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Indian food, with its hodgepodge of ingredients and intoxicating aromas, is coveted
around the world. The labor-intensive cuisine and its mix of spices is more often
than not a revelation for those who sit down to eat it for the first time. Heavy doses
of cardamom, cayenne, tamarind and other flavors can overwhelm an unfamiliar
palate. Together, they help form the pillars of what tastes so good to so many
people.
But behind the appeal of Indian food — what makes it so novel and so delicious —
is also a stranger and subtler truth. In a large new analysis of more than 2,000
popular recipes, data scientists have discovered perhaps the key reason why
Indian food tastes so unique: It does something radical with flavors, something very
different from what we tend to do in the United States and the rest of Western
culture. And it does it at the molecular level.
[Why many restaurants don't actually want you to order dessert]
Before we go further, let's take a step back and consider what flavors are and how
they interact. If you were to hold a microscope to most Western dishes, you would
find an interesting but not all-too-surprising trend. Popular food pairings in this part
of the world combine ingredients that share like flavors, which food chemists have
broken down into their molecular parts — precise chemical compounds that, when
combined, give off a distinct taste.
Most of the compounds have scientific names, though one of the simpler
compounds is acetal, which, as the food chemist George Burdock has written, is
"refreshing, pleasant, and [has a] fruity-green odor," and can be found in whiskey,
apple juice, orange juice and raw beets. On average, there are just over 50 flavor
compounds in each food ingredient.
A nifty chart shared by Scientific American in 2013 shows which foods share the
most flavor compounds with others and which food pairings have the most flavor
compounds in common. Peanut butter and roasted peanuts have one of the most
significant overlaps (no surprise there). But there are connections that are more
difficult to predict: strawberries, for instance, have more in common with white wine
than they do with apples, oranges or honey. NEXT
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