason.
#
The crunchiness, the texture variations, right?
#
So you have soft aloo and those kinds of things, and you have the crunch of the papdi and all
#
So you have the extra variations and you have like four kinds of acids, right?
#
The tomatoes are mildly acidic, the tamarind is sort of like the base strong acid, then
#
the lime juice squeezed at the end is the top note, if you will, think of it like an
#
Then the armature is the more sophisticated acid.
#
So that again, added kind of bridges everything together.
#
So literally four kinds of acids used in a single dish, right?
#
So that's why chart is delicious and we're kind of addicted to it as well.
#
Yeah, you know, my favorite objective in the book was this objectivated compound you use
#
for the flavor of chart, where you refer to as disco party in the mouth flavor, which
#
And again, you spoke about tamarind as drummer plus bass, armature as lead guitar, citrus
#
like lead vocalist, which I absolutely love.
#
I want you to elaborate on this very intriguing sentence, which I love but didn't fully understand.
#
So I'll ask you to kind of explain it to me now, which is, quote, when recipes call for
#
tomato puree, noobs at tomato puree, experts at tomato paste and legends at tomato ketchup.
#
So this is, you know, so this is again, stems from the fact that tomatoes are notoriously
#
I mean, they're very seasonal.
#
So the flavor of the tomato varies by season.
#
The tastiest tomatoes come in summer, winter tomatoes are bland.
#
So the summer tomatoes are much sour, right?
#
And again, depending on the variety.
#
So there are tomatoes that are also sweet and strongly sweet.
#
What's sweet and sour is the ideal one and so on.
#
So therefore, if you're looking to get a certain level of sourness in your dish and you're
#
relying on tomatoes for it, it's almost always going to be a tricky thing.
#
So almost always most Indian dishes don't rely only on tomatoes, which is why they'll
#
always either add tamarind, they'll add other kinds of acids because you can't rely just
#
on tomatoes for sourness, right?
#
And so, but tomatoes, on the other hand, have a ton of umami flavor, right?
#
And you get that out and tomatoes are mostly water and you're not going to get much unless
#
you are able to reduce the tomatoes down to lose as much water as possible.
#
So if you find some of the best cooks on YouTube and so on, right, I can give some examples
#
like Nisha Madhulika is another one, right, so she almost always, you cook that, you cut
#
tomatoes and you cook it down till it loses, they'll tell you that till it loses so much
#
water that you can see the oil come through the sides, right?
#
So that's usually a visual aid at understanding that you've not make it.
#
So the more concentrated the tomato is, the tastier it's going to be.
#
In fact, you can take it to the logical extreme.
#
Some of the pasta sauces in Italy are cooked for 28, 24 to 48 hours.
#
You can endlessly cook tomatoes that the longer you cook, the tastier it becomes, right?
#
As long as you stop short of burning it and so on, right?
#
And so therefore, so obviously, tomato puree means you are just taking the tomatoes, putting
#
it in a mixie, making it into a liquid and then using it.
#
But it's going to be not really tasty.
#
You're not going to make it lose a lot of the water.
#
On the other hand, tomato paste is concentrated.
#
It's already lost a lot of the, it's already been dehydrated and a little bit of tomato
#
paste is the equivalent of four or five tomatoes, which otherwise is painful for you to sit
#
and cut and add, right?
#
So adding tomato paste is a much, much reliable way to get the core tomato flavor.
#
So if you're making like tomato soup, if you're trying to make this just with actual fresh
#
tomatoes, you're going to get a very disappointing soup.
#
So you will need a tomato paste kind of thing.
#
Tomato ketchup, on the other hand, is tomato paste plus garlic powder, onion powder, and
#
all those other magically addictive and vinegar, which is also acid, a stronger acid.
#
All of that put together.
#
Onion powder, garlic powder, and tomato paste and a bunch of other spices and salt and sugar.
#
And so it is really, it's designed to be addictive, which is why people like eating anything with
#
the tomato ketchup, right?
#
This is the most popular condiment around the world.
#
And so, and the reason I say legend is because look, you, if you're like me or like anyone
#
else ordering from Swiggy, you know, three or four days of the week during the pandemic,
#
you're going to have a ton of sachets sitting around with every one of those orders.
#
And trust me, if you're throwing them away, you're wasting some of its most fantastic
#
Any recipe that calls for tomatoes, just open up one of those sachets and trust me, it'll
#
just elevate your cooking.
#
I remember some very old essay by I think Malcolm Gladwell on tomato ketchup where he
#
spoke about how one of the reasons it's so popular is it's a combination of all the different
#
flavor profiles, including umami.
#
Let's talk a bit about umami.
#
You've already kind of mentioned that, you know, it not just accentuates the flavor of
#
anything else, but it lingers for a longer time and how, you know, Japanese cooking can
#
be minimal with few ingredients because, you know, whatever flavor is there is given that
#
much more depth by umami.
#
And I was kind of, you know, another myth which you sort of busted here with so many
#
people believe is that MSG is bad and all of that.
#
And as you pointed out, I'll quote you again, quote, there is no chemical difference between
#
the glutamates and cabbage, mushrooms and tomato, and the half teaspoon of Ajinomoto
#
that you sprinkle on fried rice, stop quote.
#
And in fact, as you said, parmesan itself has more glutamates and an equivalent amount
#
of Ajinomoto and you know, which among us westernized elites can resist sprinkling of
#
So tell me a little bit about kind of umami and what's a big deal about it and what is
#
still the lingering mystery around it because, you know, it's
#
So we kind of, you know, so the lingering mystery is fundamentally coming from the fact
#
that as a taste bud, we've only known it for about a hundred years or so, right?
#
I mean, we didn't know that we had a taste bud for umami specifically.
#
And the mystery is also the fact that we still don't know for absolutely sure why we haven't,
#
There are some very popular theories which I'll talk about, but it's not like, it's
#
not like done and dusted, you know, science, right?
#
Because you know, like we explained, we know why we need sugar.
#
It's just, we needed to live, right?
#
We know why we need salt and we know why we need the ability to detect acids or bitterness
#
and alkaloids and so on.
#
So you know, we've been wondering why is there a taste bud for umami, right?
#
It's a set of sensors, taste buds that detect a very specific amino acid in food.
#
Not all amino acids, only one amino acid, which is why it's odd, right?
#
So one of the right now most explained, I mean, right now it's a partially accepted
#
theory is the fact that it is ultimately a taste for protein.
#
So you have to remember that protein is not very tasty.
#
Protein is actually, it doesn't taste like sugar, right?
#
It doesn't taste like fat.
#
It doesn't taste like sugar.
#
Protein is the least tasty of the foods and it's possibly one of the most important because
#
you know, all the rest of your body, your growth and muscular growth and everything
#
else requires proteins, right?
#
And your body can't synthesize all amino acids.
#
Make it only synthesize some and some amino acids are essential, which means that they
#
have to come as part of your diet, right?
#
And this is also why, so, and some of these essential amino acids are available only in
#
animal sources, which is why even vegetarian or most people who don't eat meat still will
#
eat dairy and others because that's where you get the other amino acids from.
#
Although technically vegan diets now, there's apparently soy does have some of these essential
#
amino acids, one of the few plants that does.
#
So if you make soy protein, you're mostly okay.
#
But if you are vegan and do not eat soy, then I think there's a serious problem.
#
And again, if you're a child on a vegan diet, it's a serious problem because it's not going
#
So anyway, so that's the nutrition which we will skip.
#
But essentially the prevailing theory is that because meat is raw meat, the taste of raw
#
meat is evokes disgust, right?
#
So we've developed taste as we were like, you know, cavemen and so on, the ability to
#
And to do that, apparently, our tongue has a way of detecting this particular amino acid.
#
Obviously, the gap in the story is the fact that why not other amino acids?
#
And that too, glutamic acid as an amino acid is not an essential amino acid.
#
So therefore, we seem to have this ability to detect glutamates, glutamic acid in food.
#
And at the moment we detected, it has that sort of lingering.
#
So the way it works is that the umami receptors amp up the salt and sweet sourness receptors,
#
So a tiny amount of sourness in an umami-laden broth will taste a lot more sour than a non-umami
#
based one, which has a ton more acid, which is why you can get away with adding less.
#
So second is the fact that your body, because we are made up of the same set of amino acids,
#
I think, I don't know the number, I think 14 or something.
#
So we have about two kgs of glutamates in our body, our muscles in our body.
#
If you take, you know, if you take a 70 kg person, two kgs of glutamates are there.
#
So that one quarter teaspoon of MSG is not going to kill you because it's just simple
#
And the fact that natural umami is really no different from the synthetic one.
#
That said, there are a tiny proportion of people who are allergic to synthetic Ajinomoto,
#
But that's much, much tinier than people who are actually say gluten allergic or have celiac
#
So, so therefore that's the thing about umami.
#
And as I said, I think Indian cuisine is not focused as much on it.
#
But again, even there, there is an urban bias and I kind of point this out in the book.
#
A lot of coastal, poorer, fisher folk, et cetera, a lot of the cuisine is pretty umami
#
Because the tinier the fish, the more umami heavy it is going to be.
#
So they eat the bigger, less tasty fish, but they eat the tiny, dry fish and so on.
#
Second thing that adds umami to food is, is fermentation.
#
And the Northeast of India has a lot, a bigger fermentation tradition of using actually fermented
#
Than the rest of India.
#
I think at some point of time, certain kinds of fermentation began to be considered unacceptable
#
from a caste system purity standpoint, because obviously, because you know, production of
#
alcohol is also fermentation.
#
So there is that, you know, which is why most of India does not have a vinegar tradition
#
because we don't like alcohol.
#
So we will ban all of those kinds of things.
#
And you can't have vinegar without an alcohol being produced first.
#
So vinegar is literally just sour wine.
#
But you do in Goa and you do in the coast of India where there is amongst non-Hindu populations
#
amongst Christians and others.
#
So vinegar is a very big thing in Goa.
#
Also coconut vinegar also in coastal Karnataka and Kerala as well.
#
So that's essentially umami.
#
They've always known it.
#
So mutton and onions is another fantastic pairing.
#
Tomatoes in anything is concentrated tomato is very, very high on umami.
#
Any kind of concentrated base gravy that has tomato is going to be very umami and so on.
#
I'm kind of reminded of this old cartoon.
#
So I don't know if it was a cartoon or an anecdote or whatever, but it basically features
#
this aristocratic English lady telling her companion and talking about, you know, the
#
domestic health and saying, do these people also have sex?
#
It is entirely too good for them.
#
And you know, in an Indian context, it would seem that the lower you go down the class
#
or the caste change, you're actually getting more umami.
#
So you know, they're actually better off in that sense.
#
And it's also fascinating that we are two kg glutamates.
#
I mean, you know, after reading your book, it seems to me that human beings are basically
#
So we're mostly water, but you know, so the other, you know, since you brought up that
#
aristocratic lady, so there's actually a even in England, right, or even in Europe, right?
#
If you think about this modern day phenomenon of sourdough baking, and that kind of crusty
#
artisanal brown whole wheat kind of breads, which are now what hipsters eat now, right?
#
You know, three, 400 years ago, that was considered to be peasant food.
#
That bleached white perfect sandwich loaf was what the rich people ate.
#
And you know, obviously, it's the same thing, right?
#
They've realized that that's actually that crusty artisanal, long fermented natural sourdough
#
bread is tastier than that fast fermented bleached white floured bread is the realization
#
that you know, we've we've come too much later, mind blowing and another sort of another great
#
villain of you know, in Indian culture, which should not be a villain at all is baking soda,
#
And this is a misconception that I held as well.
#
I always knew MSG was perfectly fine.
#
But I always thought that hey, you know, restaurants mess up our food, they put too much baking
#
soda and blah, blah, blah, they're taking shortcuts.
#
But you know, after reading your book, I have looked at baking soda with new eyes.
#
So tell me a bit about you know, why that misconception exists and why it is actually
#
such an incredibly useful ingredient.
#
See, I think there's a certain the bias against baking soda is no different from the wider
#
slightly more fallacious bias in Indian culture in general against anything chemical, which
#
So it's apparently sodium chloride is not chemical, but sodium bicarbonate is chemical.
#
But but then, you know, so the whole yeah, so there is that right, because obviously
#
And the other thing is that, you know, you can collect salt by you can make salt by evaporating
#
seawater and you get a sense that it's it's natural.
#
Although salt is the only thing that is not of organic origin that we eat.
#
It is literally the only thing of non organic origin that we eat.
#
So because it comes from the oceans and so on.
#
So the other thing is baking soda per se.
#
So there is that larger chemical thing.
#
The second thing is that obviously, you know, as a historically predominantly poor country
#
and so on, you know, your your low end restaurants, your your low end food outlets and so on.
#
I mean, they need to find ways to save on fuel.
#
There's just no getting around.
#
And by the way, you know, we know how those guys operate, you know, they figure out some
#
guys they get a domestic cylinder and that's how all the all the cooking happens.
#
So none of those guys are paying like commercial cylinder rates and so on.
#
It's somebody's cylinder that they're using and so on.
#
So the jugard is there everywhere in that industry.
#
And so it is not surprising, therefore, that they would have figured out that using baking
#
soda is a fantastic way to reduce fuel costs, because baking soda will reduce the amount
#
of time that it takes to cook, right, especially legumes, grains to an extent.
#
If you are cooking chana, a pot of chana, right, using a pinch of baking soda will cut
#
the cooking time by 50 percent.
#
That is a lot of money over time.
#
And obviously, I mean, the only thing is that over time, we've also figured out that you
#
can balance that out by adding tea, right, adding tea bags, which is why when you make
#
chana masala, you add a little bit of baking soda and you add tea.
#
People only remember the fact that I'm adding tea because it gives the brown color.
#
That's not what it is for.
#
And more importantly, it's an acid that only becomes acidic at high temperatures.
#
So which is why just the tea bag is not acidic.
#
Only once the temperature goes above a certain level is when tea becomes acidic and so on.
#
So the reason it exists is because in the early part of the cooking process, you want
#
the baking soda to break all of the walls of the chana so that it actually cooks it
#
faster because baking soda breaks down pectin, which is which is part of the cell walls of
#
And what happens is that then the tea kicks in and neutralizes any leftover baking soda
#
because acids and bases react and you get, you know, carbon dioxide and water.
#
So therefore, that's why we use this and restaurants will use it pretty liberally in most things
#
that they're cooking because it's also common that they don't quite know all of these reactions.
#
So there's a good chance that they're probably using it when cooking rice, when cooking literally
#
anything because they think that if it works for chana, it'll work for anything.
#
They'll add it when cooking meat.
#
Because they it's not like they have a craft and they have documentation, they have knowledge
#
and they've been trained.
#
It's quite common for people to kind of try these things everywhere.
#
If it works here, it works everywhere.
#
So unless you know how it actually works.
#
And so which is why a lot of low end restaurants food ends up being slightly heavy on baking
#
And therefore it has that bad rap of, oh, and then people come up with all kinds of
#
fancy theories saying that they add baking soda to make you eat less at buffets, which
#
That's not why he would do that.
#
So if he's somebody's adding something to food to physically make it taste metallic
#
But if he's using it to save on fuel, that makes better sense.
#
So in a sense, that is really it.
#
I mean, and then the fact that it is fantastic.
#
It's also a great tenderizer of a beat.
#
In fact, your Chinese style of marinating meat, if you go to a Chinese restaurant, you
#
get that glazed kind of feel.
#
It's got a silky finish to meat and it's incredibly succulent inside.
#
It's because they use baking soda in the marinate a tiny bit.
#
And that's why you kind of get that effect.
#
So in fact, Indian marination uses acid, Chinese marination uses base.
#
So it just is quite fascinating.
#
And once you're done cooking, by the way, it can also help you clean.
#
It's a fantastic deodorizer.
#
You put a small plate of baking soda in your fridge, it'll absorb all the other odors.
#
So if you have like fish, et cetera, in the fridge and you don't want everything to smell
#
a fish, you know, is one way of doing this.
#
And it also accelerates the Maillard reaction.
#
So if you want to brown onions and you're too lazy and you don't want to spend 20 minutes,
#
a pinch of baking soda will get your onions evenly brown in no time.
#
So do you use more baking soda and MSG in your own cooking?
#
And would you advise that Indians in general warm to MSG because that will actually, you
#
know, you spoke earlier about the wastage of spices and all of that.
#
And you know, using MSG would certainly cause it to, right.
#
Let's kind of move on to the other sort of ingredient which should be used more in Indian
#
cooking, but isn't, which is alcohol.
#
And again, I love the starting quote, you know, which begins the chapter, which is from
#
Julia Child, where she says, quote, I enjoy cooking with wine.
#
Sometimes I even put it in the food I'm cooking, stop quote.
#
So tell me a little bit about alcohol and why you call it the silver medal winner in
#
the hundred meter flavor extraction race.
#
So fat is the absolute winner in what is able to do hot fat, right, is able to extract as
#
much flavor, but clearly alcohol is the second, right.
#
And then with the added advantage that in the cooking process, a lot of the alcohol
#
So it's not like you're going to get drunk by adding a tiny amount of rum or brandy and
#
So remember that, you know, beer is not alcohol enough for it to be used as an alcohol for
#
its purposes, but beer is used as an acid because beer is acidic, right.
#
Because it has, it's carbonated.
#
So beer battered, whatever, or, you know, beer is used as a, as a, as like a lemon juice
#
or something like that, but to add an acidic flavor profile, right.
#
And a complex, you know, all the complex, slightly bitter flavors of the hop also add
#
So you have alcohol, again, you know, not very common in India because of the historical
#
taboos against alcohol and brewing.
#
And the fact that the British largely got rid of a ton of local, lower caste brewing
#
cultures, you know, in collaboration with, with upper caste Hindus, as they kind of,
#
you know, elevated them to positions of power, made them officers and, you know, in the,
#
in the original civil servant and sort of a British administration, right.
#
So there's a ton of, you know, if you look at, if you read, and I was reading some of
#
these older Tamil novels set in the pre-British era or during the British era, Perumal Murugan
#
actually talks about how the, the British guy and the Brahmins, if you will, were coming
#
after their brewing of culture, right.
#
I mean, so this is, this is something that he kind of mentioned.
#
So there's always been, so if you have human beings, microbes and starches, you're going
#
It's just, there's no escaping it, right.
#
And especially in a hot and humid part of this world where microbes work, like they're
#
on steroids, you're going to get alcohol all the time, right.
#
So in the sense that it's, it's quite surprising, but I think, hopefully, I think we'll kind
#
of start, you know, learning about this and as at least amongst urban Indians.
#
And if you don't have like any religious strictures against the use of alcohol, I think definitely
#
use of some of the cheap wine that you get in my local Tasmac store.
#
I think it's good only for cooking.
#
I wouldn't drink it at all.
#
So, so that's the good thing.
#
So you use, use up cheap wine for cooking and it adds a ton of taste, right.
#
So again, fermentation is one of those magical biochemical processes that take something
#
one dimensional and adds a ton of additional dimensions of flavor, right.
#
Fermented grape, it loses sweetness, but it gains a ton of other flavor profiles simply
#
by the, the action of yeast, right.
#
So, so you take something like, imagine something like your floor or maida, which is tasteless
#
odorless powder, right.
#
You add water and you just let it sit.
#
You don't even need to add yeast because there's yeast already, you know, in the, in the, in
#
the maida already, right.
#
It will smell delicious.
#
It will smell alcoholic.
#
It'll, you know, so the smell of fermented dough.
#
And then once you bake it, the Bayard reaction just makes it all the more magic, which is
#
why bread is so magical, right.
#
So you just take four things.
#
You take a floor, water, salt, and yeast.
#
You turn it into this universe of the most astonishing flavors by just applying heat,
#
So that way, so alcohol is a part of the production of any kind of fermentation process, right.
#
At least yeast, that's aerobic fermentation produces alcohol, anaerobic fermentation sort
#
of produces, you have lactobacteria, like your idli, dosa, and all of those are lactobacteria,
#
So yeast is not involved.
#
Bacteria produce lactic acid, which is sour, right.
#
So the fermentation that produces sourness, yeast fermentation produces alcohol.
#
So that's the, that's the basic principle here.
#
And alcohol is a fantastic additive, especially grapes, especially even hard liquor is a fantastic
#
brandy, cognac, and these things actually are fantastic for deglazing the pan.
#
So especially if you're like, you know, using a, not a nonstick, but a stainless steel,
#
a lot of things will stick to the bottom.
#
Those things that stick to the bottom of the vessel are tremendously tasty because they
#
have all those Maillard, you know, byproducts, right.
#
So once you're done with your fat and onions kind of getting there, adding a little bit
#
of this sort of brandy or something else will unlock a lot more flavor and also remove all
#
the sticky bits from the bottom and get it into the gravy.
#
And over time, most of the alcohol will also sort of burn away and it'll release a lot
#
of those other aroma molecules that then get, end up getting, you know, dissolved in the,
#
So alcohol is definitely a fantastic, even if you don't drink it yourself, I think it's
#
worthwhile keeping a bottle or two in the kitchen as a cooking aid.
#
My favorite cooking video of all time on YouTube, and it may not be because of the, this thing
#
is this famous Vareva video called of Toddy chicken, where the chef is making Toddy chicken
#
and you know, every once in a while when he has to have Toddy, he'll say one sip for me,
#
one sip for the chicken.
#
And it's just, it's a friend, it's a masterful, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
#
So actually cooking with Toddy, yeah, cooking with Toddy is a, is, is a traditional thing.
#
Definitely smaller town, definitely more common amongst the, the lower down and the, the caste
#
hierarchy you go, definitely, but because Toddy is a, you know, so for example, you
#
know, Mallu's, when they make appam, right, the traditional way of fermenting an appam
#
was to actually add Toddy, right, because Toddy is basically, is a live thing.
#
It's because it's got that culture, right, so it's got that yeast culture that is going
#
to then ferment the rest of your, these things as well, right.
#
This is before we are baking soda was invented, right.
#
So then obviously nowadays people just add baking soda to the, to the, to just before
#
So you get that soft, fluffy in the center.
#
Historically, it used to be done with Toddy.
#
Can you speak about a couple of counterintuitive ways in which you use alcohol and, you know,
#
most people wouldn't have thought of alcohol in that context, like you spoke in your book,
#
of course, of game changing pakoras and, you know, what's the last time you used alcohol
#
And, you know, if you had to give a couple of tips to our listeners, if they are cooking
#
on, you know, when they can use alcohol while cooking Indian food, you know.
#
So the last time actually, so I think I, some people did get a bit angry that I used some
#
rum when I was making dal makhani and again, dal makhani is one of those dishes where you
#
actually don't want to add a ton of spice powders and things like that.
#
Because it's the intrinsic flavor of that actually comes from slow cooking the urad dal,
#
which is an absolute, you know, rock star legume in that it is the greatest legume.
#
You give it enough time.
#
It is painfully hard to cook.
#
You have to soak it for hours and hours and cook it for several hours and so on.
#
But the longer you cook, the more amazing the texture and the flavor gets.
#
And a lot of this, you know, people don't realize that the makhani part of the dal makhani
#
doesn't come from actually adding makhani, which is very little.
#
It comes from the fact that the dal itself has a silky buttery texture, the longer you
#
And so when you make something like that, it's, you don't need a ton of jeera powder,
#
that powder, this powder and all these other spices and so on.
#
You want it to be minimal, just the sort of onion, ginger, garlic, the primary base sort
#
of flavors that you're likely to find in a Punjabi feel.
#
And then you're going to, what I essentially do is add a little bit of that rum to deglaze
#
the pan before I add the tomatoes so that it really just amplifies the garlic and onion
#
flavors in the dish, which is exactly what you want.
#
So that is definitely one.
#
And I think the pakoda trick is actually something that I learned from this British molecular
#
gastronomy guy, Heston Blumenthal.
#
So basically this idea that one of the things alcohol does, and one of the reasons why it's
#
therefore used when you bake cakes, rum and things like that, is that alcohol actually
#
prevents gluten formation.
#
So gluten is essentially when you add water to any kind of wheat flour, the gluten and
#
gladden proteins kind of form this sort of stretchy structure, which therefore allows,
#
if you had any leavening agent, it allows it to rise, which you can't get in a rice
#
or anything else, right?
#
And so the thing is that in a bread or a chapati, you want that, but you don't want stretchy
#
gluten kind of a texture when you're making cakes or when you're making like a pakoda,
#
especially if you're using maida, like a tempura stick, right?
#
Because some people don't necessarily like using besan.
#
They also use a mix of besan and maida to get better crispiness, right?
#
So if you add a mix of maida and besan, and instead of using just water to make the batter,
#
add a little bit of vodka, the vodka will prevent the maida from forming a stretchy
#
So you get an ultra crisp, this thing.
#
The other thing, the trick here is to instead of using water, if you use soda, right?
#
That will aerate the batter so that the exterior of the pakoda will be the most astonishingly
#
So I mean, this is something that I've tried and it is like, oh, wow.
#
I mean, especially I made mirchi bachi and it is just, it's just amazing, right?
#
One the crispness outside and then you bite into the chili and the chili is really hot
#
and then you get the dopamine high and it's quite a perfect experience.
#
So see dear listeners, if you've reached the three hour mark of the show, your big revelation
#
is that the recipe for great pakoras includes vodka and soda.
#
You know, I've taken a lot of your time, so I'm going to get to closing questions now,
#
but in between, I'm going to say that we haven't finished all the chapters of your book yet.
#
I particularly enjoyed this penultimate chapter called Burn the Recipe, where you kind of
#
talk about models and meta models.
#
And you know, you give sort of different algorithms, gravy algorithm, rice dish algorithm, Indian
#
bread algorithm, chutney and raita generators, salad generator, talk about base gravy, spice
#
Absolutely eye-opening and I'm really going to take my time and, you know, process it
#
over a period of time and not try to do it at 2x or 3x speed.
#
So I'll kind of get to sort of my closing questions that I had for you.
#
And while writing this book, what did you learn?
#
I can understand that a lot of this is your accumulated knowledge over the years and you
#
actually had a structure in Scrivener and you know, you've mentioned in another interview
#
where you had your chapter and headings and then your subheadings and all of that.
#
So a lot of it was there, but I've often found that when you try to write about something
#
in detail, you end up learning a lot more about it and sometimes surprising yourself.
#
So what are your sort of learning moments from this book?
#
So one is clearly the more I research to write this book, the more I realized that there
#
are fewer strict and rigid rules about how to make delicious food, that you can get to
#
a great product in a bunch of ways.
#
And in a sense that minimalism is a great way to get to the same thing, right?
#
I think we tend to overdo recipes with too many ingredients.
#
Sometimes realizing that the quarter teaspoon of jeera powder that they ask you to add actually
#
If you have 15 other spices, you're not going to taste it, right?
#
Sometimes people don't realize that sometimes, you know, store-bought garam masala already
#
has dhania and jeera powder in it.
#
So you're not adding anything by adding that as well.
#
But recipes will say add garam masala, add jeera powder, add dhania powder, like it is
#
So definitely that was definitely one learning.
#
I think the second thing I kind of learned is that clearly I think I taught myself to,
#
in a sense, I mean I had this habit, but obviously definitely sort of improved during the course
#
of this, is that reading academic papers and food science is often a great way to discover
#
food science tricks that you could apply at home.
#
And as I said, people the likes of Kenji Lopez-Alt and others have essentially done that for
#
So for instance, so there was actually this paper from I think Indian Institute of Science,
#
I think it was from the 1980s, right?
#
On the some 20 page white paper on idli batter fermentation, right down to what is the impact
#
of the variety of rice, the amount of amylose and amylopectin in the variety of rice, the
#
kinds of microbes involved, a family of lactobacterias, staphylococcus and yeast involved in fermentation
#
And the impact of temperature, salt concentration, the impact of whether you use a two is to
#
one ratio, three is to one ratio, four is to one ratio and the variations in texture,
#
final properties of idli and so on.
#
I'm like, wow, I mean, I was not able to accurately get my mother to accurately describe how is
#
it that you can reliably ferment idli dough and get soft idli.
#
It's very hard to do, right, because fermentation is a wild thing.
#
I mean, it's you can only use your natural cues, you can kind of get a sense when something
#
is over fermented, under fermented and so on.
#
Even then, once in a while, your idli is going to end up slightly hard or over sour and so
#
It's just the way fermentation is like that.
#
And I'm like, wow, this is one of those things where I could genuinely get the right down.
#
So one example is that the reason you add salt when you ferment something, right, is
#
Salt normally kills bacteria and yeast and so on.
#
But the magic of evolution, lactobacteria have evolved the ability to live in slightly salty
#
And the reason they do that is, is that and by adding that salt, you are preventing the
#
millions of other families of bacteria and fungi that want to colonize the same food.
#
And so that's where you are basically helping it along.
#
So it multiplies, it is able to dominate.
#
And once it reaches a certain, you know, enough amount of a population, then lactobacteria
#
is another trick up its sleeve.
#
It produces lactic acid and that acidic environment again closes the door for a ton of other things
#
that again will spoil your, say at the end of the day, you're leaving food outside.
#
And there are literally millions of microbes out there.
#
And so therefore, it is just that understanding this and why you add salt and therefore when
#
you should add salt, et cetera, et cetera, is I think one of those things.
#
So therefore, I think I learned a lot from reading actual academic papers.
#
They're very hard to read.
#
They're obviously aimed at a food scientist working for a consumer food company, somebody
#
wearing lab coats and, you know, making chips or producing, you know, freeze dried idli
#
or freeze dried dal makhani and so on.
#
But clearly, but I think there's there's tons to be learned from actually going right down
#
to the scientific publications is definitely one.
#
And I think the third realization was that that it is a Indian cooking is can actually
#
be phenomenally a lot more diverse if people actually stop being tethered by recipes.
#
And there's this whole notion of authenticity.
#
I used to feel strongly about it, but I began to feel even more strongly about it.
#
I think the fact that there's a Szechuan dosa is I think glorious is not a matter for, oh,
#
Because somebody enjoys that.
#
And it's a fantastic fusion of cuisines.
#
And literally anything you eat today is also was also considered fusion cuisine when one
#
of those ingredients came from Mexico or came from somewhere else or a technique that you
#
borrowed from somewhere else.
#
I mean, I take the example of how my grandmother would make sambar when she was in a village.
#
You know, things like carrots and beans were called English vegetables because, you know,
#
they were not available in India and they used to grow only in the colder climates of
#
Bhuti and so on, right, so if you're in the hotter parts, you're going to use the native
#
local string beans and those kinds of things.
#
But the moment she got to Chennai, she would use carrot and sambar.
#
And, you know, who's to say that's not an authentic sambar because it doesn't have carrot?
#
Literally any sambar in Chennai will now have carrot.
#
So I think in that sense, the whole, in some sense, the chapter seven, if you will, right,
#
is fundamentally it's saying that, look, you know what, I think given the amount of variety
#
we already have, I think there's an opportunity to do even more.
#
There's no reason why you can't make a Thai-spiced chutney for your idli, right.
#
Why would you not do that?
#
Or a Bengali-flavored chutney for your dosa, right.
#
Or eat your dosa with kosha mangg show or something like that, which is fantastic.
#
You go to rural Tabernadu, I mean, dosa is always eaten with meat gravies.
#
It's a perfect canvas, if you will, for really well-spiced meat gravies.
#
So I think, you know, in that sense, I think that's what I learned in the sense that this
#
is, we're doing ourselves a disservice by thinking in these very insular terms of this
#
is authentic, this is my home's recipe, and therefore it is authentic, and these are the
#
only way to make this, and these are the spices you need to use.
#
I think if we mix and match, I think it will probably be a more vibrant, richer, I expect
#
to see a lot more innovation, if you will, on, I think if you, if people are more open
#
to some of these things, I expect to see food startups and others inventing new snacks rather
#
than just the same old things, right, essentially, if you look at Indian snacks, right, either
#
the traditional ones, namkeens, and, you know, those kinds of things, or you have the Western
#
canvas of the potato chip, but with desi flavors, you know, that's really about it.
#
There's just an ocean of Indian snacks made from millet and a ton of other things, which,
#
by the way, if you can apply a little bit of food science, mix a few flavors and so on,
#
why couldn't you take a murukku from, say, South India, and flavor it with mustard oil
#
and others and sell it in Bengal, right, there's nothing to stop you from doing that, right.
#
But yeah, people will say, no, no, no, that's not authentic.
#
But I think, you know, there's a great opportunity to do that.
#
You know, in the last couple of minutes, you've just made a bunch of cravings explode in me.
#
One, I'm thinking of kosha manchur, two, I've realized that, you know, the dosa cart outside
#
Mithi Bhai is like a five minute drive away from where I live, and I can have some Shezwan
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dosa there, which by the way, I love, and they have some 40, 50 kinds of dosas, which
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And three, you know, you, you mentioned new kinds of snacks.
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Have you ever had dosa khakras?
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Yeah, they're absolutely delicious.
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So yeah, I'm sure they'll reach Chennai at some point in time.
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And again, I share your feelings about authenticity and this food snobbery that people have.
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I don't know where the hell it comes from.
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I mean, if you think about it, you know, tomatoes, potatoes, chilies, onions, none of them are
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sanskari in that sense.
#
They're all relatively recent and still, you know, we are so incredibly snobbish.
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It is not surprising in a sense, because I think food is unlike many other places.
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I think food is a stronger part of community and caste and religious identity in this part
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of the world than many other places, right?
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So people sometimes define themselves on what they don't eat.
#
So I don't eat garlic, I don't eat mushrooms.
#
I mean, it's just that we've carved ourselves into, you know, in so many sort of these things
#
that, you know, if you're not experimental enough, the system, the culture actually makes
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it harder for you to go to a stranger's house and eat their food, right?
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The average Indian is hard for, you take someone, you know, from say a vegetarian family, what
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would he eat if he goes to a Muslim friend's house or if he goes to a lower caste friend's
#
I mean, it's just that we have created these walls based on food as well, right?
#
Which is changing, thankfully, because of urban India and the fact that, you know, people
#
are open to these things and people order these things regularly now on Swiggy and they're
#
able to experiment, etc.
#
But if you only go by just home cooking and so on, we're very insular in the fact that
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this food and this way of cooking, this is our food.
#
And in a way, I think food serves as a way of, in some way, the smaller divisions in
#
cuisine and exclusions and so on, make it easy for people to be homogeneously only among
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their own selves and not marry someone else because they'll cook something you can't eat
#
I mean, I think food is a very, very important part of that entire thing, we sometimes don't
#
And, you know, people in my family will sometimes say, oh, you bring caste into everything.
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India has changed, etc.
#
I'm like, no, the reality is that you cannot walk into the house of this friend I have
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and eat what they cook.
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You have to call well ahead of time and say, I will not eat this.
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And it's not just enough to say vegetarian, you have to say it has to be no mushroom.
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It has to be no garlic.
#
If it's Tuesday, it has to be no, you know, something else and so on.
#
So it is just that I think it is a, that's just the nature of this part of the world.
#
But hopefully I think amongst urban India, this is hopefully changing and people will
#
be open to really experimenting a lot more and not treat food as a, as something that's
#
I think, or at least it should be the part, that part of your identity that you're happy
#
to share and happy to have it, you know, be fused with others.
#
But that's both insightful and inspiring and maybe our dream of an India in the future
#
is actually a food dream when everybody eats everything.
#
You know, I'll ask you my closing question now, and it is not one about hope or despair
#
because what despair can we have when we are talking about food?
#
So my question really is that, you know, listeners of this podcast are always looking to dive
#
So give me a, give me a set of recommendations for people who really care about food, books,
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YouTube channels, movies, absolutely anything.
#
If you want to dive deeper into food, I mean, my number one recommendation in that regard
#
will obviously be your superb eye opening book, which I'll, I'll, you know, read again
#
at leisure because there are parts of it I want to take time and process.
#
And that's a must read.
#
But apart from that, what are the books that kind of opened your mind about food and besides
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your excellent YouTube channels?
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And we, you know, we haven't spoken much about your music, so someday I hope you'll come
#
on again and we can kind of tackle that because I just fucking love your work.
#
And I always thought that, you know, if we have an episode together, we'll talk mainly
#
about music, which we haven't gotten down to doing, but someday in the future, but yeah,
#
so you know, books, videos, whatever.
#
So I think one, I'll start sort of simple, right?
#
So if you want to get a little bit more into, so, you know, I had enough material to write
#
But clearly I said, no, that's, you know, that's automatically going to reduce the potential
#
I think two, 240 or 250 under 300 pages seems to be the sweet spot for someone to pick up
#
a book and say, you know what, I'm going to finish this, right?
#
So obviously I had to make a lot of choices on what I'm going to leave out.
#
How detailed am I going to get in?
#
So I think Food Lab by Kenji Alt-Lopez is the, you know, it's fantastic.
#
It's like, okay, 700 pages might be slightly hard to source in India, hard cover and can
#
be slightly expensive, but I think you could perhaps buy the Kindle edition or, you know,
#
So that's definitely, I think really a lot of the principles I talk about, but they're
#
still applicable in Western cooking in those dishes.
#
It's going to be the dishes focused on a lot of meat and, you know, roasted vegetables
#
and seafood and pasta and those kinds of pizza and those kinds of dishes, but it's still
#
learned tons of things from, and also I think his approach to his methodology, right?
#
And literally, whereas I kind of talk about the methodology at the end, he talks about
#
the methodology while he actually describes the science of why it's very literally say,
#
I tried seven batches and this batch, I tried this dispatch, and this is the table of what
#
So it's, I mean, remarkably sort of, I mean, it is, it is a treatise in that sense.
#
Definitely I think I would say that's the immediate next step for someone who's interested
#
The second book is a very recent read, I would strongly recommend is slightly, slightly hard,
#
but neuro gastronomy will open your eyes in terms of the, how your brain perceives food.
#
It may be slightly harder to read, but just stick with it.
#
Definitely, I think there are also some, if you have a little bit of money and you have
#
money to blow, there's something called modernist cuisine, which is by Nathan Mervold, the ex
#
He's become like this food science guy and I think modernist cuisine at home, actually
#
the original thing is actually a set of six books, which costs $600.
#
Therefore, impractical for anyone, there is a concise version called the modernist cuisine
#
It is a fantastically ground up, fresh way of thinking about food.
#
Some of which, I mean, I do refer to this in, I think in chapter six or something, right?
#
Suvid and many of these other newer techniques where ground up, he said, no, I'm going to
#
ignore all of the tradition, ancient wisdom ground up.
#
If I really think about the chemistry of it, how would I, and if I had no budgetary constraints
#
in terms of, you know, he uses like chromatographs that spin stuff and extract stuff from carrot
#
juice at like 10,000 RPM.
#
Obviously, a lot of that stuff is impractical, but it's a gorgeous book that I think you'll
#
still learn a ton about the science.
#
You're not going to be able to cook.
#
I don't think that's the intent of that book at all, right?
#
The equipment he uses is not practical at all, but it's still an amazing book if you
#
really, really want to get deep into food science.
#
This is obviously on the book side.
#
I think there are several YouTube channels that I absolutely adore.
#
I think my all time favorite has to be Bong Eats.
#
Bong Eats is just, I mean, even if you don't like cooking and if you don't like watching
#
cooking videos and all that, I think, you know, my wife watches Bong Eats videos to
#
just relax and unwind at night because it's just gorgeously shot.
#
It's the aesthetics of it right down to the cutting, to the cooking and the ASMR nature
#
They pay a ton of attention.
#
They're amongst the most beautiful cooking videos ever shot anywhere in the world, right?
#
And I think, you know, single handedly, you know, they've made me cook more Bengali dishes
#
in my kitchen than anyone else.
#
I think Bong Eats definitely, when it comes to vegetarian cooking, Nisha Madhulika and
#
Nandita Iyer are fantastic.
#
Nisha Madhulika on YouTube and Nandita Iyer on actually very well researched recipes.
#
So it's often, you know, we don't, you know, I dunk on recipes, but it's very rare to find
#
well researched, well tested recipes.
#
So people do it once and then they document a recipe, rarely do people like do it like,
#
you know, four or five times and then really pay close attention to actually documenting.
#
And if you like really well researched recipes, I think Saffron Trailers is a good choice
#
Nisha Madhulika is a fantastic source for vegetarian cooking.
#
I mean, her channel is one of the most watched in the world, I think.
#
And she's obviously fantastic.
#
And I think there are some very specific channels that I follow for other specific cuisines.
#
There's just Shalu's Kitchen for Mallu Cooking, especially if you like beef and pork dishes,
#
you know, that is the channel.
#
And I think there's also Madras Samayal for so the more meat based Tamil dishes and so
#
There are several others.
#
I think I'd probably, you know, I can share a list and you know, you can probably look
#
into the show notes and so on.
#
So this is on the YouTube site.
#
And I am, unfortunately, there's a ton of cooking video, cooking content innovation
#
happens on Instagram, that's it's a platform that I don't use.
#
So I'm not really aware of what's happening on Instagram, but I'm sure there are probably
#
tons of interesting things that happen on that space as well.
#
Well, you know, thanks so much for your time today.
#
And also for providing us this rabbit hole for listeners and me to go down on, you know,
#
if you have additional links, I'll put them in the show notes as well.
#
By the way, as far as modernist cuisine is concerned, you know, after reading about it
#
in your book, I went looking for it and right now on Amazon, it is 60,999.
#
But I managed to find pirated PDFs, which, you know, raises that whole question of what
#
And my take about piracy is absolutely never except when the book is not available.
#
But I would say being available at 60,000 is like being not available.
#
So kindly forgive me, Mr. So I bought I bought my copy in Singapore when I travel modern
#
cuisine at home, which is what that's about $130 still still quite expensive.
#
But I really loved the book and so on.
#
So it's I mean, it's a work of art just for the photographs.
#
And so well, so thanks so much for coming on the show.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore online
#
or offline and pick up Masala Lab by Krish Ashok.
#
I've put links to some of Ashok's remarkable work in the show notes.
#
You can follow him on Twitter at Krish Ashok.
#
You can follow me at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Seen and the Unseen at Seen Unseen dot I-N.
#
Thank you for listening and have a good time in the kitchen.
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Remember, it's your lab now, it's your lab.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Seen and the Unseen?
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