I love Indian food. But it is very difficult to cook it at home to make it taste genuine Indian. But now I have I discovered the trick, which I want to share with other chili lovers.

The main reason I am a chili lover is perhaps I have eaten a lot of Indian food growing up and am therefore now a so-called chili-head, i.e. someone addicted to chili. Addicted to chili? Yes, it’s not that hard to be. 🙂

How do you recognize a chili head? Well, it is a person who say “I want to eat something, but it must be spicy”. And if the food is not spicy nor hot, he becomes a little disappointed. It’s like coffee addiction. People addicted to coffee are disappointed when the coffee is diluted and watery. Same with me, if I haven’t eaten spicy food for a few weeks I usually order something spicy, and if the food is not spicy I get whiny and disappointed. In that case I usually ask for some fresh chilies to spice up the food. And, if they don’t have chilies, I’m definitely going to be disappointed.

People who like spicy food also tend to like Indian food. Indian food is very flavorful, a real firework in the mouth. The problem is when I try to cook Indian food at home, I it is not entirely easy, even though I follow the recipes. Or… actually I always change all the recipes and don’t strictly follow them. Sometimes I skip Garam Masala because I don’t have it at home, and it doesn’t taste particularly good. Similarly I often ignore Turmeric, which I don’t have at home very often and also doesn’t taste anything special, etc. I typically discard several spices, especially if they don’t add much in my opinion. I usually make sure to keep chili, cumin, pepper and salt. And when the cooking is complete, it never tastes like real Indian food you get in a restaurant. But this way of cooking Indian food is actually why my food never tastes like an Indian restaurant. Let me explain why.

I read an interesting research article from the university MIT about Indian food that explained why my Indian food is never as good as the real deal. In Western food, the flavors typically reinforce each other. For example. champagne and strawberries go well together – because both contain the same flavoring substance. Another example of a western dish could include… hmmm… chocolate mousse plus chocolate sauce plus chocolate sprinkles. The point is that in Western food it is often the same taste, only different variations. This leads to Western food sometimes being perceived as one-dimensional, a bit thin.

Indian food on the other hand is completely different. Indian food doesn’t reinforce the same flavor in different versions, instead Indian food has completely different flavors. Using the language of mathematics, one could say the Indian flavors are orthogonal – i.e. perpendicular. An example could be like, salty + sweet + sour + umami. Here, an Indian chef would use a salty ingredient, a sweet ingredient, etc. This means there will be several totally different taste dimensions. In Western food it would be sweet + sweet + sweet + sweet, which can be monotonous, in comparison.

Now, it’s not like in Indian cooking, they mix everything wildly without a system. No, they have a system and the combinations are tried and tested over centuries. The point is when I exclude certain spices which does not taste good – I throw away certain dimensions. A certain Indian dish might be salty + sweet + sour + umami, but when I exclude two spices, maybe only salt + umami remains. And that’s not at all how it should be, and that’s why the Indian food I cook, doesn’t taste like from an Indian restaurant at all. It should be a firework in the mouth from different flavors, but I only used two flavors.

The secret to cook Indian food is to not exclude any spices. All spices each add a different dimension. They don’t add exactly the same identical taste dimension as in the Western diet, and that’s why I used to exclude ingredients when I cook Western food – because it doesn’t matter if I exclude the chocolate sprinkles from the chocolate mousse and the chocolate sauce. But in Indian food it doesn’t work, because all the dimensions complement each other and are really needed.

I have now tried cooking Indian food where I use all the spices and do not exclude any at all – and voila, it tastes genuinely Indian for the first time! I have several Indian recipes to share with you. For instance, Indian curries typically have a very thick gravy which I love to scope up with bread. How can the gravy be so thick? Is it wheat flour? No, it is onion cooked for a very long time. I will tell you about my findings later so you too can cook Indian food at home. 🙂