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Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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