 So we've got a couple of questions and I'm going to sort of combine a few questions that I think are sort of similar. So since we spoke last about spices, so somebody is asking us if what happens, can we add Thadka to a water-based emulsion? Is that possible? So that's one question that's come in from Mohit Sharma. Sure. So Thadka is basically, do you want to combine some of the questions or should we just go ahead and answer this? Since he's last spoke about spice, I think there are a couple of things about pressure cooking and marination. So we'll just take it. Okay, so I'm not sure I entirely understand. So Thadka is basically this idea of taking very, very hot oil and adding all spices to it and then sort of adding it at the end so that you kind of give a whiff of the primary flavor as per that regional profile. So if it's a South Indian thing you'll do Thadka with mustard and curry leaves, garlic and others and so on. And if it is somewhere else, Punjab you do ghee and jeera or whatever it is. If it's Bengal, you might do punch for and mustard oil. So in that context, I mean, you could add a Thadka to anything. I don't know what you mean by water-based emulsion. If your dish is an emulsion, if you mean that adding that hot Thadka will break the emulsion to a small degree, maybe, but you can make sure that you have a strong emulsion. So to give you a sense, one example that I can think of is Gujarati Kadhi or Sindhi or Gujarati Kadhi. Yogurt-based, more coriander or Kadhi-type dishes. So yogurt is a weak emulsion. And so if you heat it up too much it will separate out and your dish will look terrible. So you can strengthen the emulsion by adding rice flour or corn flour and whisk it. So that actually strengthens our gram flour. So if it's, in fact, Kadhi uses a gram flour to strengthen the yogurt emulsion. So that when you add any, when you heat it and cook it or add Thadka, it will not break. So that's the way to think about it. So you can add Thadka as long as you think you have a strong emulsion. We've got a couple of questions about breads. So I'll just combine. Srinath asks, not sorry, this is Hariharan. Where is the question? Okay. So how do tortillas hold the structure as far as corn is gluten free? How are they able to be pressed into tortillas? And one more question on bread as sort of expanding the universe of bread. What are the proofing duration for breads in the science behind it by Nivellita? So if you can answer these two questions, we can go to the next one. Okay. So the tortilla one is actually the corn tortilla one is a great one, right? So there are two kinds of tortillas. So the authentic Mexican ones are actually made of corn. And the Tex-Mex or the South American, South of the US version is usually made of flour. Flour is Maida. So, you know, we're good on gluten there. So in Mexico, the ancient, the native people in Mexico, discovered on me, I guess almost 2000 years ago, that corn floor, if you kind of treat it with an alkaline solution, it's a process called Nyx Tamilization. So in fact, what tamale comes from that Nyx Tamilization, so that's the process. So the moment you treat it with an alkaline solution, the corn actually one, it improves nutrition. Your ability to absorb the nutrition, it makes it significantly healthier. And two, it adds a certain level of elasticity that while not as strong as gluten, but is enough for you to press into a tortilla for it to make a reasonably strong structure, right? So which is why you can actually get two kinds of cornflour. In India, in fact, you don't get that Nyx Tamilized treated cornflour that you get in say Mexico or the US. In India, you get cornflour, which is used to make say maki roti, right? So this is your corn roti, that's the maki roti and sarsongasad, right? That floor is notoriously impossible to make rotis. And the only way to do it is to mix it with atta, which then adds the gluten and so on. So in some sense, so that is how, so let me extend this a bit. So the way to make any kind of non-gluten based breads, both leavened or unleavened, is that you need either one in case of corn tortillas to use that alkaline solution to treat the, which, which kind of gives this structure. The other way is to add starch binders, right? Now normally starch binders we are used to is very common. We use rice flour, we use corn flour, we use, you know, powdered, the dal in many cases to thicken, right? Those are starch binders that we use in our dishes, but those will all add or dilute flavor in what you're doing. So it's now common for non-gluten free baking to use things like xanthan gum or guar gum. These are really, really industry grade starch binders, thickening agents that a tiny amount, less than 1% by weight of the dough and so on will let you make say a millet based, a millet floor based roti, bajra, joar, which are all notoriously hard, takes a tremendous amount of skill to, you know, have them not break in your hand, patri, rice based rotis and so on. So the idea of using these xanthan gum and guar gum a tiny bit will really makes a lot of those gluten free baking significantly simpler. So the second question about proofing time. See the, it's like with pressure cooking. I don't think you should think of this in terms of time actually. You should rather think of this in terms of what you're seeing. So in, as a general rule in food, time is not a great indicator. Aromas, flavor, texture, visual indicators are almost always safer and better. So in the context of bread, right? I would say is that you are, at least when you're proofing it for the first time, you're looking for it to grow at least two to three times in volume. So that's really what the indication is. Now, again, there are distinctions here. So what takes two to three hours in say London for a to rice will take 45 minutes in Chennai because, you know, yeast loves the temperature here and it's way, way more active and so on. So in many cases and fast-rising is not necessarily great either for flavor, right? So in many cases in Chennai or if you're in a tropical place, you may want to actually let the bread rise in the fridge for a while. And then again, wait for it to rise two to two and a half times its original volume for you to get a decent loaf of bread, sometimes even up to three times. But if you go above 2.5 to three times, you will end up over proofing it. And then the structure is not strong enough to hold the bread and it will collapse on you when you actually bake, right? You'll kind of learn it the first couple of times you bake it. It typically goes start with about two times and then flatten it, shape it again and let it rise two times again in general. So that's how you think about the rising bread. All right. So a couple of questions on marination and we'll sort of take them all, I suppose, together. Vikal asked, what is the role of acid yogurt or vinegar in marination? And we have, I think again it is, where am I looking at it? Yeah. Mohit Sharma is asking, that's an acidic medium again. So similar question. Does an acidic medium do anything to meet over a longer time? And Shreyas is asking, how does the equation change when marinating the tarin meat, say paneer or veggies? We have a similar question also from someone else about marinating veggies. Yeah. So a couple of things. So acids actually tenderize, I think the term tenderize I think is misleading. It does not turn it tender, so tenderizing is different. So it denatures proteins, which essentially means that it literally cooks the protein. But it mostly just cooks the surface, which makes it easier for the surface to absorb and attach a lot of the other flavors that you might have. And by the way, just acids is not good. So that's why you also sometimes experience cooks, if you see the way they marinate for biryani, they'll also add a teaspoon of ghee. Fat actually is an important element. In some cases, you'll add a little bit of mustard oil. If you're mustering, say doing a tandoori style marinade and so on. And what the fat does in combination with the acid is that it allows for these flavors to stick to the surface more effectively. So that's really what the role of an acid is. But if you over marinate in acid, that it will turn the surface texture into a complete mush. And that's not necessarily nice. And then again, it's a very subjective thing. With Indian cooking, you can take a 24 hour marinated thing and still make a very delicious dish. And the gravy is so delicious that you're not paying attention to the texture of the meat. There's just so much flavor that you're not actually paying attention to individual textures of the meat. And you can actually argue that in Western cooking, since you use fewer ingredients. And so they're really razor sharp focused on the texture and the mouth feel of the meat itself. Whereas we are not. We can really just make, take rubbery chicken and still make a great tasting butter chicken because it's the gravy that people are interested in. So that's what acids and fat does in the context of marination. What was the second question again? Was it about veggies? Yes, so marinating veggies. So for most part, vegetables do not absorb or work the same way that meat does. So as I said, marination is meant to attach to the surface of the meat. It's very hard to attach things to the surface of plants. Again, there's a reason for it. Plants have an evolutionary reason to prevent things from sticking to them. That's the reason why your lotus leaf is so phenomenally hydrophobic and water just slicks off it and so on. So many plant surfaces in general will be hydrophobic. But paneer, etc. obviously is, I wouldn't call it a plant. It's an animal product. It came out of a cow. So paneer on the other hand, the way you make things stick to it is by again, using a starch binder like basin or some kind of gram flour. So if you make your marinade with all the spices, you also need to add some bit of oil and also some basin or some kind of gram flour. That is what will cause. And if you remember what happens when you make starch and water, amylopectin from the first thing, that's what causes all of this to stick to the paneer. And that's how you get flavors to stick to paneer. Again, nothing's going inside paneer. So it's all happening on the surface. So just so we're clear. Again, if you want to get salt inside vegetables, that's hard because salt will dehydrate vegetables. But that is the intent. So pickling actually does that. So you can actually get the whole flavor and salt and vinegar and all of that into it. But at the cost of the fact that it will discolor and will also sort of lose its volume and so on. If that's what you want, you know, you can do that. So a couple of more questions coming on in terms of somebody's asking, does adding baking soda to unpeeled potatoes result in a crisper? And we have a similar question. Someone has tried to make chips following your Twitter tip on adding baking powder in the cold water. So do you want to talk a little bit about this? Yeah. At the same time, maybe you can talk about because we're talking chips and chips require fat and oil. Someone's asking about what is the best oil to use for Indian cooking? Yeah. So if you can add that too. Yeah. So I think let's start with the whole baking soda potato thing, right? So here we're actually using the third trick that baking soda does, which is breaking down pectin. So potato plant material, plant cell walls have pectin. A pectin is very, very hard substance to break down, right? That's why it takes more energy to cook a potato than it takes to cook a chicken, right? So the way this trick actually works is that you want to peel the potato because, you know, in this case, you want to expose the surface that you're actually trying to cook and crisp. And the skin is not that, right? So again, you can still make very, very delicious stuff with the skin on. But in this case, we're talking about the skin off, right? So the surface of the potato when it hits the baking soda is going to cause breakdown of the pectin on the surface, right? So a lot of that stuff is going to become crumbly and create a very groovy, high, more surface area for crispy. So when you then put it in oil, it gets more crispy because there's more surface area that's now getting crisp, right? So that's essentially what's happening when it comes to that. Now, you can do it one of two ways. You can actually just soak the potatoes in baking water and then wash the baking water, baking soda off and then, you know, you can just directly fry it. Or you could take the whole potato, par, kind of cook it, cut it into sort of smallish cubes and then briefly put it in hot water along with the baking soda, which will then sort of extract a lot of that surface stuff. You get kind of water, you get white and then you discard that water and then you deep fry that and you'll get a perfectly sort of golden brown roasted potato, right? So that's the baking soda. Now, when it comes to oils itself, there is no such thing as the ideal oil for Indian cooking. In fact, I would actually argue that every regional cuisine in India is defined by a combination of things. It's defined by the choice of fact and it is defined by the choice of spice and flavor profiles that they combine, right? So you know that when you kind of combine sesame oil and fennel seeds and garlic and chilies and curry leaves, it will taste chutney not, right? If you take coconut oil, garlic, curry leaves, mustard and so on, it will taste, it will taste like Malabar and so on. So it's likewise, punch foreign and mustard oil will make something taste Bengali and so on. Or ghee and jeera will make something taste, you know, generic North Indian or Punjabi and so on. So the interesting thing, as I said, so therefore there's no such idea. So the way you should think about it is that in your cooking, you've got to think about the right kind of fat to use for the right situation. So clearly there are fats that you must not deep fry in. In fact, you must not fry in anything that says extra virgin, hand-pressed, cold-pressed because I know that a lot of these urban people are now buying all these unrefined oils because, you know, they're healthier and all those claims are there. So please do not fry deep-fried stuff in extra virgin olive oil or extra virgin peanut oil or extra virgin coconut oil because virgin oils or first-pressed, cold-pressed oils have a very low smoke point. Smoke point is basically the temperature at which the oil is like smoking, like becoming gas. And at that point, the fat, the oil is actually breaking up into stuff that's nasty, right? Not unhealthy but nasty, right? So not nasty tasting at least. So you do not want to use extra virgin oils in general. So in fact, you should use kind of refined oil, sunflower oils and those kinds of oils which have a high smoke point. See, deep-frying happens ideally at around 170C and above. That's when you, you know, efficiently any less and you will get a greasy product, okay? And if it's too high, then the outside will become black before the inside cooks. So 170-180 is like that perfect range for deep-frying anything, right? So you want to find an oil that is still, is not smoking at that temperature. So that's when you need to do that. So therefore, you cannot deep-frying butter because butter smokes at 140 Celsius. You can deep-frying ghee because ghee has a very high smoke point, okay? As long as it's fully clarified, right? So not the stuff where you have a ton of the whey and that will become black. If you try to find, if you're filtering out, you're entirely clarifying the butter and removing all the whey off, then it's fine. You can deep-fry it, right? So which is why you can also deep-fry in animal fat, which I think also has a high smoke point and so on. So do not deep-fry it for saute, use it for more milder, lower-temperature use cases. So I think that's the way you need to think about an ideal oil. And then pick the oil as appropriate to the region. See, when you're deep-frying, the flavor profile of the oil does not matter. You're heating it up at a high enough temperature that any aroma and flavor it had is all gone. See, remember that you lose most flavor once you are above the Mayard reaction range at the top end towards 170 Celsius. You're losing all of that anyway. So it's not the fat that matters. And remember that when you're actually deep-frying, the fat is not chemically reacting with the food. It is literally only transferring heat. That's all it's doing. So it's a very efficient heat transfer medium at 170 Celsius. You cannot transfer 175 Celsius of heat from water because water boils at 100. Oil boils at 200 or 220 Celsius in case of some of those oils. You're efficiently transferring that heat so you can crisp the outside to golden brown and cause the Mayard reaction. And the insides get cooked without stuff leaking inside to it. So that's essentially how deep-frying works. Do you want to take one more question on oil? Yeah. So Pritam is asking, does Thadka level temperature destroy the vitamins of the omega-3 from super oil like gingelly and mustard and coconut? So again, as I said, I would say that I don't think your aim should be to get vitamins and stuff from Thadka. Let me just be clear on that. That's not where you get it from. You should be getting it from other places where you're not heating the oil to that temperature. And if you're not heating the oil enough, you can't do a decent Thadka either. So I think it's really just a question of balancing, figuring out where you're getting your nutrients from. As I said, it's not about thinking about whether I'm getting the most out of the nutrition at every single step. Let's just be perfectly fair. You're doing a Thadka or deep-frying, you're not doing it for health. You're doing it because it tastes delicious. And sometimes you have to do that because we enjoy food. So that's the way I'd say. In general, I'm not the expert on nutrition. So if you're worried about how to actually figure out you get the best out of nutrition, you should talk to someone with a nutrition background. So that's what I'd say. Okay. A couple of, actually three, four questions that are sort of similar, but do it with cereals and grains and bread and things like that. So Vidya, Devadhan's asking, cooking millet or rice powder in a bit of water makes the dough pliable. Almost like some amount of gluten has formed. How is that? So that is one question. Two sort of similar questions I'm going to combine here. So whole wheat bread, Aditya Sharma says you mentioned whole wheat bread is a bad idea, but it's seen a certain popularity among the health conscious. So do you think this is healthy? And then can you also talk about the difference between Maida and all purpose flour and how they work for baking cakes or bread or pizza dough and things like that? Sure. Okay, good. So the first question was the whole don't gluten thing, right? So in fact, traditionally before these fancy Xanthan gum and Guar gum and all these starch binders came into play. I mean, you know, our grandmothers and so on was still making, you know, joar rotis and patris and all the varieties and other rice based sort of bread type things, right? So the trick they essentially use is again to gelatinize the starch, right? So if the starch is uncooked, then it has literally nothing that sticks, right? So you're not able to make a actually a dough, right? But once you cook it, right? So once it actually reaches once you've actually cooked it to 65 Celsius or 70 Celsius and the starch is cooked, then it becomes sticky. Okay. And that is a reasonable alternative to gluten. It won't give you a very strong structure, but enough to just hold it together. Okay. So that's the, that's the whole idea, which is in fact why they will often recommend that need it in really hot water, because that will also gelatinize some of the starch so that you get enough binding. So that's how it works without gluten. It's not as good as gluten, but it's good enough. So that's how that works. What was the next question also about the whole wheat bread? Whole wheat bread. Yeah. So in general, you can make, I'm not saying you can make whole wheat bread at home, but you can't make it with 100% data. You can. It'll end up being very dense, terrible bread. If you like it, you like it. That's fine. Whatever floats your boat. But in generally bakeries, we'll use a mix of whole wheat flour and by that I'm talking about India, right? So let's remember that whole wheat flour in the west is not the same thing as our dough. Okay. Whole wheat flour in the west is basically not just the endosperm of the wheat, but also uses some of the bran and the outer and also the wheat germ itself has a lot more fiber and so on. And more importantly has enough undamaged gluten as well. So you can literally bake with the whole wheat flour in the west, but Arta is not that Arta has damaged starch and damaged wheat protein, which makes it much harder to bake entirely with Arta. So generally you'd mix both if you like whole wheat bread, if you like the taste of whole wheat bread and if you also the other nutrition that you get from Arta, the other parts of the wheat plant that is not there in Maida and so on. So that's what it is. So you can make it except that you need to mix, right? Or the second thing is all purpose flour is very similar to Maida. The only distinction that I can see is that Maida tends to be a little bit more finely ground. So let's think about what all purpose flour was meant for in the west. All purpose flour in the west was kind of meant for a situation where you can make everything from a cake to a bread. So in one flour you don't have to worry about all other fancy flour. So if you want to use one flour to make both the cake and bread, both savory and sweet, you can use that. So that's what it was meant for. Likewise, in India, I think it's meant for both people who make cakes, sometimes bread and also sometimes things like your parathas, naans and so on. So as a result of the fact that it's used for slightly more number of things, the milling is a little bit more finer. So Maida is a little bit more finer than all purpose flour, but otherwise largely similar, probably has slightly lower protein than all purpose flour. And so it takes a little bit more needing for you to make bread with Maida than it does with all purpose flour. And the best kind of flour for making bread is something called bread flour, which is like all purpose flour, but has more protein. So that's very ideal. You'll kind of see it if you get bread flour. You can actually even in India, you can buy it on Amazon now. Pizza flour is very similar to bread flour, except that it is finely ground. Pizza flour is a lot like Maida from a texture standpoint, but it has higher protein. So you know, it can hold the structure. And so these are the different kinds of floors that we did. Okay. So I think we can, can you stay on for a couple of more, maybe 10, 15 minutes more before the time? Yeah, I'm good. Lots of questions coming in. A couple of questions on pickling. Mowgli is asking, which vegetables can be pickled? Is there a rule to pick with which vegetable to pickle? Sai persona asks, do you use pickling in your Indian cooking? What to pick and pickle and when? Can lactic acid be used with any Indian dishes? But he clarifies that by picking, he means vinegar and lactic acid and not the general chili oil like Mavadi or Urga that we do. Right. So, yeah, I see pickling is, you know, okay, there are two kinds of, so in India, what we tend to refer to sometimes as pickle is, is basically brined, dehydrated brined vegetables, mangoes, lemons and so on, cooked in a ton of oil and spices. So the oil acts as a preservative as opposed to the fermentation. So that's, you know, it's important. So achar, if you will, Urga or pickle is what we mean by that. But typically pickling essentially typically means that you put it in acidic solution or let it ferment naturally so it becomes acidic. So either lactic acid or one of the other acids or in some cases you directly dunk it into vinegar and salt and then it stays preserved, right? Both. So in India, both exist. So, you know, if you've been to Kerala, any streets at shop will literally have tons of different things that they pickle. Everything from amla to literally anything, mangoes, you name it, every fruit, every vegetable will be pickled. And you can, it is pickled in a brine kind of solution and it is fantastic. So it's a way of preserving and so on, right? So, pickling is, there are different kinds of pickling traditions in India. In the Northeast, you will often find more fermentation, basically, where you kind of let the microbes in the dish, in the ingredient itself naturally ferment the food. In fact, you make hot sauces, let's say Bhujlokia and so on, by fermenting the chilies first. So actually, so for example, your famous Sriracha sauce, the really the complex depth of flavor from Sriracha sauce comes from the fact that the chilies are fermented, as opposed to just directly just ground and, you know, cooked and made into a sauce that's just blazing hot, it has a much more complex depth of flavor. So yes, so this, I think this is an entire ocean, but I don't think I can necessarily answer, maybe point you to some resources as well. So there's various kinds of pickling and you can pickle anything, nothing you cannot pickle. So, at least from my, you know, having seen this in Kerala, they can pickle anything. Okay. So couple of questions on how to save stuff that has been cooked, but it's probably not right up to the mark. So Suresh is asking, once cooked, I'm told not to reheat palak or greens. Is there any science there? And another person wrote it face after cooking a real estate end product is lacking the taste or maybe lacking salt and you had to balance food once it's been cooked. So greens, right. So greens actually are very tricky. Okay. If you overheat or overcook greens, they will turn bitter. And the other thing that happens to greens also is that there's an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, which is there in most plants, that will discolor the whole thing. In fact, what it does is that it steals the magnesium atom from the chlorophyll molecule. Chlorophyll is what makes plants give that bright green color. And when you see something that kind of goes dull olive green, it's because, you know, this has happened. In fact, one way to prevent that is, which is why when you make palak something is to blanch the palak in boiling hot water for 30 seconds. And then take it out and then immediately cool it down and then use it in your dish, but don't overheat it. So that instant high heat will deactivate polyphenol oxidase so that it stays bright green. And then also make sure that you're not overcooking the palak itself. So in general, add it back towards the end of the dish once you've made all your basic. So don't let the palak boil away in its gravy for long periods of time. The longer you cook, the more bitter it's going to get. In fact, for those of you who have struggled to make sarsong ka saag, I mean, it is notoriously hard to get right. Which is that it will, if you do the slightest amount of overcooking of the mustard leaves, it will go bitter. And so which is why you never reheat palak because it will become bitter. So that's definitely one element to keep in mind. What was the second question? About balancing food after it's been cooked. So after it's cooked, it depends on what you want to do. So one is it's always important to keep tasting food as you cook it so that you kind of know how it's coming along. So that you don't get surprised right at the end. So at all stages, always you do the taste test. But also keep in mind that when something is really hot, it tastes much muted on your tongue. So your tongue actually works at its most sensitive between 25 to 28 Celsius or something like that. Which is essentially the room, typical room temperature sort of inside your mouth and so on. And so therefore this is why by the way, hot coffee is okay. But cold coffee is insanely bitter. It's just too bitter. Hot enough coffee, your tongue basically can't taste all the bitterness. But once it gets to room temperature, it becomes intolerable. So the same thing applies to that as well. So you always remember that you will think something is taste muted and you will end up adding a ton of flavor. To realize that once the dish cools down, it's just overwhelming. So always account for that. Or take that dish, blow it, wait for it to lower its temperature and then taste it if you have the patience for that. So that is one thing. The second thing is that you've got to balance. Sameh Nasrath has a fantastic book and the title of the book essentially explains what you need to do. So salt, fat, acid, heat. So you've got a test for salt. So most people, it's safe to... Most people are very nervous about how much salt they add. So it's always safe to add less and then add more as you go along. And it's perfectly fine if in some cases people need to add salt when they're actually eating the dish. Because sometimes some people will say, oh, I find it quite ridiculous that sometimes some men will say that, oh, this dish does not have enough salt. We need to add more salt. For you, it does not have enough salt. For most people, it may be quite okay. People have various salt tolerance levels. In general, of course, Indians eat a ton of salt. So apparently, the general science behind it is that your salivary amylase has about 0.4% salt in it already. So any food that has less than 0.4% concentration of salt by weight will taste under salted. So anything more than that will be fine. So typically, 1% is what people aim for, at least in the West, but 1% is not enough for India. Typically, Indians go 1.5% by weight. And in fact, a lot of people in the West will find Indian food too salty. That also happens. So every individual has their own sense. And so don't shy away from the fact that ask people to add salt or squeeze some lime. So one is salt. So you can always adjust salt at the end. You can adjust if something is tasting flat. The safest way to improve it is actually squeeze some acid, which is usually lime juice or some kind of acid. Now remember that some acids are stronger. Vinegar is a strong acid. Lime juice is a pretty strong acid and so on. Tomato is not strong enough. Or yogurt may be not strong enough and so on. So typically, you squeeze lime, but you may not add vinegar. It might be overwhelming at the end. You might add a squeeze of lime. Never cook lime juice because that gives it a very bad taste. So you always want to squeeze lime right at the very end. So adding acidity will really create balance out a lot of flavors. But most importantly with salt, you also want to balance sweetness. Every good dish will have some amount of sweetness as well. It may not be perceptible sweetness like in say a Gujarati dish or some dishes in Karnataka and so on. But without sweetness, your dish is one-dimensional. So never shy away from adding in general the amount of salt you add. Add the same amount of jaggery or brown sugar or whatever sweetness you have. Again, not things like honey, especially because you don't want to cook honey. You can add honey right at the end. So you can get the sweetness and so on. Some ingredients will naturally be sweet, especially if you're cooking with fruits for instance. They will naturally bring some sweetness so you don't need to add additional sweetness. Again, the last thing you want to kind of balance for is umami. Again, optional. If you add a sprinkling of say, monosodium glutamate that can also improve their subsequently. So here's one thing that you cannot do. Very hard to do. If you've over salted your dish, sorry, there are no science tricks. I know there are lots of stuff. Even I used to think that adding a bowl of rice or some atta dough ball and then letting it cook for a while and it'll absorb some of the salt. No, it doesn't. It absorbs just most of the gravy. It doesn't absorb just the salt by the way. So literally the only way to rescue something that is over salted is to add more gravy. And literally means adding more water or some cases adding maybe yogurt or cream or something like that. If something tastes too spicy, overwhelming, too intense, you might want to add fat. So typically coconut milk, yogurt, cream are all things that you can add to mute flavors to bring them down a bit. So these are the ways in which you can adjust the flavors. Okay. A few more questions. So Tenmud asks, can pork be substituted in most lamb or mutton recipes? Similar question from Joy Ghosh asking, is there any good substitute for beef or pork cut for making goat curry? So these are two questions on pork slash mutton and beef of course. Joy Ghosh has another question. Is there any good use of fish sauce and oyster sauce in Indian cuisine? So absolutely. So it depends on the cut I guess. In general, pork is higher on fat as a softer cut of meat in general has a softer mouthfeel. Mutton on the other hand has a stronger flavor while being essentially a tougher cut in general. So in general in my experience again, this is just my opinion that you can mostly replace, you can take the base gravy and replace any kind of beef with it. There's just such a ton of flavor in the actual gravy that the kind of meat you use makes little or no difference actually. So you could take a pork recipe and replace that with beef or mutton, you'll be perfectly fine. What you'll have to pay attention is how each of those cuts of meat actually cook. And so they may take different amounts of time and different kinds of treatment. And as we spoke about brining, they actually might need different kinds of times of brining. So tougher cuts of meat and tougher cuts of mutton or beef require longer brining times. Softer cuts of pork may not. And so you might want to check what's the right amount of brining time, otherwise you'll end up with a very salty cut of meat and so on. So but in general, you can replace. So I don't think, it'll still be nice. So I think that's at least my opinion. What was the second question? The use of fish sauce or oyster sauce in Indian cooking. So in my experience actually I have found that you can do it. I sometimes when making say South Indian style meat gravies, I will often start in the tadka process in the oil, mustard and all those other things, add two anchovies and sort of just mix the whole thing up. Sardines or anchovies in general. You can get them dry as well. So what they call karwad in South India, either use dry or you can use the tinned, the full, the fleshy ones. They add a ton of umami. And because you're adding a small amount, your entire dish won't taste of fish. So if that's what you're worried about. And so that's one way to get the effect of what otherwise fish oil, fish sauce. Fish sauce is basically very similar except that it's in liquid form. It's the equivalent of essentially trying to add an anchovy or something to your start of your cooking right at the very start. So you can actually, I would say you can use it as a salt replacement in many, I would say mildly flavored gravies. I wouldn't recommend if you're making a Rogan Josh because I think that is such a strongly intensely flavored thing. On top of all of that, you don't want the flavor of coming through from the fish sauce. But in more milder dishes, absolutely. I think it really makes the taste linger much longer and so on. So you can use it as a salt replacement in general. Actually, that reminds me a lot of Chinese cooking uses this instead of salt because it just concentrates the flavor of salt and umami much better. And it just tastes so much better. Yes. Some similar questions. Madhu is asking how do you understand the archival problem internet is not a super credible source. So, you know, where is the circle of documentation with our credibility. A couple of other similar questions. Bharat Chetty wants to know when your book is releasing similar question again from someone else and then Joy Gosha has any good food science books except yours or Kenji Lopez. So you want to answer archiving and documentation and when your book is going to release. Yes. So archiving documentation again, as I said, you know, there are two things, right? So let me at the same time, it's important to recognize that the internet has played a tremendous role in creating an ecosystem of people who have managed to document and share all these cooking videos and recipes. And you know, it's definitely improved a lot of people's lives. And you know, for example, you know, a ton of the North Indian cooking that I've learned has probably been from a couple of channels like Nisha Madhulika or Harpal Singh Soki and so on. So clearly there is that right. So but I think, you know, if you didn't know that that Nisha Madhulika is very, very accurate when it comes to a method and she very few things that she says that are bad science actually. 99.99% of stuff she says is like, oh, spot on, okay, this is exactly sometimes you will not give the right reason, but her techniques are spot on. I think what we're missing is the fact that the documentation of how she cooks through the lens of here's why this is why she's doing it. So this is essentially she's doing this to, you know, increase the pH of the dish or sorry, lower the pH of the dish or she's doing it specifically for infusing the flavors into the oil and so on is what is what we're missing. And again, in it also a lot of the really good channels sometimes are very focused on a very specific kind of cuisine, right? So sometimes it's limited to one region, sometimes it's limited to either a, you know, only vegetarian or, you know, very specific limitations and so on. So what we're missing actually is this more formal archival of I really think of it as a almost has to be a oral history project, right? But as I said, there is, you know, there's no such thing as a perfect biryani here. I mean, there's literally tons of variations from across the subcontinent, right? I mean, literally every person, every grandmother, every mother who's been cooking it and who's been learning the way they cook, you know, from their family and so on. It's all great stuff. I mean, it needs to be documented in its own way, but we need to sort of maybe standardize the larger common methods, right? So the silly argument is whether your veg biryani is biryani or not is the silly argument. The argument should really be whether, hey, you know what, what varieties of rice can be used that can yield us a, you know, separated. So can I use Govindobo, can I use Basmati, can I use Hiragasambha and so on? And how long should I cook it? And how should I cook it to get the perfect kind of rice consistency and so on? And other interesting things related to how long I should brine maybe a country chicken versus a, you know, regular broiler chicken and so on, right? And that's the, that's the useful stuff and I think, you know, that's what we're missing. So. All right. So I just want to say we'll try and wrap up at 8pm sharp because I think the number of questions you've got to keep on coming. And also I'll remind everybody who's watching that we can follow up on questions on the Haskeek website and Pish, sorry, actually will answer between all the other multiple things he does on Twitter if you want to ask him also. Okay. A couple of questions I will ask. So Garima saying, you mentioned your obsession with fresh cooking, what is the dental rule of thumb for prepping meats or components in advance? And how long should we generally store cooked food before it degrades? I think if you can answer that and then we can go into one more question and then wrap up. So I'm not, I'm particularly not crazy about fresh cooked food. I think in general there's an Indian obsession in general. I mean, I guess also growing up in a household where I was getting fresh food all the time definitely spoiled me in the early part of my life and so on. But I think, you know, you kind of grow up and you maybe once you, you know, go abroad to study or work abroad or live by yourself and so on, you kind of realize that it's just a silly obsession. So you want to optimize your workflow. So I think there are ways to use food science to optimize your workflow so that you can get reasonably fresh food in a very quick time as opposed to simply just reheating something from the fridge. And those I think, you know, there's, while there's a ton of that stuff in the book, but largely it has to do with things like making base gravies. So where you take very specific regional kind of gravies and make them ahead of time and you freeze them in small sort of bite-sized portions which you can then either in ice cubes or small silicone cups and so on, and you can just directly use them and you can make a dish pretty quickly. So restaurants do that all the time. So it takes two hours to make a good dal makhani. So your restaurant will get it to you in 10 minutes time. So it's not being made from scratch. So everything is pretty cooked and it's assembled together. So obviously if you're not looking for that level of optimization in the home, it's not like you'll sort of pre-boil dal and keep it. But at least you can make the gravies in some cases, at least for weekday nights. It really just makes sense. You take a gravy of a specific style and we can quickly put a gravy together. So like I told about the microwave trick, you could do that as well. With regards to storing stuff in the fridge. So again, I do not want to answer the nutritional or the health safety part of it. I'll just go with taste. The taste part of it is essentially that in the temperature, if the temperature is around 3 to 5 Celsius, what are you actually doing? Am I audible? Am I audible? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, now you are. So yes. So in the regular compartment of your fridge, it's about 3 to 5 Celsius if it's a good functioning fridge. It's not like all bacterial or fungal activity stops. It's just slowed down. So remember, if you're putting your bread to rise in the fridge, it does rise. It just takes more hours. That's exactly what's happening to your food and it's the same effect. The same kind of fungus, same kind of bacteria that's acting on your food as well. So yes, there are a couple of days maybe and then after which it will start to taste funny. So therefore, if you're serious about storing for anything longer than a couple of days, you might want to consider the freezer. And then you can, you know, you're taught before using it and so on. So in general, I find that in India, people do not use the freezer effectively. Use it. You store spices in it, store dry fruits in it, please store basin. Notorious, right? So it's almost as if the basin floor comes with larval legs inside it and that no matter how airtight you keep it, they will hatch at room temperature. So you might want to actually, you know, keep things like a lot of your floors and so on in the freezer for it to stay as long as it needs to. Okay. So there's one question I think sort of leads on from here. What do you think should, what are the gadgets you think an Indian kitchen should have? Okay. I know there's so many of these questions with, I'm very tempted to say, please read my book and so on. But I think since it's coming out later this year. So that's another question. The book is coming out later this year, but I'll soon share a sort of, shall I say pre-order link sometime in the next couple of weeks. So hopefully, okay. So I hope Mansi is listening to this from Penguin. Okay. So that said, so kind of gadgets, don't overthink gadgets in general. Don't use single use. The only single use gadgets that I use are a weighing scale, which I think is absolutely important, especially if you want to achieve some kind of precision consistently, right? So if you want to make sure that you get perfectly soft chapati, you can't just buy memory. Remember what you did a couple of weeks back when you got it right. So it's always good to log stuff down. And so weighing scale is absolutely useful, especially if you bake a lot, it's absolutely critical. You can't just guess your way through baking unless you're really, really seasoned. Even professional bakers always are very precise about weights. The other thing is obviously some way of checking temperature, either a probe thermometer, which is more accurate, or one of those coronavirus laser temperature IR, you know, infrared temperature guns, which can check the surface temperature of your oil, the surface temperature of the vessel before you add stuff in and so on. So if you've been following my cooking videos on Twitter, you know, that temperature gun makes a pretty regular appearance. Fantastic. We have a lot of other questions that have come about oils and fats and that kind of things like this. Well, maybe we can just sort of do one more round of it. So Vasudha is asking, is it better to put the spices after the oil is very hot or put it in earlier and let it heat up with the oil. A lot of questions about which is better ghee or for Indian cooking, is desi ghee better? And why do you use ghee for curd, thadkas and stuff like that? So a couple of things. So one is that whether you put the spices when the oil is hot or versus when you add it to the oil and let it heat along with the oil is a choice you make based on what you actually want to do. So in general, if you want to infuse the oil with a lot of the flavor of the spices, you want to cook it for over a slow heat, slowly till it comes up to temperature. So that's absolutely one way of thinking about it. But that's not what you want with the thadka. Actually with the thadka, you actually don't want an intense flavor of the spice. You actually want a milder flavor of the spice and you want as much about the texture. So when you add jeera as a thadka into your dal, you're not looking for the intensely strong cumin flavor. You're actually looking for the crunchy texture as much as a little bit of the cumin. So that's why the hot oil really just instantly kills a lot of the aroma of the flavor while just retaining enough for you to get a whiff of it. So remember, most of the ton of the flavor is already there in your dish. You're not overwhelming the dish with more spice if that's what you want to do. So if you cook the spices for a longer time in oil, it will infuse more flavor into it and that may not be what you want. But if you're making flavored oils, that's what you do. So you essentially pour oil and let the spices steep the flavor molecules into the oil over time. And then you can just add a little bit of the oil when you actually eat. Chinese cooking and Southeast Asian cooking uses flavored oils quite a lot. I think that's a fantastic technique as well. What was the second part of this? On ghee. Oh, ghee. Is it better? Why do we use ghee for ghee? So ghee is clearly tasty. I mean, it has a fantastic flavor profile. And I think, see, we also, so for example, nothing actually stops you from using ghee to make, say, pasta instead of olive oil. At the end of the day, it's a fat meeting. It doesn't matter. But we kind of have strong nostalgia. So we associate some part of our brain has this aroma of olive oil, very close next to the basil and tomatoes. If you've someone who's had good pasta and so on. So adding ghee that makes it incongruous when you find it. No, I may not like it. But some people may like it, may like the experimentation if you will. So it depends on the individual, right? Because a lot of taste and flavor perception is very strongly tied to memories. So that's why we sometimes use fat mediums that just remind us of our childhood or what we used. So that's really what we do. And the second principle in general is, as I said, for a consistent flavor profile, if you will, you kind of use things that go well together, right? So over years and years, cuisine of a region has evolved to figure out the specific combination of, say, mustard oil and say fennel, ajoin, radhuni or, you know, nigella seeds and so on, really just work well together. So you could of course put punch foreign in ghee as well. It'll work perfectly fine. But we kind of have that strong association of that with mustard oil. So the same thing, right? There's no reason why you should use ghee with curd based dishes other than the fact that, well, you know, they both came from the same cow. I mean, basically not the same cow, but literally from a cow. So there's yogurt and ghee and so milk products in general all work together. So it's likely to be sort of integrated from a flavor profile standpoint. So that's no other reason. I think this is going to be the last question because we'll wrap up after this. Two questions on dosa, dosa texture and what is the ratio of batter of, you know, the lentil and the rice and a similar question. What is the, what is the technique for a perfect crisp but not burnt dosa? Okay. So you want to answer the dosa questions. So maybe the first one, you know what I'm going to say is that because it's a slightly long answer, I'm going to say, okay, wait for the book. So that's the only question I'm going to say you wait for the book because it goes into a fair amount of detail. In fact, there's a ton of science because again, since idlies and dosas are something that are also industrially produced, if you will, both batters as well as, you know, restaurants make it all the time. There's a ton of published science there that really go into what ratio of one is to two versus one is to three versus one is to four will yield you different textures based on what you want, based on what you want from your dish, right? Sometimes, you know, the difference may, you may see that actually when you make the dosa as opposed to when you actually make the idli, right? So in general, when you form it, the batter, the general idea at home is that the first couple of days is idli and then after that, there's a couple of days of dosa and then once it gets really sour is when you do uttapa, right? So that's the, that's, that's a general principle, precise ratios and so on. I think I'll just say, wait for my book. So at least leave some of that stuff. I think when it comes to texture, it varies. I think the way you grind has a lot to do with the texture itself. The fermentation process itself is largely okay. It's, you know, as long as you're fermenting it for six or seven hours, largely the same outcomes in that sense, but the level to which you grind it and so on has a bigger say in the texture and also other additives, right? So in general, this is just my personal opinion that I think dosa and karnataka is, I like dosa and karnataka more than I like dosa and Tamil Nadu. I find the dosa and karnataka to be sort of golden brown, crispy and it stays crisp for a longer time versus, I think the Tamil Nadu one is very thin, stays crisp for a very short time and when you heat it hot, it's fine, but doesn't have that. I think there's also the use of sugar. There are some cases to aid in the caramelization when you actually make the dosa as well. And obviously I think there's more use of fat as well will make for a crisper and at a lower temperature for a longer period of time will make it crisper and so on. All that said and done, ultimately also I think using a cast iron pad and anything that retains heat for a longer period of time is generally good for when you need a crisper dosa. A nonstick pan will not give you as crisp a dosa as a cast iron, a seasoned cast iron. So I think we should wrap up. There are a few more questions about package food and I'll preserve it as good for human consumption. But I think this is a... Yeah, it's a nutrition question. So I will only say that look, food scientists are paid to make sure that the package stuff you eat will not harm you beyond the point. That said, too much of it, probably a bad thing. But in moderation, I think most things are fine. So that's really what it is. All right, fantastic. So I think we'll wrap up here. Ashok, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you all for your questions and your comments and feedback and things like that. A lot more questions are coming up and they are on the Haskeek website. Go to the Haskeek website or you can look Haskeek up on Twitter and you can ask questions to Ashok on Twitter and stay tuned for the next session on food. Thank you. Thanks. Bye-bye.