Indian Recipes Reveals New Food Pairing Phenomenon

Scientists Figure out Why

Indian Cuisine Tastes so Amazing

And it's the complete opposite of what they predicted. 

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur have come up with a reason, according to science, for why Indian food tastes so good. And strangely enough, it actually goes against the principle that made British chef Heston Blumenthal so famous, known as ‘food pairing’. 

The basis of food pairing is that foods, whether they’re sweet and savoury, can work together in a recipe if they contain the same types of flavours. So while white chocolate and caviar might not seem like the best choice to throw toughener in a dish, Blumenthal tried it out with the food pairing theory in mind, and it worked beautifully. Writing for The Guardian in 2002, Blumenthal said he went to his friend, François Benzi, who works for flavourings and perfumes company Firmenich, for answers.

"The response was that both the chocolate and caviar contain high levels of amines," Blumenthal said. "These are a group of proteins that have broken down from their amino acid state but not so far as to become ammonia. Amines contribute to the desirable flavours that we find in cooked meats and cheeses, among other things."

The same principle is at play in Blumenthal’s recipe for beetroot and green peppercorn jelly with mango and pine purée.

But when a team of Indian scientists specialising in biomedical text mining examined the molecular structure of thousands of Indian recipes, they found that the flavours in the ingredients most commonly used together really didn’t match up at all. In fact, in some dishes, the spices that make them what they are actually strengthened this 'negative food pairing’ effect. 

They looked at 2,543 dishes in eight different sub-cuisines - Bengali, Gujarati, Jain, Maharashtrian, Mughlai, Punjabi, Rajasthani and South Indian - and found that together they contained a total of 194 unique ingredients, which they separated into 15 categories: spice, vegetable, fruit, plant derivative, nut/seed, cereal/crop, dairy, plant, pulse, herb, meat, fish/seafood, beverage, animal product, and flower. While some dishes contained a whopping 40 different ingredients, the average number was seven.

The data scientists then came up with a ‘flavour network’ to figure out which ingredients were linked on a molecular level, and where they appear in the different dishes. 

The first thing they discovered was that the cuisine as a whole was characterised by strong negative food pairing - so the complete opposite of what Blumenthal is doing. "They also found that specific ingredients dramatically effect food pairing,” MIT’s Technology Review reports. "For example, the presence of cayenne pepper strongly biases the flavour sharing pattern of Indian cuisine towards negative pairing. Other ingredients that have a similar effect include green bell pepper, coriander, garam masala, tamarind, ginger, cinnamon and so on.”

“Our study reveals that spices occupy a unique position in the ingredient composition of Indian cuisine and play a major role in defining its characteristic profile,” the team writes in a pre-published version of their study on arXiv.org.

The differentiating factor that could have made Indian cuisine so different from other cuisines around the world is that some of the ingredients began as medicinal, rather than flavour, additives. “We conclude that the evolution of cooking driven by medicinal beliefs would have left its signature on traditional Indian recipes,” the researchers say.

Not that we need science to tell us that Indian food is amazing, but it's always fun when it does.

Source: Technology Review

Data Mining

Indian Recipes

Reveals New Food Pairing Phenomenon

By studying the network of links between Indian recipes, computer scientists have discovered that the presence of certain spices makes a meal much less likely to contain ingredients with flavors in common. 

The food pairing hypothesis is the idea that ingredients that share the same flavors ought to combine well in recipes. For example, the English chef Heston Blumenthal discovered that white chocolate and caviar share many flavors and turn out to be a good combination. Other unusual combinations that seem to confirm the hypothesis include strawberries and peas, asparagus and butter, and chocolate and blue cheese.
But in recent years researchers have begun to question how well this hypothesis holds in different cuisines. For example, food pairing seems to be common in North American and Western European cuisines but absent in cuisines from southern Europe and East Asia.

Today, Anupam Jain and pals at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur say the opposite effect occurs in Indian cuisine. In this part of the world, foods with common flavors are less likely to appear together in the same recipe. And the presence of certain spices make the negative food pairing effect even stronger.
 
Jain and co began their work by downloading more than 2,500 recipes from an online cooking database called TarlaDalal.com. These recipes come from eight sub-cuisines, including Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and South Indian, which together span vast geographies, climates, and cultures in the Indian subcontinent.

Together, these recipes contain 194 different ingredients. The average recipe contains seven ingredients but some can contain up to 40. In particular, the Mughlai sub-cuisine has many recipes with exceptionally large numbers of ingredients, probably because of its royal heritage.

Jain and co then created a flavor network in which ingredients are linked if they appear together in the same recipe. The network can then be studied for interesting phenomenon such as clustering effects.

The question that the team set out to answer was to what extent food pairing is positive or negative. In other words, do ingredients sharing flavor compounds occur in the same recipe more often than if the ingredients were chosen at random.

The results make for interesting reading. Jain and co conclude that Indian cuisine is characterized by strong negative food pairing. Not only that, but the strength of this negative correlation is much higher than anything previously reported.

They also found that specific ingredients dramatically effect food pairing. For example, the presence of cayenne pepper strongly biases the flavor sharing pattern of Indian cuisine towards negative pairing. Other ingredients that have a similar effect include green bell pepper, coriander, garam masala, tamarind, ginger, cinnamon and so on.

In other words, spices make the negative food pairing effect more powerful, a phenomenon never seen before. “Our study reveals that spices occupy a unique position in the ingredient composition of Indian cuisine and play a major role in defining its characteristic profile,” say Jain and co.

That result has some interesting corollaries. In many cuisines, spices add flavor but also prevent food spoilage by killing certain types of bacteria. Jain and co say this medicinal role must have had a significant effect on the way recipes evolved since removing these ingredients would have had health impacts. “We conclude that the evolution of cooking driven by medicinal beliefs would have left its signature on traditional Indian recipes,” they say.

The result also has implications for the future of food. In the same way that Western chefs search for unusual ingredients that share the same flavors, negative food pairing may also drive the development of new flavor combinations and recipes in Indian food. “Our study could potentially lead to methods for creating novel Indian signature recipes, healthy recipe alterations and recipe recommender systems,” conclude Jain and co.

Beyond that, this work shows how powerful network science has become in analyzing disparate aspects of everyday life. Treating recipes as networks has turned out to be a powerful tool that is changing the way we think about food and how we consume it.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1502.03815  Spices Form The Basis Of Food Pairing In Indian Cuisine

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/535451/data-mining-indian-recipes-reveals-new-food-pairing-phenomenon/#comments

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