Short Wave - To Unlock Sublime Flavor, Cook Like A Scientist

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

What is flavor? Is it merely what your nose and tongue tell you? For cookbook author and recipe developer Nik Sharma, flavor is a full-body experience. Drawing upon his background in molecular biology, Nik brings scientific inquiry to the kitchen in his new cookbook, The Flavor Equation. In today's episode, Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong and producer Rebecca Ramirez cook two recipes from Nik's book and explore the scientific principles at work. Check out the episode page for photos and other links! Email us at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody. This is Shortwave reporter Emily Kwong and Shortwave producer Rebecca Ramirez. And a few weeks ago, we spent a whole evening running some experiments in Rebecca's kitchen involving food. So it's 1120 at night, but we have finished. We have debittered olive oil. We have made panir properly. One thing I didn't do right. Experiments inspired by a new cookbook called The Flavor Equation, The Science of Great Cooking, Explained by Nick Sharma.

Nick's a food writer, recipe developer, and appropriately for shortwave, a molecular biologist. And even as a kid, cooking has always been a science-driven adventure for Nick. I mean, I think the bulk of my experiments involved chopping plants and putting them into liquids and seeing what happened. but it was just so much fun. Nick grew up in Mumbai, India, a city he'll forever call Bombay. He learned the basics of cooking from his grandmother,

but his culinary style came from tinkering in the kitchen while his parents were at work. My earliest memory of cooking is I learned how to make rice, and just plain rice, and I really liked the smell of roses. And this was in India, they have this rose syrup that's sweet. It's bright pink. And I don't think the colors are natural in it. And it's got a really strong rose scent.

So he tipped a little of that sweet rose syrup into the rice. And the result was... The most horrific thing in the kitchen. I remember my mother coming home and saying, oh, very nicely, we will not be doing that again. There was no way to salvage it. It just had to be tossed out. The rice had turned bright fluorescent pink.

And it smelled so strong of roses that I have never gone back to that combination in my life. Later, when Nick's parents got him a chemistry set, his tinkering just took on a whole new level. He set up his lab every weekend, running experiments that largely involved food and household chemicals. He do things like isolate the pigments in mangoes and spinach leaves using whiskey. As a child, it's just so fascinating. Just to see something change color and you have no idea why it feels almost magical, but

it's not magical, it's science. Just to see bubbles coming out of a tube and two liquids are mixed together, a liquid and a powder. See, Nick was constantly asking his parents why questions. Why this? Why that? And he wishes that we all asked ourselves more of those questions when we're cooking. Like, you know, what a recipe says. But do you know why it says that?

So today on the show, the flavor equation. How Nick Sharma uses scientific principles to... to fix food and heighten flavor because you too can cook like a scientist. Plus, the results of our own food experiments. PSA, no, kitchens worked better than making this episode. This is Shorewave from NPR. All right. Today we are talking about the science of great cooking.

A kitchen is not all that different from a science lab. Honestly, there's refrigeration, measuring equipment. Not to mention the possibility of a third degree burn. Or a flesh wound. Wounded pride. The stakes are. So high, but the results are edible. So edible.

Unlike most scientific outcomes. Which I would wager, honestly, Rebecca makes cooking the best science. And listen, maybe you see cooking as an art. That's totally fine with Nick. In fact, he thinks the two coexist harmoniously in the kitchen. You know, when you cook, you are performing some sort of experiment every time. Just taking a moment as much as we take to appreciate the art. and beauty of food. We should also appreciate the science because whether not we deny or

confirm its existence, it's happening without our permission, right? Nick is a self-taught cook, and his cookbook, the flavor equation, illustrates the science at work in each recipe, drawing upon his molecular biology training. And of course, we had to try it out for ourselves with two experiments of our own. after we decided in a really professional way who was going to hold the microphone. I'll let you, I'll let you, I'll let you do all the fun stuff. You can do the recording. You can have mine?

No, no, no, no, no. No, I got to cook. I got a cook. Wow. Okay, let's just get into it. Experiment one was debittering olive oil, which is just Nick's recipe to make olive oil less bitter for, say like a mayo or a salad dressing. This process involves heat. and water.

But how did you figure all this out? You know, in science, you're taught to come up with a hypothesis and then go about it in several different ways to see if your hypothesis is valid or not. And I said, you know, what are the outcomes going to be? And what do I know based on what I've read so far? So in the case of olive oil, Nick knew that bitterness is related to these micronutrients called polyphenols. He'd read a paper that said that polyphenols are soluble in water, which just means they'll dissolve.

And solubility is at its maximum when water is super hot, which the researchers in the paper were playing around with, in this case, with plants. They were using boiling water to extract these polyphenols from leaves. And I said, why can't I apply this method here, too? So that's what he did, and we did too. We poured boiling water into a jar of olive oil. seal with a lid. Okay, I'm going to shake this. Look at the color.

The olive oil is turning like yellow green. Yeah. We let the olive oil water concoction sit for an hour. It's separated. Also known as the suspension, the olive oil just above the water. But incredibly enough, when we tasted the oil,

there was no trace of bitterness in the end. Experiment number one. In the bag. Yeah, I think We compared the before taste to rolling down a hill in Italy, the olives like falling into your mouth, and the aftertaste to being on a sailboat in Italy, the wind just caressing your face. This is a fitting way to describe flavor, Rebecca, because Nick has this pretty holistic way of defining flavor as a full body sensation.

He calls it the flavor equation, and it informs his entire cookbook. For the longest time in cooking and in food literature, flavors always defined as two components, aroma and taste. So, Nick's flavor equation is sure aroma and taste, but also sight, mouth feel, which is like, you know, the creaminess of a creme brule, for example. And then there's also sound. Yeah, like the sizzle of bacon hitting the pan or the crack of that creme brulee when you strike it with a spoon. And honestly, my favorite part, we haven't even gotten. It's emotion. Anyone who's ever eaten dessert while watching the Great British Baking Show, which I watch religiously, knows food can really turn your mood around. Yeah, food totally affects emotion. But scientists now know that emotion affects our perception of flavor.

Nick mentions this study in his book where researchers at Cornell University studied college hockey fans. And when hockey fans saw their team lose, their food actually tasted. to them more sour. When their team won the game, they were happy and it tasted sweeter. And researchers at the City University of New York discovered that when college students were asked to judge a moral transgression, you know, like a scenario in which someone did a subjectively bad thing, they were way more easy going after drinking a sweet beverage versus a bitter beverage.

And Nick kind of figured this out intuitively as a kid. whenever he did something wrong, he told us he used to make hot tea infused with cardamom and ginger for his parents. He'd just ply their emotions so we get a softer punishment. Which is honestly just genius. And like where we come from, our memories and the emotions that surround a particular dish, those are tied up in flavor too. You know, I grew up in a culture where when someone dies in the family, you eat their favorite foods in memoriam, so to speak.

Culture also plays a significant role in determining what kind of flavors we like. So there are certain things that I grew up with in India and I really love. And I know a lot of other people will not. For example, I love the taste of hot and sweet Maggie ketchup. Sure, a lot of people will probably walk away from it. But for me, that is my go-to ketchup all the time. Another food from India that Nick loves is panir. And that brings us to food experiment number two.

Paneer, if you're unfortunately, sadly, not familiar, is a kind of fresh, unsalted cheese common in India. And Nick was trying to make it at home here in the U.S., but his panier would turn all soft and crumbly. And it wasn't at all like the firm panier that he could buy in an Indian grocery store. It's so nice and beautiful in a block. It looks like cheddar. It looks like a nice block of white cheddar cheese. And then when you make it at home, it's a mess that falls apart. So to understand the panir problems Nick was facing,

let's just first understand how we make this beautiful, heavenly product called cheese. Cheese is milk that's been treated to change its shape, usually with heat and acid. And that allows for milk's protein molecules to unwind breaking their bonds. This process is called protein denaturation. And we manipulate it all the time in cooking. Totally. When you put a little lime juice on fish to make saviche or marinate chicken and buttermilk, you're messing with protein structure to maximize flavor.

Right. And the trick with cheese is to break down the proteins enough that they come together in a new way and then you strain it. But when Nick did this, like we said, his curds were kind of mushy. And he realized that the problem was the milk itself. So in the U.S., we often use cow's milk. But in India, it's buffalo's milk, which has a tiny bit more calcium. And the presence of a bit more calcium helps with the cheese making process,

getting those curds to separate from the way, the liquidy part, and creating a firmer cheese. And I thought to myself, what if I increase the amount of calcium in the milk to what it is in Buffalo's? milk. We ordered our calcium chloride online. It was just a little rattling packet of white granules, and then we cut some cheesecloth. And then we heated up a cup of milk and added lemon juice to help with the curdling. That was our first batch, but then we made a second batch with calcium chloride in the milk instead of lemon juice. Oh my gosh. And curds emerged, like cheesy miracles from the way. Oh my gosh, look, look. It's curdling. I'm stirring and it's curdling.

The protein is denaturing before our eyes. Look at the milk solids, dude. We rinse those milk solids. Yeah, we did. Let them sit for a while and then dug into our panier. And, you know, the lemon juice did do its job. Our first batch was a soft panier that was a little sour, a little mushy, but the calcium chloride one, let me tell you.

That's delicious. That's so good. Dude, oh man, you can put that away. Wait, no. Much more substantial. Like, so good. But let it be known that we did have a third batch because someone quadrupled the amount of calcium chloride by accident.

You know, we just made an extra firm paneer, if you think about it. And you almost poisoned us. Not on purpose, but I won't make the same mistake again. You know, when you're sitting down to make something new, it's fine to fail. But kind of understanding why you failed and then making that into a success is what will help you. And that's how I learned to cook. You know, anytime I've cooked a recipe that was successful the first time, I probably don't remember it. But it's the recipes where they didn't work and then I had to go back and try and fix things.

Those, that's what I remember and those are the recipes I go back too. And because that's made me wiser. And I think that's the kind of attitude that I hope people will have with cooking is that don't be bogged down. It doesn't have to look like the photograph because I always tell people, no one's coming to judge you at home. And if they do, then they probably shouldn't be eating with you. And if you make a mistake, it doesn't mean you're a bad cook. Maybe it means you're a culinary scientist and you should figure out what went wrong and try again. Well, you're always welcome to try again cooking with me and eating with me, Emily Kwold.

Oh, thanks, Rebecca. You can check out Nick Sharma's book, The Flavor Equation, and his blog, A Brown Table, using the links in our episode notes. Along with some gorgeous images Nick took of the food beneath a microscope. Today's episode was produced by me, Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Viet Le and fact-checked by Aureeliz. Alex Drewenzkis was our brilliant audio engineer. I'm Rebecca Ramirez. And I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave.