In this issue: why recipes sometimes go wrong, and a simple exercise in balancing primary flavours

food

Food

“Hmm, that doesn’t taste quite right” — that was the first thought when I tasted a biryani I made a few weeks ago. This was not an experiment; it was a recipe I had used plenty of times before. It was developed for a restaurant client. It was well documented, and I hadn’t strayed.

So, what was wrong? It just didn’t feel spicy enough. The flavour balance was off. I was annoyed enough that I decided to go check the ingredients again. And I found the guilty party: the damn green chillies. I bit into the tip of one and they hardly had any heat to them. If I had checked the green chilli paste before adding it, I might have identified the issue in time. But when you’ve made something so many times, you tend to not bother sometimes.

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Fresh chillies are notoriously fickle, however. Today’s batch may be noticeably spicier or tamer than another. If you’re using one or two, it probably won’t make a huge difference, but if you’re making something in bulk like biryani, the minor difference can get amplified. Throw in differing sizes and an instruction like “8-10 chillies” can introduce enough variance in flavour.

I bring this up to show the inherent unreliability of recipes. Beginner cooks often depend on them as if they were infallible. They then wonder why things didn’t turn out quite as expected. Experienced cooks usually use a recipe as a guide: a skeleton for process and ingredients, and then wing it. This confidence is borne from two main factors: having done something similar enough times previously that the minutiae of common cooking techniques is not something that bothers them, and a general sense of understanding how much of X ingredient produces Y effect. When you have the benefit of this kind of experience, you can read a recipe that says, “Add 1 tablespoon of cardamom powder”, and instinctively know that no, that was probably a typo and would absolutely ruin your dish; the author probably meant “1 teaspoon ”.

(On the other extreme are people who consider themselves skilled enough to swap out multiple components of a recipe and then complain in online comments that it didn’t turn out well. There is even a funny Reddit corner for them called <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/">I Didn’t Have Eggs </a> .)

Let me run you through a sequence of how recipes can produce unexpected results at different stages of cooking:

Recipe accuracy

We go with the default assumption that the recipe author has got all the ingredients right. There are some publications like Cook’s Illustrated that follow a rigorous <a href="https://diannej.com/2018/what-i-learned-from-cooks-illustrated-about-recipe-development/">process for recipe development </a>that involves months of testing and <a href="https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/5237-join-our-community-of-recipe-testers">surveying recipe testers </a>for feedback. But there are also plenty of sites, even those by popular chefs, that do not bother. They sometimes try to translate cooking instructions like “a handful of X” into proper quantities. It doesn’t always work. That’s before you get to typos and actual mistakes. I once saw a recipe for “Andhra Chilli Chicken” from someone who might possibly be the most famous Indian chef, and it used a whopping 100g of fresh green chillies for 750g of chicken. That’s the kind of heat that would leave you regretting life. I wrote it off to a likely copy-paste error.

Then you have YouTube cooking channels, of which there is no shortage. You’d think that visually demonstrating something would make it easier to get an idea of what’s involved. While it definitely is more useful than a printed recipe, sometimes what they say and what they actually do are different. For instance, “1 tbsp of chilli powder” is simple enough, right? Well…it depends. Are you talking about a level tablespoon or a heaped tablespoon? Because that’s a huge difference. A heaped tablespoon may be 2x to 2.5x the amount as a level tablespoon (which is what I believe must be the standard.) Here, let me illustrate with this screenshot from a popular YouTube channel:

Yeah, that’s a whole lot more chilli than one tablespoon. If you went back to the written recipe on this person’s channel and used 1 level tablespoon of chilli powder, your dish would only have half the heat.

Or take this example from another popular channel, where the chef says, “add 2 tablespoons of oil” as he’s cooking.

That isn’t two tablespoons, folks! That is about four tablespoons. The chef’s next step was frying chopped onions in this, which would go easier with more oil.

Standardised ingredients

“2 cloves of garlic”. There’s a recurring joke on Reddit cooking forums that if a recipe calls for 2 cloves of garlic, people add four times as much. I laugh at it now but when I was learning cooking as a kid, Western cookbook recipes often seemed to use too little garlic. It wasn’t till I went abroad that I realised garlic cloves and bulbs there were huge compared to our tiny Indian garlic cloves. Two of their cloves were about four times ours. Heck, I got a box of peeled garlic from an online grocer the other day specifically to test the variance, and I took a photo for comparison. Here are a few cloves, from smallest to largest.

The clove on the right is at least five times the smallest on the left. You can understand how “2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped” can make a noticeable difference in flavour depending on which of these cloves you used.

But what if you used a more reliable measure like “2 tablespoons of finely chopped ginger”? That gets some of the standardisation woes sorted, right? You’d think so, but then you run into the other problem: the ingredients themselves.

That ginger we’re talking about? How long has it been in your kitchen? If it’s fresh and young, it will be punchy and vibrant. If it’s been lying in your kitchen for a few weeks, it will be more fibrous and get stronger in flavour. How about spices? If you toast and grind them yourself, you will get the best flavour. If you use packaged spices, the flavour will be mellower. If you let either of them sit unused for months, exposed to light and heat, their flavours will dull. Apply this to other fresh ingredients like vegetables and herbs. What it means is that if you made the same dish with the same ingredients today vs four days from now, the flavours might be a bit different.

Which brings me to the last problem with standardisation…

Temperature control

Managing heat is a major part of cooking. But it’s hard to standardise nebulous terms like “medium heat” for a gas stove. My burner may be bigger or smaller than yours. Maybe you use an induction or electric stove instead. It may even be something crazy like using piped natural gas (PNG) instead of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). LPG burns hotter than PNG. A “medium flame” on a PNG-powered gas stove <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=piped+gas+vs+lpg+btu">will not be as hot </a>as that of an LPG-powered stove. I found this out from personal experience when I tried cooking at my parents’ home in Delhi after they had a gas line installed. Suddenly, all my cooking times were being thrown off and food was coming out undercooked. It took a while for me to adjust my recipes mentally.

But hey, how about baking? At least there we specify temperatures accurately in degrees, right? Surely that’s got to be more reliable.

Convection ovens are notoriously <a href="https://blog.thermoworks.com/thermometer/thermal-secrets-oven-calibration/">unreliable for exact temperatures </a>. Sometimes they can be off by 10-20 degrees. Apart from that, the temperature regulation also works via cycling on and off via a thermostat. If you set your oven to 200 degrees Celsius, it will hit it and then turn off, and when it drops again, it restarts. All parts of your oven may also not be the same temperature at the same time. The only way to get this somewhat in control is to calibrate it with an oven thermometer.

Well, all that sounded rather exhausting. What is a person to do with so many variables in cooking? A longer guide on this will have to wait for a future newsletter – this one has run long and I still have a flavour-balancing exercise to do – but one thing you can implement is to keep tasting as you cook, and use the “less is more” principle <a href="https://madhumenon.substack.com/p/a-boy-and-his-fried-rice">from the last edition </a>to start with less and keep adding as per your taste. The further along the cooking process a dish is, the finer your adjustments should be. Even chefs in restaurants, where a lot of standardisation is done, check their food before it’s sent out.

(If you have some spare time, check out this video on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOeyz25Flzo">how to follow a recipe </a>.)

I’m sure you’ve read about the primary flavours – Sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and umami. (The “hot” from chillies, while commonly treated as a flavour, is actually just the pain and burning sensation on your tongue <a href="https://www.popsci.com/science/spicy-basic-taste/">from the compound capsaicin </a>.)

I want you to try this easy flavour-balancing exercise to increase your awareness to how flavours change when combined with other flavours. This is a simplified version of a similar exercise from the marvellous book It Rains Fishes by Thai chef <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasma_Loha-unchit">Kasma Loha-Unchit </a>, first published in 1995 and now sadly out of print for many years. I shamelessly borrow it because it really is that helpful.

All you need is some lime juice, chilli powder, sugar, and table salt.

<ul><li>Add about 2 tablespoons of lime juice into a bowl. Using the tip of your finger or a few drops on the end of a teaspoon to taste it. OK, it’s sour with maybe a hint of bitterness. </li><li>Add ½ level teaspoon of hot chilli powder to the lime juice. Stir it well. Repeat the taste test. Hmm, OK, there’s some sourness and maybe a hint of heat but the whole thing probably tastes a bit…disconnected? Like it hasn’t quite come together. </li><li>Now add ¼ teaspoon of table salt and mix till the salt is dissolved. Taste it again with the tip of your teaspoon. Notice anything different? You haven’t added any lime juice or chilli but by now that feeling of flavours feeling disconnected has probably gone away. Everything tastes more together now. </li><li>Next, add ½ level teaspoon of sugar and stir till it’s all dissolved. Taste it again. What do you taste? Does the lime juice taste more limey? Does the overall flavour taste more heightened? How did this happen without adding more lime juice? </li><li>Lastly, let’s see if we change things more. Add another ½ level teaspoon sugar and stir till dissolved. Taste. If you’ve done everything right, you should finally be tasting a simple mixture that is hitting all the taste notes on your tongue in a beautiful symphony. </li> </ul>

You have just experienced how salt and sugar modify flavours beyond just adding saltiness and sweetness. Some of you may prefer to experiment with this and create something that’s more sour, salty, spicy, or sweet; that’s your individual preference. This is a cheap experiment. Try adding more or less of everything and see what happens.

And hey, no need to throw away this mixture. Chop up a couple of tomatoes finely, add chopped onion and coriander leaves in a 3:1:1 ratio (3 parts tomatoes), maybe a teaspoon of finely chopped green chillies, and mix in a bowl with this lime mixture you created. Stir and keep in the fridge for a couple of hours at least. Voila! You’ve made a Salsa Fresca , a dip you can have with something crispy. If the flavour seems a bit flat at the end, add a bit more salt. You’re welcome.

What have been your main challenges in cooking? Drop a comment below or <a href="mailto:mail@madhumenon.com?subject=Newsletter%20feedback">an email </a>and let me know. And if you liked this edition, forward it to a friend please?

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"2 cloves of garlic"

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