Study: Why Indian food tastes so damn good

After 5,000 years of learning how to cook, it’s probably inevitable you’ll come up with some pretty decent tasting food, and now science has proven why Indian food, with its complex array of flavours, textures and eye-watering aromas, is so delicious.

Three Indian scientists put themselves to work deciphering the secrets of the masala and the vindaloo and came up with the following spicy chunks of wisdom, paraphrased here as a convenient analogy.

Imagine a colour wheel running the usual spectrum of red, yellow, pink, green etc. but instead of colours, think of them as flavours. Western food tends to match complimentary flavours, like purple and blue, or orange and red, or yellow and light green. In contrast, Indian food – and this was found across the board, no matter what region of Indian cuisine was being studied – matches opposing colours, like purple and yellow, or blue and orange, or red and green to create the character of the dishes.

Anupam Jaina, Rakhi N Kb, and Ganesh Bagler from the Indian Institute of Technology analysed over 2,500 Indian recipes and 194 unique ingredients and found that the “flavour compounds” of the ingredients that make up all varieties of Indian cooking were almost never repeated in a dish.

Hillary Pollack of Munchies discusses how the logic of North American, European and Latin food – of matching complimentary flavours – is essentially reversed in Indian cooking, and the research bears this out, “The more the extent of flavour-sharing between any two ingredients, the lesser their co-occurrence.”

So there you have it. Of course, one way is not necessarily better than the other because how good are burgers with pickles, cheese and mustard, but it does explain why Indian food tastes so varied, unique and awesome.

Image via Munchies

Word by Simon Toppin