,
5 tweets,
1 min read
Read on Twitter
One of the most common cooking errors I’ve seen in Indian kitchens is keeping the temp. of oil high when adding mustard, jeera, hing & other whole spices. All that does is entirely kill flavour molecules. The idea is to extract & dissolve spice flavours in the oil by slow heating
Pro tip: at low heat, add red chillies, fenugreek, mustard, jeera, saunf & pepper to a largish amount of oil & let it cook for ~15 mins. Then filter out the spices & use the “infused oil” in your cooking to add an insane flavour punch (Chinese cooking does this all the time)
Restaurants manage cook at high speed by keeping base gravies and infused oil ready ahead of time (both are extremely slowly cooked, but in large volumes). High temp cooking at home is essentially a waste of good spices
Here is a simple way to establish what’s the right amount of heat. The mustard should start popping in about 3 minutes, not before. That’s enough time to extract a lot of flavour from all spices
And finally, to those going “oh no, my mom/grandmom has been doing it wrong all these years”, no. You can still make delicious food while ignoring chemistry. This suggestion is aimed at those who love/are learning to cook better & don’t mind optimizing based on food science.
