Data-Crunching Indian Recipes | Hacker News Reader

Data-Crunching Indian Recipes

washingtonpost.com

117 pointscgoodmac90 comments

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

There is, in fact, quite a science of producing foods that have pleasing tastes. They call the optimum combination of flavors the "bliss point":

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

Salt, Sugar, Fat is a great book about this: http://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/081298...

That might be linked in the article, but even clicking thru via a google search it is locked down now so I can't check.

Those foods are hyper-appetizing but they're not what most people call delicious.

That comment is more about how companies create and hook us on mass market food using those three properties in the book title. There also is specifically a lot of talk about food chemistry and their use of the "bliss point".

The headline is a bit clickbait-y, but the referenced paper is interesting. Main idea is that people have been saying that pleasing combinations have overlapping flavor profiles, but Indian food is characterized by strong negative food pairings.

> The headline is a bit clickbait-y

Calling it "a bit" is a bit of a minimization.

India is enormous. It is a continent with totally different climates. There are lots of different food variants there.

I find some of its food delicious, some I can't eat because it has so many spices.

Lots of Western flavors come from India, like custard from cinnamon,hamburger pepper in the meat or ketchup(an indian dish imitation), or Spanish paella from saffron.

Yes this article and the recipes sound mostly north Indian centric. For instance there is no such thing as Indian curry. It is a western word for some mixture of spices and ingredients. If you say "I like Indian food, I love curry" they will understand you nothing about Indian food. Curry is what a restaurant will call something when someone asks what the dish is.

Another example is that in western India they hardly use garam masala. It is much more north Indian centric. The main ingredient in garam masala, cloves, can be very overwhelming.

Indian curry and its usage is annoying. That's the farthest you can ever go from Indian food.

Actually the article uses Coconut Chutney to illustrate which is very much a south Indian staple accompaniment.

The word "chutney" is not even in the article. It just talks about putting onions with coconuts and curry leaves. And in fact you will find that the vast majority of coconut chutney does NOT have onions.

Curry leaves are interesting, they are not used in Bengal. In spite of Bengal being tropical like parts of South India.

This is aka. foodpairing, a nice illustrated example of the principle is this one of pear & ginger: http://blog.foodpairing.com/2015/02/pear-ginger/ There is also a tool available w/ +1500 ingredients (mainly aimed at chefs & bartenders)

> pallet

This word and 'palate' are so overloaded.

Actually, the startup[0] I work for has found a way to quantify subjective flavor space. We use data science, machine learning, and advanced algorithms to analyze human sensory. We're focused on the craft beverage market as of right now, mainly in quality control and flavor profiling.

[0] https://www.gastrograph.com

Gastrograph looks very interesting. I run a coffee shop/roastery and the industry has been in need of a tool like this for awhile. I'll be checking you guys out at some point. Glad I saw this!

Not a fan of indian food at all but I like some Chinese food.

Mostly what I like is 'traditional' English/North European cooking (pork, beef, veggies, potatoes etc) and some Italian (but again the simpler dishes).

:/ Boring.

Spice is good!

Every cuisine has people that don't like it, but some are more popular than others.

There are lots of people with bad opinions.

I concur. For one, I find Indian food pretty bad, too much spices, too much ingredients, and everything tastes like curry ;)

Understand that "curry" is a style of dish, about as specific as "stew". It doesn't automatically imply a specific flavor or set of flavors, just as "stew" doesn't automatically imply meat and potatoes, even if they do feature frequently in many stews. Are you perhaps thinking of turmeric or cumin? They feature heavily in a lot of different curries and are particularly strong and distinct in flavor.

Curry in India means, colloquially, just any dish with some gravy. Not gravy as in Western cuisine, which is made separately and poured onto some food (or kept on the side), but gravy as in, a dish that is somewhat liquid-y.

Whereas (I think) in British slang, curry means any (quite) spicy (as in pungent) Indian or South Asian dish.

In both Japan and China curry means a kind of dish made with a blend of Indian spices. They are usually liquidy. In Thailand they mix coconut milk into a spice blend. Japanese curry tends to be less spicy. My point is curry is an international dish with lots of regional variation and each has its own authenticity.

>everything tastes like curry ;)

You may not have been to restaurants that serve authentic Indian food. A lot of Indian dishes are spicy, but there is a wide range, and many are only a little spicy or even not at all. On many ingredients, definitely tends to be a lot more than in Western cuisine. As for your last point, there is a vast range of items even in a single regional Indian cuisine (and there are many regions), and many of them don't taste remotely like "curry" :) - which is too vague a term anyway, see sibling/nearby comments.

There is no such thing as "curry" for an Indian cook. That is an Indian restaurant thing for westerners.

Looks like nobody remembers that "everything tastes like chicken" reference... Chill, why so foodist?

Interesting read!

My wife practices ayurveda so we eat a lot of Indian food.

In terms of the flavor profiles they mention in the article, ayurveda has a concept of the 6 tastes: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent and bitter. A well-balanced meal should include all the tastes.

I am not sure how much ayurveda has influenced "Indian" style cooking, but I assume quite a bit. Maybe someone else can weigh in on it.

And yes it does require quite a number of ingredients.

Example, the breakfast I just made included:

Poha (flattened rice), mushrooms, coconut flakes, onions, green beans, almonds, potatoes, apples, cilantro, mustard seeds, hing, turmeric powder, cumin powder, salt, lime, chilis, coconut oil

Took about 20 mins to prepare.

>I am not sure how much ayurveda has influenced "Indian" style cooking, but I assume quite a bit. Maybe someone else can weigh in on it.

As amalag says (sibling comment), quite a bit, though less nowadays (because of traditional knowledge fading somewhat, time needed to make such food properly, work pressure, fast food, and increasing popularity of Western and other cuisines). There are a few books that talk about this, i.e. how traditional Indian food recipes incorporate Ayurvedic principles, for health (and taste :). One such book that talks about this a little, IIRC, is "Prakriti: Your Ayurvedic Constitution" by Dr. Robert Svoboda, who studied Ayurveda in India.

http://www.drsvoboda.com/prakriti-bk.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Svoboda

Indian style cooking used to mean ayurvedic cooking. Nowadays it is a bit more modern and not so healthy. For instance the poha recipe you shared is quite traditional (except for the mushrooms and apples). The 6 tastes are definitely more prominent in Indian cooking. Most Indian people will enjoy a nice bitter preparation. That is not something which is common in western cooking.

North Indian cooking is younger because of the Moghul/Persian influence.

Ayurvedic? Isn't that the one with the heavy metals? Maybe spice up the dish with some methylmercury seasoning salt.

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

Something like The Flavor Bible [0] but in a database would be really nice.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316118400/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=3521...

This would be handy if matched against a database of recipes: e.g., I'm craving something that tastes like x, here are y recipes that taste a lot like x based on their ingredients and flavour profiles, but are (perhaps subtly) different; this way you could have some variety in what you cook and still feel as if you ate what sounded good.

The tricky part would be getting the molecular breakdown for each ingredient. I'm not sure if that sort of data is readily available.

I'd think you'd only need a breakdown of the taste receptor stimulating compounds.

But even then whether food tastes good or not is very complex and goes WAY beyond taste receptors. There's the obvious smell and the way it looks, but even the sounds around you while eating, how hungry you are, what your drinking, the temperature of your beverage, the room's light levels, temperature, and humidity, and even the height of the table, what kind of chair you're sitting in, and the texture of your napkin will affect how you perceive the taste of a meal.

It could model what happens in a smoothie blender (with no heat and assuming no oxydation) but it would not account for the reactions occurring during cooking. Thinks like the Maillard reaction[0], breakdowns of various oils, etc.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction

I think emphasis on the ingredients used is short-sighted. Cooking technique can drastically alter the flavor of ingredients.

There is a reason we brown meat, and it's not to "lock in juices" or some such nonsense. There is a reason we let stews, well, stew so long. Dry aging beef isn't just a game of musical chairs for entertainment reasons. There is a reason awesome ramen soup takes more than 24 hours to make. It's why you can't just add smoke flavor and color to neutral spirits and get whiskey. It's why you can't add liquor and acetals to grape juice and have wine.

It's all about giving time for various enzymatic processes to do different types of work on the food. I suspect that the slow, stewing cooking methods typical of Indian curries allows the proteins in the meats used to break down and create a significant amount of glutamic acid, the chemical responsible for the "umami" or "savory" flavor.

While this article is very interesting, it's very far from the whole story.

'Labor intensive cuisine'? No more labor intensive than any other cuisine. Most of the time it's: stir things to brown them a bit, add the liquid part, and let it simmer unattendend for a while.

EDIT: Milk, butter, bread, and rice, meanwhile—all of which are hallmarks of Western cuisine

I'm wondering if the author has ever even been to an Indian restaurant.

Indian cuisines are quite labor (and time) intensive as compared to the other cuisines I've seen, and that's why hard to prepare. For example, going by this link (http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/malai-kofta/ ) , the curry based dish 'Malai Kofta' (very popular in India) is said to take 1 hr 30 minutes in total. Even if it's 1 hour, it's too much time just for a part of food (It's eaten with a 'naan' or flat bread, which needs to be prepared separately).

Certainly more time consuming than stacking raw meat slices and veggies inside a bread and topping it with mayonnaise.

That doesn't sound particularly out of line for western cuisine, at least if you look at traditional food, rather than hamburgers. A typical "classic" French dish takes about 4-8 hours in total to prepare all the sauces and meats and such. Even just properly browning onions takes 30-45 minutes, and that's a pre-cooking phase in many French dishes. I've been learning Greek cuisine lately and it's similar, e.g. melitzanosalata (a common side dish / spread) takes 60-90 minutes or so, and has to be done before preparing the main meal unless you have multiple ovens.

What sandwiches are you eating that call for raw meat slices? Cold yes, but raw... I haven't had any.

Regarding your edit, I think you are misinterpreting the author. The point of the article is that Indian food tends to pair flavors which are not alike, unlike Western food, which tends to pair flavors which are alike. However, in Indian food with milk, butter, bread and rice, they tend to be pairing flavors that are alike - similar to what Western food does in general, and the author pointed out that those are staples in Western food.

The way it is worded, it sounds like he trying to imply that 'milk, butter, bread, and rice' are not staples in Indian food.

The main thesis is that Indian food is tasty because it uses flavors that do not overlap. Adding a caveat for milk, butter, bread, and rice of: "When any of those ingredients appeared in an Indian dish, there was a good chance there would be a lot of flavor overlap." kind of obliterates the main thesis. Am I misreading?

SubEDIT: Awwww, looking at the source paper, they count 'ghee' as completely separate from 'butter'. Rice still seems pretty staple-y though.

EDIT EDIT: Wait, Table S3 lists 'rice basmati' with a frequency of occurrence of 69, but Table S4 lists 'rice' with a frequency of occurrence of 256. This smells of improperly sanitized data.

I can understand how one would interpret it that way - implying that milk, butter and bread are not staples in Indian food - but I don't think that's the case. The wording is confusing, but I think we get the most consistent meaning interpreted my way.

Whether or not that interpretation actually represents reality, however, is a different matter.

>EDIT EDIT: Wait, Table S3 lists 'rice basmati' with a frequency of occurrence of 69, but Table S4 lists 'rice' with a frequency of occurrence of 256. This smells of improperly sanitized data.

I haven't read the article yet, but replying to your comment, it may not imply improperly sanitized data (if by sanitized you mean something like normalized, in this context); because basmati rice is different from "general" rice - it is a more expensive kind, typically used in biryanis and pulaos, and not so commonly eaten, except that nowadays it is starting to get more common. And BTW, it smells good - basmati I mean, and that's why it is called that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basmati#History_and_etymology

Indian restaurants probably follow a somewhat industrialized method which cuts down on labor.

Following a recipe from a cookbook is really quite laborious: grinding spices and mixing them in the correct proportions took me a long time to complete. It's certainly a lot harder than what you suggest.

These books purport to relate exactly what the restaurants do:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Curry-Secret-Indian-Restaurant/dp/...

http://www.amazon.com/New-Curry-Secret-Mouthwatering-Restaur...

LOL.

You've obviously never made tadka daal before.

It's not stir-fry, my friend.

You weren't kidding I see - http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/restaurant-style-dal-tadka/

Sure, one example. Every type of cuisine has labor intensive recipes - the exception, not the rule.

"The takeaway is that part of what makes Indian food so appealing is the way flavors rub up against each other."

The article seems to be a missive from the Capt Obvious dept, just apparently "datafied" with some study. I did not learn anything new from it, neither do I agree that Indian cuisine is necessarily more complicated compared to cooking from other regions of the world. Glad some people somewhere enjoyed the exercise of collating ingredients and flavours, I guess.

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

Most of the sauces are very similar, a tomato base with some cream thrown in. You start to get really sick of it.

As far as I know, most of the Indian food is not "fast food" category i.e. you need to have patience and heart to prepare and it takes real effort and you need to have patience to sit and eat comfortably rather than eating on the way or eating while walking ...etc. It naturally helps health.

This may or may not be the case with other cuisines.

Indian food is huge as takeaway/takeout.

Indian food is one of the oldest cuisines in the world -- created in a region with abundant crops and flavors, it represents the pinnacle of human cuisine.

Each recipe is tens of thousands of years old and has been refined into what it is today. That's why it's do delicious.

Slightly OT: reading this near to lunchtime was a huge mistake.

Edit: because now I'm craving Indian food, not because there's something unappealing about it.

> More specifically, many Indian recipes contain cayenne,

Cayenne is a city in French Guiana. "Cayenne pepper", on the other hand, is a specific cultivar of the red chilli pepper that's not really used in India (although lots of other varieties are).

> the basis of curry powder that is in dishes like red curry, green curry, or massaman curry.

Those are all Thai curries, not Indian ones!

Similar paper on the subject, broadly breaks down other regions and has a similar finding that 'western' food shares flavor compounds while others do not.

http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/full/srep00...

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

It doesn't come with its own cardboard microwave holder?

What???

They've missed the essential ingredient of good food. You have to add some love to it before it can become great food!

I like Indian tacos.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!

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

astazangasta, also known as human #6,412,973,103, your disturbance level is nearly 9.34, recommend enhancing calm before you enter exponential philosophic failure.

100 years from now when the price for organically produced food be going through the roof, average person would be eating chemically produced food. Having a scientific process to reproduce the flavor profile of cuisines will be incredibly useful.

I'm assuming you don't believe in evolution, then?

Because if you do, if you accept the reality of evolution, genetics, the slow accretion of complexity through purely random changes, some of which are positive, etc., then EITHER you implicitly accept reductionism OR you must explicitly state how it is we are not just chemistry.

We are piles of complex chemistry, and not much more. In fact, nothing more, according to our best reproducible, documentable, shareable, practical, implementable knowledge. (As opposed to slippery mystical knowledge which is hard to reproduce, document, share, do anything practical with, etc.)

Actually you are dead wrong. Not only do I believe in evolution, I have a PhD studying evolutionary biology (mostly mammalian phylogenetics).

Yes we are piles of chemistry. "Not much more" is an empiricist conceit, as is reproducibility. But thanks for making the chauvinism of empiricist epistemology clear via your comment. You are exactly who I am complaining about, the asshole who sees people in love and thinks, "hmm, oxytocin."

Thank you for the pleasant name calling, that's always fun.

For the record, when I see in people in love I think "Hey, that's wonderful, the world needs more of that, that's fantastic". I rarely think of the chemistry involved because it is irrelevant to that context.

But it is there (and would be entirely relevant were I studying the mechanisms involved, was I interested in the neuropsychology, etc.).

To deny its presence, though, to argue otherwise, is either to be mystical or irrational.

Or in your case, angry. And rude.

Ta!

Could you recommend a book or other reference on the epistemology of your choice?

I don't have a favorite. Different modes of knowing have their own limitations; it behooves us to be aware of them and look from other angles at a question, not shoehorn everything into one way of understanding. Empiricism is in vogue; everyone loves data because it is "objective" - within its bounds. That doesn't mean it gives us better insights all the time. Indian food being a great example.

What would be an alternate to empiricism, for looking at Indian food from a different angle?

Eating it?

You seem rustled.

Me? Nope, never been stolen in my life. :->

Seriously, not bothered in the least. Just curious why someone would question empiricism, reductionism, etc., given how successful they have been for us in so many areas.

Especially on a site like HN, when hacking is ultimately about curiosity and discovery - and those tools, empiricism, reductionism, analysis, synthesis, etc., the whole modern package of modern science, are the best tools we have for discovery, for satisfaction of curiosity.

They're not perfect, but they are far better than many alternatives folks espouse (mysticism, anti-rationality, etc.).

Can we explain everything? Of course not! Not yet, anyway. Are there any reasons in principle why we will not be able to, eventually?

Hmm, well, if there are, we will discover those reasons using those same tools of investigation and exploration, e.g., there may be things that we determine we can never explain for reasons of computational complexity - it's just impossible to get there from here, or for reasons of incompleteness, etc.

"spurious exactitude" is the phrase you might be looking for :)

Beware, amateur science incoming! Sugar. Sugar is what makes food delicious. It comes in various shapes, most notable (for me) is potato, rice and bread.

I can eat that stuff... FOREVER. Indian food has a lot of it. Rice, bread and in the sauces.

Just my two cents.

But sugar/starches are present in LOTS of foods. The question is: what makes indian different?

Do you think it has even more sugar/starches than other foods? It doesn't seem like it to me but maybe I'm wrong.

This is utter nonsense. A very few cuisines such as Gujarati use noticeable amounts of sugar. A large majority of Indian curries at most have a small amount of sugar, not enough to be discernible to the palate, but helps blend the flavours together. It is nothing like barbecue/meat sauces in the west where the second major ingredient is sugar.

Utter nonsense? You seem to misunderstand.

Bread and rice turn into sugar. A lot of the sauces contain stuff that metabolite into sugar.

You can feel the difference in blood sugar between an indian meal and say eggs and bacon, at least I can.

Indian food has so much sugar, that it's hard to eat it and be in ketosis (where your energy supply comes from ketones in the blood)

You need to do more research as you're completely missing that sugar comes in various shapes. I'd say your sentence is utter nonsense, but that be rude.

My experience with Indian food comes from living in Singapore. Yours might be different.

It is pointless to talk about bread and rice which exist in all cuisines in the world. Certainly you are welcome to prefer Indian breads but don't say that they taste good because they have sugar/starch. All breads and rice have starch: you are making a sugar-related distinction where there's none.

That leaves curries/sauces. Indian curries can have starch; they often don't. You can say a potato curry tastes good because it has potato, but you cannot generalize that to say curries taste good because they have sugar/starch.

Also, my experience with Indian food comes from being Indian.

He means that potato, rice and bread and equivalent to sugar. They sort of are from a nutritional point of view, and I guess he means from a flavor point of view as well.

Indian curries do not necessarily have potato or any starch.

There are indian food that contain potato. A lot of indian food contain naan (bread) and rice. Lets not kid ourselves here. It's your ignorance that assume sugar means sugar alone, but in reality bread (flour or corn) and rice is essentially sugars.

They aren't "sort of are". Potato, rice, and bread all metabolize to sugar.

They all have protein too, which makes them "sort of are".

However the carbs in potato especially metabolize very fast to sugar. The others are slower. But even potato has protein.

Thanks, you get it. The person completely missunderstood it.

It's so much more than just sugar/starch.

After all, Goat curry is just as delicious as say, Aloo Gobi...

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