Here’s the Scientific Explanation to Why Indian Food is So Delicious

Researchers have finally figured out why Indian food tastes so delicious, and why the aroma is so mouth-watering. Be warned, some hard-core science has been applied here, and the results are quite amazing.

Researchers at IIT Jodhpur examined and tested more than 2000 recipes and around 200 ingredients to find out why Indian food tastes unique and different. All of it has to do with how flavours pair up or don’t pair up with each other on a molecular level.

Each dish was broken to its ingredients and then compared how heavily each of these ingredients shared the flavour compound. It was derived that the less often the dishes shared these flavour compounds, the food tends to be more delicious. Unique cuisine can be seen in some dishes more than others, and it seems to be tied up to the use of specific ingredients. Spices usually indicate dishes with flavours that have no chemical background.

According to the study, in contrast to positive food pairing reported in some Western cuisines, Indian cuisine has a strong signature of negative food pairing; more the extent of flavour sharing between any two ingredients, lesser their co-occurrence. Skewed food pairing seems to be a unique feature representing molecular basis of ingredient combinations dominant in a cuisine.

They found that the key ingredients that contribute to negative food pairing of Indian cuisine were spices. On an average, one Indian dish contains at least seven ingredients.

So basically, the everyday addition of fresh spices such as cayenne, coriander, garam masala is the reason that sets it apart. Why are we not surprised.