Begging everyone on the internet to stop smoothing out their middle aged men and draw wrinkles for the love of god I promise it’s so fun you’ll love it Come into my wine cellar
it’‘s literally seasoning. that’s it. that’s what make food taste good.
Bro it’s more complex than just ‘ey they used seasoning’
It’s HOW they used seasoning, compared to other areas of the world.
Indian seasoning does this neat color wheel of flavor, fitting a bunch of spices that are very DIFFERENT from each other, to create a huge range of complex flavor.
Meanwhile in Italy for instance, they tend to use flavors that are SIMILAR. For instance, Basil and Oregano, or Sweet fish with Sweet wine. It makes foods less likely to contrast weirdly in your mouth, and it’s the basis of why fancy european people pair red wines with steak and white wines with chicken. Savory with Savory, Light with Light.
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That like flavors should be combined for better dishes—an unspoken but popular hypothesis stipulated by recipe-building in North American, Western European, and Latin American cultures—is an idea essentially reversed in Indian cuisine.
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well yes, spices need to not just complement the food but contrast against each other. to get maximum flavour when cooking indian food:
1. use whole spices, dry roast small quantities of individual spices together and then grind them to a powder. balance is what you’re looking for, not just chucking in handfuls of seasonings willy nilly because quantity does not equal flavour when it comes to spicing indian food.
2. whole spices go in the oil first. always. also everything gets fried on its own before it’s chucked into the sauce/curry. even the curry base is started off by frying onions/ginger/garlic/tomatoes or any combination thereof. basically…FRY THAT SHIT. i don’t know of any regional cuisine in india that uses stock for simmering. frying everything individually is how we add flavour instead.
3. indian food needs to be cooked long and slow for the flavours to really merge. don’t skimp on the cooking time if you can because that makes a huge difference.
This was so enlightening
I feel a need to mention that the researchers for this study are NOT white, as stated above. They’re Indian. It’s Indian people saying “why does our cuisine work and taste so vastly different than anywhere else in the world?” To quote from the article:
“Researchers Anupam Jaina, Rakhi N Kb, and Ganesh Bagler from the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur ran a fine-tooth comb through TarlaDalal.com—a recipe database of more than 17,000 dishes that self-identifies as “India’s #1 food site”—in attempts to decode the magic of your chicken tikka masala or aloo gobi.”
There’s a major misunderstanding in how a lot of people understand science. There’s this idea that there’s a frontier of stuff we don’t know and a big block of stuff we do. Their first reaction is to scoff because we already “know” that Indian food “uses spices” and that’s why it tastes good. Why waste time re-treading that ground to come to the conclusion you already have?
In reality, the frontiers of knowledge are everywhere. Most of what gets studied is common everyday stuff because we generally have a good grip on what stuff does but the holes are in the “how it does it”. And we don’t know anything to perfect certainty, only degrees of relative certainty, and in varying levels of precision.
The person who says the Earth is flat isn’t making a terribly large miscalculation of the curviture of the Earth, and on a local scale it may not impact their day to day life, but they are still wrong. The person who says the Earth is round is also wrong, but the model is off from reality significantly less. The one who says the planet is an oblate spheroid futher brings the model into precision, but ultiamtely, the only perfect 1:1 model of the planet, is the planet.
Every measurement is going to have a margin of error. Doesn’t mean we should just stop at the sphere, or even the oblate spheroid.
it’s so reductive! “indian food tastes good because of Basic Non-White Knowledge that spices exist, there couldn’t possibly be anything else special about it” - what an example of shitting on the people they act like they’re supporting!
We literally still have *no idea* how to make Maple syrup without Maple trees.
The tree does something fucking magical with compounds and mixtures and whatever the fuck with it’s sap we humans are unable to figure out.
It’s why all the fake maple syrup doesn’t taste right. We can’t fucking mimic what the trees do.
We’re able to grow literal MEAT IN A PETRI DISH and yet tree blood is beyond us.
Every time I hear someone much older than me talking about how their shame about their bodies and weight have robbed them of all kinds of fun experiences and simple joys and delights in life, it breaks my fucking heart. Older women, in particular, have been shamed into and forced into (and perpetuated themselves) so many stupid narratives about what one “can’t do” if you look a certain way. Sometimes they don’t even notice it…they’ll just casually be saying something like, “I would have loved to play volleyball back in school but this big ass wasn’t going to look right in those shorts tee hee” and I’m like that’s??? actually??? tragic???????? Especially when it’s something they COULD still pursue or try but they’ve got a fixed mindset about it.
My 84 year old aunt really spent all of her 30s-60s believing that she COULDN’T just put on a swimsuit and enjoy the water in the summer. I have so many memories of this mindset affecting her all summer. Just casually existing by a pool in a swimsuit was something that women who looked like her Could Not Do. This is someone who broke so many gender barriers in her field, who was a pioneer and a bad ass, but who held herself back from something she truly enjoyed for DECADES because she’s fat. A couple of years ago she told me how stupid she feels having thought like that now that her age has changed her mobility and safety in going to a pool and it’s no longer literally possible for her to do so.
She bought the bullshit and deprived herself of happiness when it was possible, so she lost her chance at hundreds of moments of simple enjoyment she now looks back on sadly.
Really sadly.
I think this is a topic where we can literally see a huge generational change among society right now. The bitchy boomer who says something like, “oh she should NOT be wearing that” when a happy, chunky Gen Zer bops by in a crop top sounds like the death rattles of an ancient relic to most of us in younger generations. After we get over the overt hate that surges when we hear things like that, most of us can see right through that prickly exterior into the deeply damaged, sad, and vulnerable person inside who is the one that’s the real problem in the equation.
And yet, while it can be easy to think, “Thank god I’m not like THAT” none of us are truly immune to the messages that are blasted in our faces all the time that still shame fatness and make us feel like we owe society a certain kind of “beauty.”
Just keep an eye out for any limiting beliefs you have that are depriving you from joy and delight you want and need. As anyone like my aunt could tell you, you won’t someday look back and think, “I sure am glad I didn’t do what made me happy all those years!”
i really really hate liberals who do volunteering for orgs that help the homeless and then write thinkpieces about how a lot of homeless people are very educated and hardworking and its not at all their fault that theyre unhoused like. even if ur hypothetical homeless person is addicted to every drug abused their whoever commited many crimes and their situation is every bit their fault. no one deserves to live on the street.
what walking/cycling around the city every night with a bike basket full of sandwiches accompanied only by another volunteer for almost a yeat has taught ME is that in the winter its really cold and after an hour we both wanted to go in anywhere warm, but every single business requires you to be a paying customer to sit inside, subway stations have staff that chase you away if youre sitting there long enough and even heating vents have spikes on them, and that in the summer its incredibly hot even at night and cops chase you away from fountains and the city is full of tourists and partying people that make it impossible to sleep on benches and that in the spring it rains and in the fall it also rains and that your only source of food is going to be a couple of teenagers and uni students volunteering in their spare time to make you a sandwich. and my conclusion from this, is what everyones conclusion should be. this is inhumane and no one deserves to live this way
With NASA announcing their streaming service NASA+ and also announcing it’s going to be free and also ad free, I’d just like to appreciate the lengths they go to make scientific knowledge and exploration as available as they possibly can.
There’s more info at this link. Gosh I’m excited about this.
