Tumhari idli, meri idli se behtar kaise?

There's a sense of both happiness and annoyance at opening the iD readymade Idli/Dosa batter packet. Happiness because of the silken texture of the dosas when you make them, and annoyance because when we use the same measurements of rice and urad dal (30 per cent) and ferment it overnight, it's just not the same. Where did we go wrong?

The answer might come from Chennai-based Krish Ashok, engineer, musician, science communicator and the author of the upcoming book Masala Lab, which he claims will explain the "science of Indian cooking."

Ashok, who started a Twitter thread on August 31 with "kitchen/food science hacks for inexperienced/beginner cooks to document verified, tacit wisdom from experienced folks" says that unlike the West, where the French standarised cooking, Indian cooking is tremendously diverse - there's no single Indian representation for cooking - and that food in India is tied to caste, community, religious identity and also varies from house to house. "If you search online, no two recipes for how to make idli will be the same," says the 43-year-old. "Everyone will say their's is the authentic version. However, how someone makes the idli atta is based on the latitude, the fermentation rate of the region they are in, the humidity, the variety of rice and urad dal being used, the proportions these are used in, and the family of 20-30 bacteria in the house. Hence, no two houses will have the same method. The problem is no one tells you how to make a good idli regardless of these conditions. So, if you use your grandmother's recipes, chances are that it won't work where you are. A Chennai recipe will not work in Chicago, where it'll take 28-40 hours to ferment to the same extent, unless of course, kept in a microwave."

Krish Ashok

The thread and the book then, hopes Ashok, will break down the science of the cooking so we understand why our grannies did what they did and what we can do to achieve similar results.

One revelation that did come from the thread was the simplest dish, that often goes awry - rice. Ashok explains that one cup of white rice absorbs one cup of water. The accepted ratio of 1:2 accounts for the extra water that is needed to account for the evaporation when the pot/cooker is placed on heat. Red rice, because it has the husk, needs more water to boil. The problem comes when we put two (or more) cups of rice to boil. "If, for three cups of rice, you use six cups of water, you will end up with kanji." A better method, one that he learnt from his grannies, is to add enough water to cover the rice in the pot and then, to account for water lost in evaporation - that is add enough water to cover the first knuckle on your index finger.

Also explaining the science of pressure cooking, he says that few of us read the manual that comes with the pressure cooker. Earlier, when every house had a LPG cylinder and a two-stove gas, cooking and heat was standardised. However, with induction stoves, the cooker heats up faster, the water turns to steam faster and the whistle - which is the weight letting off the steam to maintain air pressure in the cooker - blows off every 10-15 seconds. Thus, if you switch off the cooker after say, three whistles as you would on a gas stove, you'd have undercooked rice.

Ashok says learning how molecules interact with each other will also help us use our ingredients better. For instance, spices are all fat soluble and not water soluble. And so, adding a lot of ginger to water in the tea when only a small percentage of it will be absorbed by it, makes less sense than adding the ginger after the milk is in the pot. This writer tried it, and it made for the perfect adrak chai.

Now, to conquer the idli atta.

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