 So, well, thanks everyone. And thanks, Nadeka, for that introduction. So cooking for me has been something I picked up properly in the last 15 years or so, like a lot of us, where at least only when I started being a student and living on my own, I had to kind of forage for food. It was too expensive to eat out. And so then naturally you're drawn to cooking because it's the only way to eke out a sustenance. But then slowly as you know, even when I got a job or something like that, it just became second nature because of the start that we had. So also being vegetarian, it helped because a lot of places that I went, they would just be one item on the menu. So I'm like, screw this. I might as well just do something on my own rather than eat something like that. So that's how the journey, at least for me, started. And then from there, today I'm decent enough I can make quite a few things. It's fun and so on. So on that note, I wanted to just start off with some really basic things and then we can see how things go. We can take it where we want to go. So I have, let's see, I have like a very brief outline right now, it's obviously pretty fluid. Based on if you see how comments are going, we can skip some things. People think it's too boring. We can chop and change, nobody's there. So just want to touch up on things like why do we cook? What type of cooks are you? Trying to understand recipes, measurements, things like that. We're gonna talk a little about some kitchen tools which are absolutely the must. And then what goes into choosing ingredients and then of course our most important friends, time and temperature. So that's kind of the general outline I have here and then we'll see how this goes. So the first one is why do we cook? Now, the way at least I think about it is that approaching food is like a puzzle or code and should no be no different in the kitchen. So you understand what you actually have, you understand what you're actually asked to do, you break it down to individual steps and then you explore the different possibilities for each of these steps. Let's say something like making coffee, for example. You isolate the variables, there is a bean, there is a grinding, there is a temperature, there is a pressure that is required and then you explore the combination in a controlled way by change one variable at a time. And then you think about the ingredients that you're starting with and the end state that you want and then as opposed to like a straight up execution of the recipe, your recipe kind of veers away into something else. So you first make the coffee the regular way you do, but then you start tinkering with different things and which is why I guess today there are so many different kinds of beans and coffee is so many different ways to make coffee it's probably because of that. Now you're open to a plethora of possible outcomes and the way a meal turns out will be different from what you originally conceived but that's kind of how you go, right? So you think about the end state and that'll help you broaden what you think about cooking more generally because cooking is not just food in a pan. You think about why do we cook? Sometimes you're cooking because you're watching your waste, you're watching your wallet, health and finances are common considerations. Are you building a community like the potlucks or shared meals or barbecues? Those are fun social activities and they also kind of spur friendly competition. Are you expressing love? Because cooking can also is an act of giving both in the literal sense of like sustenance but also in the spiritual sense of sharing time, companionship and coming together to eat. Or are you trying out new things? Because there are plenty of foods that you cannot order in a restaurant or you wanna get closer to the source of the food in which case learning is really nice to see how a lot of these dishes come together and for example, if you're trying to, you watch something on TV, you saw this cuisine from another culture but then you can relate to it because it's kind of similar to things that you've grown up with. That's when you can experiment and see what you wanna do, right? Regardless of your reason for cooking. The most important thing is to realize that there is more to cooking than just following a recipe. When looking at the end goal, think beyond the cooking stage. Like if your reason for cooking is to express affection, then you have to consider the sensations that your food brings to the guests and the perception and reactions that they will have because that adds as much to the cooking as the dish itself. Or if you're cooking primarily for health and financial reasons, then the quality of the food, the price of the ingredients, that's what is more important to you. So that's where I'm trying to get to. It's important to see why do you cook and then based on that your choices of what you make along the way kind of get affected. So then the next slide is this guy. So what type of a cook are you, right? And this is also important because based on where you slot yourself will kind of affect a lot of the choices that you make. So I've kind of put them as like five for now. There could be probably four or some of you could find yourself in as combinations of two or so on. The first one is the soul cook. The soul cooks who make with their heart, they're giving. They're people who see the food they make. It's like giving love. They tend to be great bakers. A lot of our moms fall under that category. See a lot of traditional recipes. There won't be too much tweaking or changing or something like that. But, sorry about that. But then they most, it may be healthy, may not be healthy, but at the end of the day it just feels right. The setting category is your health freaks or the healthy cooks. And it's not surprising that they will sacrifice taste or something else just to make something healthy. It's easy to spot someone. They'll be constantly telling you about how many steps they took. They're the most fittest person in the group or so on. And more likely they'll always have like a herb garden or something like that in their kitchen. The third group, and I know personally, a lot of people who fall into this is your methodical cook. They make everything, but it has to be in front. There has to be a cookbook in front of them. And then you have all the ingredients laid out. They make it exactly the way it should be. And then they'll probably even get disappointed if it doesn't turn out to just like how the picture in that blog or on TV looked like, they were like, oh, this is a failure or something like that. So that's that set of cooks. And then your fourth category is the innovative kind of a cook, they cook by second nature. They'll use a recipe or a cookbook but it's still just more look at the picture and say, yeah, I think I can make it. And they're creative in a lot of areas in life. And for them, cooking is more like doing a painting or an artist composing a song where they're like, okay, I'm getting some inspiration. I think I have these things that I want to work with. And then you kind of go, it's more like, it's an expressive release. And a lot of those cooks, their egos are pretty light. So it's because they know not everything's gonna turn out the way they try to be, but then like, yeah, it's okay. It'll work out the next time. The fifth group, this is interesting. The fifth group is the people who are the iron chefs of, you know, they like to call themselves. They want to cook more, for them, cooking is more like a performative expression than anything else. They're cooking to impress other people, not just themselves or what. So you'll see them using a lot of techniques like sous vide and all the, the spirefication and all these things, just not just because it adds something to the dish, you know, or like charcoal or, you know, all these smoke effects and things. But at the end of the day, you won't remember what you ate at that person's house, but you will definitely remember that, you know, that person brought this charcoal and put it or put a bowl on top of it and wow, that was so amazing. That's that the, you know, that's that last category that I like to call them. See, the next, I wanted to start, so now that you know what kind of a cook you are, you know, everyone listening probably will probably fit into one of those and we were kind of established, why do we cook? Well, let's think about understanding a recipe and measurements and so on because recipes are like code, right? And they require some interpretation. So read the recipe top to the bottom as many times as you like. And so I tell people, read the recipe, okay? It's okay to go off a recipe. In fact, it's a really nice way to learn if you're doing it intentionally because sometimes you may not have all the ingredients, you wanna substitute something else. Sometimes the recipe, you know, the measurements don't make sense to you, so you wanna change them, very much like programming, right? You know, you think that there is more than one way is to solve a problem and you could do it differently. A recipe, let's say, is not a strict protocol but it is important to understand the protocol that it is trying to, the protocol before you deviate from it. There's a lot of room for personal preference, obviously, like just because, let's say, for example, a recipe for hot chocolate says half a cup of cream, one cup of milk. Doesn't mean you need to use those exact quantities the same way, or let's say a brownie or a chocolate chip cookie recipe says walnuts. You don't have walnuts, you wanna use almonds. Almonds will taste pretty good in a brownie or a chocolate chip cookie too. You're fine. But read the recipe, read as many recipes as you can because not all recipes are the same. And so you'll kind of, once you need a lot of recipes, you'll kind of get an idea of what this dish is going to be. So let's say you're making something like a dal makhani. Go read five, six blog posts. They all will have different ways to do the dal makhani but between the five, six people, you'll find a common thread of what they're trying to do and you may make one of the five or you'll come up with your own sixth version but do read recipes. And then we come to our friends with cups and spoons. A lot of these recipes will have two cups of this, four tablespoons of that, one teaspoon of this and you're lost at this because not all cups are the same. Like it's not like the international system of units is selling cups, calibrated cups to everyone. So everyone's cups differ. Everyone's spoons are bigger and smaller and therefore weights are probably a better one to do especially like which is why in a lot of baking recipes you would see things go by weight but when you're just cooking dinners or lunches, a lot of recipes are in cups which is fine but just make sure you kind of understand what you're doing. Now, for example, let's say by going by the international units, a cup of milk weighs 256 grams and that's 237 ML but a lot of recipes just gonna round up or round down and that's what you get. So it's okay if things are in cups and spoons but just make sure you understand what you're doing and you can change and chop as required. Same thing goes for stoves and this is my biggest gripe with a lot of recipes which will just say saute this for five minutes. Five minutes on your stove is a lot different from five minutes on my stove because stoves have something called the BTU which is the British Thermal Unit and that's the one BTU will raise the heat of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, okay? That's the output that your stove is giving you and every stove has a different BTU level and therefore the heat that they gave out so I'll say, look, okay, saute something on medium for three minutes. Your medium is different from my medium and so therefore three minutes on your stove is obviously gonna differ for me and that's where you want to, you still wanna get the general idea of what they're doing but not just like, okay, it's three minutes and then switch the stove off, you don't wanna do that because people have nowadays induction stoves that are electric stoves and so on and in electric stoves at least the heating power is measured in watts and not BTUs. So a watt is like three and a half BTUs per hour or something like that. So like what I'm trying to get here is they're all different and it's important that you're, which is why you're reading a lot of recipes because you may say, okay, this person had three minutes or in here, this person had five minutes and you can kind of get the general, you can try to get a consensus on how much time you wanna be going for, at least the first time and then come our friends ratio and proportion. A lot of times it'll say, you know, two parts of water for three parts of this or like especially in making pasta, it'll say like your ratio of eggs to flour should be three to two or something like that. And it's important to get that but also do that mental math because you're not making for so many people. A lot of times just making just for yourself or just two people and a recipe will have these ratios because it's catering to let's say 10 people or six people. So that's when you need to kind of tone back and say, okay, how much is three by two? How much is this? How much is six by eight? And you bring it down because you're trying to make it just for one person or else you'll end up with a batch, like a vat full of dal makhani and not knowing what to do. I mean, your neighbors will be happy, I hope, but that's important. But no matter what you do, how many recipes you look at, it's always important to read between the lines, right? And the reason why I'm saying I say that is because however bad or good a recipe is, you know, in terms of time or saying things like measurements and so on, you always wanna look for cues in there. So that same recipe where someone said, you know, saute the onions for five minutes on medium. I get that. But there may also be a sentence to say until they're translucent. So that's the word you're looking for. You look for that and say, okay, I'm trying, they need to be translucent. So how long does it take to get translucent on my stove? If you go by that, then you're safer, those visual cues, you're safer than just going by absolute limits that people give you. It's a lot easier when you're looking at a video or on TV because you know that's the cue you're looking for because they'll say, let's get a sear on these carrots. And when they flip them, you see the color has changed. So now you know, this is the color I'm going for. And you go for however long you need to sear your carrots to get that color that you're going for. Same thing, let's say for example, you see a recipe that will say turn off the heat in the middle of, let's say you're making scrambled eggs. And your mind you go, turn off the heat. Well, how are eggs going to get scrambled if you turn off the heat? It requires heat. But that's where it's important because eggs, they're so easy to cook that the residual heat from your skillet will cook your egg. This way you don't make a rubbery, but you need to look for those cues or reading in between the lines to see what the recipe is kind of implying rather than just following the recipe word for word. So then let's see, the next thing I wanted to talk about was kitchen tools, right? And the most important kitchen tool is your knife. And it might seem silly as to why I'm, you know, extolling so much about knives. And like even my mom, you know, when she was here and she saw me using a chef knife, she's like, you're only cutting vegetables. You know, why do you need something like this? Or, you know, some of my friends would make fun of me. Like, dude, you know, the guy making pao baji near the bus stop, you know, he probably chops kilograms more of vegetables than you ever do like in an entire month. And he doesn't use a chef knife. He just has one of those really thin knives with a, you know, with that really sharp blade pointing out and so on. And I go, yes, I get it. But what you have to consider is that none of these people also have to be in front of a computer with a keyboard and a mouse for 10 hours a day for 30 hours, for 30 years of their life, right? So our lifestyles have changed. You know, a lot of risks are used a lot in a lot more ways than they were used before. And therefore when you're cooking your knives become important because you want to do something which is, okay, not just from your, from your wrist, but also you want to be doing it the most efficient way of saving time. And in those, and I've told this many times, even on Twitter, is that the best knife you could buy is one of these, you know, the, it's available in every store. You'll see them right from the nineties, you know, these to be actually in exhibitions and stuff. But this, this knife is probably the best one. Reason why you, you know, you use, you're using the fulcrum, you put what you want before it and then you just go chop, chop, chop in this one motion. So it's less force on your, on your wrists or anywhere else, but physics is doing all the chopping for you. Max. Yes. I think your presentation is showing the present as you rather than the thing. So because I think people are not able to see the things. Oh, how do I, sorry, one second. How do I do this? Oh, now I know. My bad. But if it's trouble, I think we can just carry on. We don't need to. Figure out why Zoom would not let me to change this. Okay. I think I found the Zoom thing. There. Is this better? Much better. Yeah. Okay. What if the interruption works? No, that's fine. Yeah. I didn't realize that that's what I had. Okay. So, and you're, like I said, you're letting physics do all the cutting for you. Now, knives, if you think of them, like the knife blades that you get at least nowadays are manufactured two ways. It's either by forging or stamping. Forging blades are heavier because they drag through and cut better through they are more material. They cut better. Stamp blades are lighter because of the alloys used and, you know, but they hold an edge longer. So there is no A greater than B. It's more comes to what you prefer, right? The best knives then are your, I'm calling this, like I said, the JV two of knives is the chef knife and a pairing knife. And the reason why I say this is like, these are the only two tools you need and you'll be fine. Now, a chef knife is the size can matter. It's a matter of preference. Typically it's eight to nine inches long and, you know, it has like a curved blade. So let's say I have one right here. So it's, you know, you have this curved blade and it helps you to, the way you do it is the curved blade is what you use to go on the board, right? So you're using the physics to get that rocking motion. And that way is you're putting less force on your wrist because you're not hitting the board. And that also helps you cut through and pull through foods, so on. And then you have your pairing knife. Your pairing knife is a smaller knife, like four inch, like a four inch blade. Let's see something like this guy. It has a four inch blade. And it's good because it's easy to hold. You hold it like this with your finger and then let's say you're cutting apples, right? You can use your finger, go through an apple or a bell pepper or something like that. Or if you want to make slits on something, you know, you use the edge and then pretty much like a pencil, right? You can use it like a pencil and you could do what you want. It's probably, I probably use the pairing knife a lot more than I even use the chef knife for a lot of things when you're making small cuts and so on. And that grip-like design is what you're going for. Now, when it comes to knives, right? You can go from, at least in the States, let's say from $10 to all the way to $150, right? And this is where I tell people, like, don't go crazy about it. You know, if someone will go online, they'll read about knives and like, oh, yeah. This is perfect. I should get like this knife. They'll go get like a really expensive knife and not knowing how to use it. Because again, the things with really expensive knives is they're light, the blades are really thin and so they will chip away. And then now you have, you spend 100 bucks on a knife and then you kind of broke, you have chips on it. It's, I tell people, if you're getting a knife, that's fine. Start out with something real inexpensive. Or go to AliExpress or something like that. Get one of the knives from there. Once you kind of get the way of how you should be chopping on a knife, then you slowly can, you know, upgrade. Because like I was saying, knives come in multiple. Like for example, if you look at the picture here, this knife, these are what you call like a full tang knife, which means the knife blade extends all the way from here to the end and the handle is kind of riveted on the knife. So the knife has a full body versus, you know, like a blade which is just stuck into the handle. So these knives are much better to hold but then obviously because there's more metal in the wall, they're more expensive and so on. So it differs on what kind of a weight you like in your hand because not everyone wants like a really heavy knife, but whatever knife you get, right? Just make sure they're sharp. And a lot of people think that, you know, sharp knives cause accidents. It's the reverse. It's actually a blunt knife that's gonna cause you more accidents than a sharp knife, statistically at least. And I'll tell you a simple thing. Let's say you're cutting an onion, right? So I'm cutting an onion and I put my knife on the onion just like this. And if it's a sharp knife, right? It's just gonna go right through the onion. But if it's not sharp, it can slip along the surface of that onion and now my fingers or something are more in danger of getting hurt because if it slips this way, I'm holding it and I'm cutting my, you know, using your knuckles. And also reason why a sharp knife, let's say for example, you're cutting tomatoes. If you're cutting tomatoes and if you find yourself sawing through cut a tomato, you don't have a sharp knife. For sure. I mean, it's not a log of wood. It's not a block of cheese that you need to be sawing through to cut through. I mean, you put, you have a tomato, go through tomato. Your knife should just go through tomato like butter or something like that. And if you're sawing on a tomato, that means you're applying, it's not the knife that's cutting the tomato. It's the force that your hand is applying which is cutting your tomato, which your tomato will still get cut at the end of the day. But then your cutting board, you know, will look like a crime scene because all the juice would kind of have splattered out and that's not what you want to go for, right? You want to stop these tomatoes. You just want to have, you want them to retain their shape and not have this entire crime scene kind of situation with you. So that's why knives are really important. And again, like I said, try something small. Don't go for some really expensive knife. Don't go for like a forged knife with a full tang. A full tang is something like this, right? If you can see the knife blade runs completely through and the handles are on this. But again, you don't need to do something like that. I didn't at least, like I started with really cheap inexpensive knives, broke them and then slowly as I realized, okay, this is how you take care of them, you do it. And I guess it doesn't matter. You get an expensive knife or a cheap knife. Just make sure you get a knife sharpener because no matter what kind of a blade it is, again, expensive knives will hold their, you know, probably made of much better German steel. They'll hold their edge a lot longer. A cheaper knife may not. But at the end of the day, if you have a knife sharpener, you have a sharp knife. Whether you bought it for, you know, 10 bucks or 100 bucks, you still have a sharp knife. If you have a knife sharpener, and which is why you'll see a lot of these cooking shows or so on, you know, they'll have like a rod and then they'll just taking their knives and kind of sharpening them across the rod. So you don't need to get a rod, kind of more fancy than anything else. You can get a sharpener, we just go, you know, it's like a, like a block and just go through it three, four times and you're good, but you do that, you'll have really sharp knives. And at the end of the day, what you want when you're going through this is you want to cut all your vegetables or your meat or whatever in symmetrical sizes because when, let's say potatoes or carrots, they're cut in the same size, they all cook together. Because let's say if you're cutting carrots and then one carrot is like, you know, this small and another piece of carrot is this big, at that time, the cooking times are gonna vary. And what you're gonna have is either you're gonna have the smaller pieces are gonna be burnt because you're trying to get the other pieces on a sear or you're gonna switch off the heat because the smaller pieces are getting burnt but the bigger pieces will still be undone. So you wanna go for symmetry, but then you wanna have like a good knife or a sharp knife rather, let's not use the word good to give you symmetrical cuts. Then we have something known as the Japanese knives, you know, and anything the Europeans do the Japanese always think they can do it better. The difference between a Japanese knife and a German knife is in the hardness of the steel, right? Japanese steel is harder, which means it's more difficult to sharpen, but it remains sharp for a longer period of time. German steel on the other hand is softer, which means it's easier to sharpen, but it doesn't hold its sharpness for so long. What you see here are the one on the top, this is a Santoku knife and this is a Nakiri knife. You'll notice straight away, you know, the shapes are different and it's because how you use them kind of changes. A Santoku knife is a Japanese inspired design. It has a flat blade. Sorry, you'll see there's a thinner cross section and they are suited up, it's very much like a chef knife, but it's not meant for your rocking motion or pulling through foods, but a lot of times you'll see them having a grantern edge, is what you see these kind of dots on it and it's not just like a show thing, it's because what happens is when you're slicing something, you're going to have air pockets there. So the air pockets will ensure that, let's say if I'm thinly slicing, I don't know, tomatoes, for example, right? You're slicing a tomato, the tomato is not gonna stick to your knife, it's just gonna fall off because the air pocket that gets created versus on a chef knife, you know, they'll kind of get stuck and you have to kind of wipe them off the knife. You'll see that a lot, especially when you're doing garlic, ginger, or let's say scallions and so on. And then Japanese knives, they have like a thinner blade. So it's like a 15 degree blade versus like a 20 degree blade of a German knife. So yeah, and they are smaller. So smaller hands, you know, you may prefer a Santoku versus a chef knife. Like I bought my mom a Santoku knife. She liked that a lot. Of course, she was scared of my chef knife, but then, you know, Santoku was like what, seven inches or something. She liked that a lot compared to like nine inches of a chef knife. Then we go into other knives. And one of the knives I use a lot these days is, you know, what's called a Chinese cleaver. And I want to make one thing clear. The Chinese cleaver that you're seeing, it's called a cleaver, but it's more of a misnomer, you know. It's shaped like a cleaver, but you use it very much like any of the, like a thin knife that you do, you know. It's not for, it's not like a butcher's knife or crushing bones and so on. But because of the size, it takes time to get used to, you know, compared to Western European knives or Japanese knives, because your hand, that's it. So here's this guy. Your hand is at a higher height from where the board is. And therefore, the way you cut is differs, you know, because you're cutting like this or you're going through food like this versus, you know, do the other motion that you would do. The things it becomes, once you start using them, you understand how deaf they are, even though it's a larger knife, but what the biggest advantage here is that the weight of the knife does a lot of your cutting. So, you know, you, so you can, the weight thing, you can put the knife on something, the weight will take it, the gravity will pull it down. So using less pressure to kind of cut through something. And again, it takes used to, but it's really good. Also, because it has such a flat thing, it's easy to scrape things off the board and put them into bowls and so on. But like I said, whatever knife you get, make sure you get a knife sharpener and you'll be fine. You don't have to, there's no choice on what you use, but again, using knives, using a chef knife or any of these are just easier on your wrist. And you know, you're using less force because the knife, the tool is doing the work and not you. And when it comes to efficiency, that's what you want. You have tools and you want the tools to do the work. You don't want yourself to work the tools to do the job for you, right? And once we've gone through knives, the next most important thing that you need in your kitchen and again, there's a lot of things that people sell, but the most important thing is your knife and a set of skillets and frying pans, right? And here is where this very interesting discussion comes and of how it's been sold to us by the media or so on, right? It's Teflon. Teflon is the more common name for polytetrafuroethylene. Or for this purpose of this, we'll call it PTFE. Now, a lot of people will say, oh, it's not good, you know, it's carcinogenic and it's bad, you should not be using Teflon, but it's cheap, it's easy to produce. And you need to take a step back and try to understand what's really happening here. Now, again, yes, the PTFE, it does melt. It melts at around 600 Fahrenheit, 300 centigrade, but a lot of the things that you're cooking are not going that high. Now, again, if you're going to put it inside, into the oven or under a broiler, yes, you're going to touch that much, that level of heat and then the Teflon coating is probably going to melt. But a lot of daily cooking that you do, you don't hit that level of temperature, you should be fine. Now, for example, and you're making scrambled eggs in the morning, again, you were using scrambled eggs now, when you're groggy in the morning, you don't want to be sitting with a steel skillet or an aluminum skillet, because the heat, and don't want to be kind of working with it so that it doesn't kind of stick to the bottom or end up using way too much oil. In the morning, putting something on a non-stick pan, getting your other stuff done is fine. And that's why it's like horses for courses. Use a variety of materials that you like. Nowadays, I'm seeing a lot of people use ceramic as well because it just looks good when you take pictures on Instagram and so on. But use whatever you like, just make, as long as you know that it's not like A is better than B, they're all made for different purposes, right? Which brings me to the next thing of all the different kinds of metals, because you have, if you go to a store, you'll see stainless steel pans, cast iron pans, copper pans, aluminum pans. And other than the look and feel, like what should you choose and why? Is there like a copper is better than steel or something like that? Because then you'll go back, oh, back in the day, everything should be copper. So let me just buy copper visits. It's probably not the right thing to do. Again, not wrong, but just think about why you're doing what you're doing, right? So what's the deal with pans or skillets that are made of different kinds of materials? The most important things you have is thermal conductivity, which is how quickly heat energy moves through a material and heat capacity, which is how much energy it takes to heat a material, which is the same of how much energy that material is gonna give out, right? So pans that are made from materials with a lower conductivity, they take longer to heat because the energy applied from the burner takes longer to transfer upwards. And this is why, like pans with a lower thermal conductivity, as you can see here, like stainless steel or cast iron, they take longer to heat up, it's kind of sluggish because you put your cast iron skillet or put your stainless steel skillet on the stove, you can actually put your hand on it, it's not gonna burn immediately. It takes a while for it to heat up. But then similarly, let's say you're done, if you pull it off the stove, they will still have enough residual heat and they'll still be cooking. Hence example of the eggs we took earlier, versus something like aluminum and copper, which have a very high thermal conductivity, which means they heat up real quick, but they also lose heat that quick, right? So it's not a thing that copper is better than cast iron, it just depends upon what you're making, where if you need, and you make a choice of based on the dish or the recipe that you're making, sometimes copper is better than cast iron and vice versa, but there isn't a, A is greater than B always and all of these are also rants in the race. So try to think through of what's happening in a dish. Like for example, when we're talking about, let's say you're doing potatoes, like you're roasting potatoes, a cast iron skillet is good for that because even when you turn it off, the heat will keep going and the potatoes will get crispier as you go, but for some of the other things that you do, copper might probably be the best because you want it to stop cooking the moment you lift it off heat, and in that case, that's what you wanna do. But think through that as you make your choices and not just like a blind choice of someone told me this material is better than the other. So then let's see, we've spoken about two of the most important tools, which is knives and pots and pans. And now let's kind of think about taste, right? Because flavor is taste plus smell is what gives you flavor. And what is smell? We don't realize this, but we're actually wired to detect like a thousand different compounds. And we can discern let's say maybe 10,000 odors. Now trained people like a lot of these wine tasters and so on, they can actually, they've trained themselves to detect almost 10,000 odors, but for the common nose, we're probably around a thousand. And in smell or the olfactory sense or olfaction is based on the sedentary cells in your nose, which are chemoceptors. They're turned on by chemical compounds. And these chemical compounds, we're calling them as odorants, right? So odorants turning on these chemoceptors is what gives you smell. And in cooking, you only smell the volatile compounds in a dish, which is why let's say when you put some oil and then you add like hing and kadipata and so on, you see the aromatics, you get the smell. Also like when you add turmeric into the oil and you let it bloom in the oil, you see all those flavors coming out. Now, again, only the volatile compounds in a dish can give you a smell, but what some people do is you can also make non-volatile compounds volatile by adding alcohol. Therefore, you'll see in a lot of sauces and pasta sauces and so on, people add wine. This is what happens is what it raises the vapor pressure lowers the surface tension of the compounds and therefore they are more likely to get volatile and pass through your chemoceptors. This is what people call as, sorry, okay. This is what people call as co-solvency, right? So the ethanol molecule takes place of water molecules that are normally attached to the compounds and that way it becomes lighter and then it has a higher chance of evaporating. Now, some chemical structures, they have more distinct smells and families of compounds. For example, esters, they have fruity aroma. Amines have like a sticky rotting like smell. Aldehydes, if you remember from organic chemistry back in school, they have the carbon atom which is double bonded with oxygen and hydrogen. They smell more plant-like, right? So these smells, these flavors are used in a lot of products like laundry detergents, candles, so on because they cost less and they are more stable. Like if you look at some of the common ones, like on the stable here, like bananas, almonds, butter, strawberry, these are some of the common smells you'll see in a lot of things that you buy and these are your compounds. Like isoamyl acetate gives you the banana smell. Benzaldihyde gives you the almond kind of flavor. Dioacetyl gives you buttery smell. Furnol gives you strawberry and vanilla gives you vanilla. So it's these smells from these compounds that kind of makes you feel that, again, vanilla, the true vanilla has a lot of things than vanilla. But vanilla is what gives you that distinct vanilla flavor that you're wired in your head and what's what you'll see that in a lot of ice creams and extracts and so on. If that's about smells, let's go to tastes, right? And tastes is your gustatory sense and we've kind of broken things down into six different tastes, right? So you have your sweet, you have your salty, you have bitter, sour, umami and stringent. Sweet is the most common one because we are hardwired to like sweet foods. There's no surprise here. Sweet tastes, they signal, sweets are quickly digestible and therefore we are drawn towards them. But our desire for sweetness, it changes over our lifetime, right? So like we prefer a lot of sweet as we were young but it's kind of slowly decreases. And you kind of wonder why? Our first meal, which is your mother's meal is pure sugar and fat. And that's why you're wired because that's the first meal you ever had. So you're always drawn towards sugar and fat as well. And it's reason also why you like a lot of chocolate is because sugar and fat are the two biggest components in chocolate, right? So that's as far as that goes. And let's see. Oh yeah, salt. So salt, again, it's common sodium chloride makes everything better. You won't find a dish, there are very few dishes where you won't have salt even in like sweet dishes, you add salt because salt filters out the taste of bitterness, right? And it results thereby in other tastes coming more together strongly. So a small quantity of salt enhances the foods, it brings together this fullness of your food. And even therefore in cookies or cakes, you will have a pinch of salt. Bitter is the only taste that takes learning to like because by naturally from the animal world, kingdom as well, bitters is what drives people away, right? So it's more used by plants as a defense mechanism and so if something's bitter, you know, you don't go to it. So it's an acquired taste. And a primitive part of our brain therefore rejects bitter taste by default because it's a lot of toxic plants and all that tastes bitter. Now, the same primitive mechanism is why bitter foods are unappealing to even kids. They haven't learned to tolerate or forgetting, forgot we're enjoying the sense of bitterness. Now, salt like I just told earlier can neutralize bitterness which is why when you like slice cucumbers, you know, you apply some salt, it cuts some of the bitterness. Of course, if your cucumbers are bitter when you kind of eat them up. Sour tastes are caused now by acids in foods, right? The sensation of sourness is detected by the taste bud when it's interacting with hydrogen ions in the acids. So in a way, your sour taste buds is like a pH tester. From an evolutionary perspective, if you think about it, we have evolved from using sourness as a method of determining spoilage to now something taste because a lot of acids are produced by bacteria during breakdown, right? So if something went sour, that means, you know, it had gone spoiled because bacteria was breaking it down and so on. At least when you start as you think about it. Now, it's not to say that sourness is always due to bacterial breakage or that fermentation is a bad thing because, you know, italy batter, those are batters that we love is because of fermentation. When you have yeast in your other preparations, we like that fermentation or beer of any of those facts. But at least primitively, that's how you start out, right? Now, lemon juice, for example, is sour. That's because of the citric acid in it. Or even yogurt, it acquires a sour taste because of the lactic acid. And that is created by the bacteria that breaks down the lactose in your milk. The next taste is umami, right? Umami is a Japanese word with roughly trans to savory. And it's that lip smacking sensation which is triggered by amino acids or glutamates in your food. Now, glutamates are there in a lot of foods. Mushrooms probably have them in the highest quantity, seaweed and so on. But glutamates are also found in tomatoes and other dishes, which is why you'll see a lot of our Indian gravies have tomatoes in them because the glutamate from the tomatoes gives you that savory mouthful feeling. Now, it's interesting because sweetness, saltiness, they are associated with positive attributes of food. Like sweetness gives you quick release of energy. Salt is what your blood needs for blood pressure. So you generally get them. Sourness and bitterness, they indicate kind of potential danger, like either the food has gone bad or the plant is bitter or so on. But umami is a very subtle indicator. And it doesn't follow any of these. It's subtle indicator of protein content. Or it's a way of telling you that the food that you're ingesting has enough amino acids because your muscle functions need amino acids. And regardless of that, umami is worth understanding just for because of MSG. MSG or monosodium glutamate is to umami what sugar is to sweetness. It's a chemical. It's odorless. But it triggers all your umami receptors in your tongue. Now, MSG or Aginomoto, it's kind of called, has got a very bad rap, both in India and in the States. And there's a lot of bad press. But if you kind of take a step back and look at it, it's more because of a lot of these people, a lot of these chefs, at least in the West, were very threatened by chefs from the East because of this flavoring, which a lot of these other dishes wouldn't stand a chance because of the flavor. So a lot of the press would then say that MSG is bad and so on and so forth. And in fact, there's fascinating stories of how in the early 80s, chefs from China, Japan, and all would kind of smuggle small packets of MSG in their clothing as they would come in because it was like a bad substance and so on. And same thing, even in India growing up, you would read reports about MSG or Aginomoto causes, heart attacks and things like that and kind of demonizing it to this very day. Like someone saw it on a food video that I'd put out and sent me a comment, it's dangerous. Why are you using MSG? You shouldn't be using that and kind of sent me this huge five, six paragraph message. But again, we can only try. Then you have your other taste, right? Your taste buds can pick up other tastes as well, like the irritation bought by chilies. And that's because of the chemical capsaicin which is in your chili, which latches on to your tongues and then your tongue sends that whole signal to your brain. It's a neurotransmitter and says, okay, no, I'm in trouble. That's why you feel heat. Now, a lot of times, people will say you'll drink water or something, but milk is what you wanna use because milk is gonna latch on to the capsaicin and it's gonna release it from your tongue rather than water, which is not wash it down. These receptors, they take more time to, they get depleted and they take time to come back to replenish, which is why the more and more hot foods you eat, you kind of slowly build a tolerance for hotter and hotter foods. It doesn't happen with sweet or saltier in the other, but with hot food, it happens, which is why you give someone a taste and say, oh, tell me if it's too spicy. It probably might be spicy for them, just not for you. So it's not very safe to jump into that. And then you also have tastes like the cooling sensation in which you get from plants like menthol, mint or something like that. That's a cooling kind of a taste. And then a taste which is very more known in the Indian subcontinent anywhere else is astringency, right? And astringency results when certain compounds bind to your taste receptors and cause like a drying or a puckering reaction. So you'll see a lot of astringency in pomegranates, in teas and so on, where that's, and so for example, you go back to Ayurveda, lists out astringent as one of the tastes and not umami. And the combinations of these is what becomes really interesting. Now you know all the different tastes is like salty and sour, right? Salty and sour, we know works because we see it in pickles and salad dressings and so on. Salty and sweet, we know because, for example, you have chocolate pretzels or you have watermelons and feta salad, those two tastes go really well. Sweet and sour, I mean, we love oranges, lemonade, so on. Or even corn when you kind of roast it and you have lime rubbing on it, it's that sweet and sour that comes together. Bitter and sweet, apples are bitter and sweeter times, chocolate is, coffee is a very good example of that. So what I'm trying to get is like, a lot of these tastes are separate but they can come together and that's what you wanna be thinking as you're trying to come up with a recipe or trying to think what you could do to a recipe. So then let's see. This is one of my favorite ways of exploration is how you choose your ingredients, right? So one of the ways is called adapt an experiment where you take a recipe, then you start changing, chopping and then you see what you want to do. So let's say, and what will happen a lot of times is that recipe will kind of go bad because you're just doing way too much experimentation but that's when you wanna take a step back and see, okay, what do I need to do? So let's say if you wanna increase the bitterness in something, you can add tonic water or if you want to reduce it, you increase saltiness because salt cuts bitter. And these are the ways to like, you salvage your dish because you experimented way too much, right? Or if you want to make something more sour, you add lemon juice, vinegar, or to reduce sourness, you increase your sweetness. Umami, like I said, comes from tomatoes, comes from mushrooms, MSG, soy sauce, that's how you increase umami, which is why you'll see this a lot of in your noodles and Chinese dishes and soups, those soupy manchurians and things like that. And the only way to reduce umami if you have too much of it is not just dilution. You can increase sweet by obviously sugar, honey, maple syrup, so on. But if you want to reduce it, then you have to kind of increase your sourness or increase the heat to reduce something it's gone way too sweet. Same thing with salt, umami-based ingredients have salt to the soy sauce or some of these are obviously salty. But then if you want to reduce salt, you kind of increase your sweetness. Adapting and experimenting is fun, but just make sure you have this in the back of your pocket because a lot of times things will kind of go haywire as you're experimenting way too much with your dishes. But it's a very fun way of choosing ingredients because you just say, okay, what if I take this, this and this, what will happen? But then you just need to make sure you have something as a backup. And again, don't feel bad about burning dinners, right? It's always okay to burn dinners. You have Maggie, you'll be fine. You can order pizza, you'll be fine. Another way to choose ingredients, and I like this a lot, is by regional or traditional means, where you identify by region what they use for each of these tastes. And therefore, if you take a recipe that's from a particular region, how can you make it, how can you adapt it to an Indian taste or a Chinese taste or something like that, right? And a lot of people look down upon stuff like this, but I don't care. That's the whole point is there are no rules in the kitchen. So there, for example, in Chinese cuisine, right? Bitter comes from bitter melon. Salty comes from soy, MSG. Sourness comes from rice wine vinegar. Sweetness comes from plum sauce. Umami comes from oyster sauce, dried mushrooms. And the heat comes from Sichuan peppers, chili oil and so on. Now, if you picked a Chinese recipe, you will see these flavors or these ingredients or similar ones bringing in some of these tastes. And then if you go to, let's say, the French or Greek, they differ, but you can see how, you can start spotting common trends. Like for example, in saar, right? You will see the French use red wine vinegar, the Greeks use lemon, but they're all giving you its acid that they're imparting. So you can see why they're using what they're using, or for example, they use feta cheese and someone else is using capers. But at the end, you're going for that pickled saltiness from a caper or that saltiness that feta cheese gives you versus how the Chinese use soy or MSG or so on, right? And you can very well take a, like an Italian dish or something and then say, what if I just swap out these flavors and substitute them instead with something from any of these other countries, what will happen to it? That's really nice experiment. I've done a few. Sometimes they work out really well, sometimes not so much, but it is fun to kind of do that. And so then let's see. If you then, same way, if you go in Indian cuisine, are you bitter? I have tamarind sauce. Sorry? I've been pasta with tamarind to make it more tangy and sour and it just gives one such a burst of flavor tamarind non-pasta. And that's exactly, I see a lot of posts on Twitter or Instagram where people will take someone else's posts and say, yuck, I'd rather die than eat this. And it's because you've been conditioned in your mind a certain way that pasta has to just taste this way or choli has to just be like this or noodles should only be like this. It's your conditioning rather than anything else which is kind of making you think on those terms and you instantly reject something. Just the very idea of it kind of is something that you want to detest rather than maybe taste it. Maybe it may be nice. You don't know, but that whole snobbery that we have this ingrain snobbery of when we look at dishes. And like recently there was this thing where someone had made polenta. It was adding into one of the episodes of MasterChef or something. And then someone was like, oh, this is just upma. What a big deal of, why are you making upma in a finale and what's a big deal with that? But that's our whole conditioning. And one of the things also gets me a lot of times when people say, how do you get the authentic taste in this dish? And my wife also, I make fun of her a lot of times. She'll use the word and she'll get, okay, I know what you're gonna say. What do you mean by authentic taste? Is the authentic taste the taste that you grew up eating when you're in your home? And now that is the way that is the authentic taste for let's say like a sambar or like a coconut chutney. And now you're looking for that everywhere else. It's not authentic. It's just that something you've been conditioned for the last 20, 30 years of your life. And now you just think that that's how sambar or whatever it should taste like. Or if you've gone to a restaurant and then you've been served this kadai paneer and then actually a lot of restaurants the kadai paneer tastes exactly the same. It's that rubbery mess floating in an orange sea of gravy. You just think that is the authentic way or that is the way of kadai paneer or whatever. You need to start thinking, that's just how the restaurant that your favorite restaurant has been making. It doesn't mean anyone making it differently is any less than the other. And the goal here that I'm trying to go for is also that, right? Is to try to kind of dissociate all this conditioning that you have in your mind. And kind of think with an open mind. Now, let's say, so you have bitters, right? You have hing, methi, karela is what gives you bitter flavors. Whereas in Italian cooking, you have olives, artichokes, that's what gives you bitter. You can see the common thread, as you put this into a table structure, if you go down, you can see they're all related. And therefore, you can try substituting them or you don't, but you can also now start seeing why a polenta, an upma, or a corn meal, they all are kind of similar to each other, right? You'll see that thread kind of flow through across cultures and across regions is because it's not that someone stole your recipe or your culture's recipe. They just brought in the same set of flavors but using ingredients that grow locally there. Our source locally, and it kind of now is very similar to what you do. Let's see, we can still keep going on this, across, if you go to Southeast Asia, Latin America, they're both opposites, but you will see how some things are still similar, right? So in Southeast Asia, you'll see you use a lot of tamarind, but even in Latin America, you see tamarind being used. Now, a lot of these Indonesian and Thai preparations, you'll see the fermented bean paste, whereas Latin America, you'll see a lot of tomatoes and so on being used. So now, and my whole goal, like I said, is just to get those things out, like jalapenos, habaneros, growing now in the U.S., I love the habanero a lot more, but that doesn't mean that I don't buy birds actually from the Thai store, I don't buy birds actually, that doesn't mean that I don't buy birds actually from the Thai store when I get a chance, right? They are all still giving you that heat, but then the heat that you get from birds actually is still different from the heat from a habanero. It's a different kind of a heat, but they're all substitutable and you can see why you would wanna use them. Another way of picking ingredients is seasonal and now with global supply chain and logistics, you get apples throughout the year, in January, in April or so, you get apples or anything like that, but there is inherently something special about eating a consuming ingredient in the season that it is known to grow, like despite being flash frozen and so brought to you later or it's being shipped from somewhere in Latin America where I still get bananas even when it's like, there's a snowstorm outside and I'm still getting bananas at the grocery store, but when you are eating something that's in season, it's naturally fresher, you can actually feel that taste. Like for example, let's say you make a peach jam. If you make a peach jam in the summer, that will taste a lot different from a peach jam that you made with peaches that you bought in winter. So that's one of those things is trying to appreciate what grows locally and a lot of our dishes, if you actually see, you'll see these winter dishes, summer dishes and so on. Like my mom, she's like a very big proponent of that and she's like, eat winter things in the winter, eat what grows in the summer, in the summer, cucumbers and things like watermelon, eat those in the summer again. Here I get watermelon even in winters, but that's what we tend to say is that the freshness of a watermelon that you get in the summer is not going to be matched by something you can get in the winter, or like apples. I went apple picking yesterday to an orchard and it's taking apples from the tree and the crunch that you get, it's not the taste that comes from the apple. The crunch gives you, your ears are perked up by the crunch that also adds to the taste and that same crunch won't be in an apple that I find in March or something when I'm buying it from a grocery store. So choosing an ingredient seasonally is a challenge, but it's also a very interesting challenge because now you are trying to restrict yourself to what grows locally where you are in that very season and again, unless you're living like in the far north where it's like snowing for six months of the year or something, but at least in a more tropical climate, well, especially if you're in India or so on, cooking with things which are local and seasonal probably is going to be a lot better. Again, it presents an interesting challenge and what I'm trying to say all of these are just trying ways to feel how we can pick out our ingredients, right? You pick out the ingredients because you want to adapt an experiment, you just want to say, oh, what will endives and artichoke, will they go together? That's your experimenting ways. You're picking them by cultures and see, okay, how would the Chinese do this? Or how would the Greek add salt? And maybe if I can use that in one of my dishes or like Narika said, pasta and tamarind, which I should try now. Or even amchur powder, as I think about that. Or you could do it seasonally. One of my favorite ways and which I do often is the analytical method, is where I read a lot of things and put them together and then I think, okay, what if I do this that this recipe did, pick this that some other recipe did, pick this that some other recipe did and what comes together? Because now we're looking at things more from an analytical standpoint of what will happen when I bring the common ideas that these different flavors do and put them together. Let's say if you're making, on this slide I have, if you're making chutneys, right? You can start picking any, you need a base, right? If it's coconut chutney or tomato chutney or mango chutney or onion chutney, anything, you need one of the bases. You pick a base, whatever you want from here. You need to add a souring element. You pick again, whatever you want. You can add lemon juice or coconut, dry mango, yogurt. And then there is a tempering, right? These are your basic building blocks of any chutney that you make. The analytical way of coming at it is, okay, yes, there is a way that the adigas or the MTR or the swathi tiffins will make coconut chutney. But does coconut chutney always have to be made that way? You start kind of taking a step back and thinking that way or tomato chutney or whatever you get. And then now you can pick and choose. So you can now pick anything from this category. You pick something from here, pick something from here, you try it out. It may be good, may not be good, but that's your analytical way of doing it where you're now thinking, okay, this selection six, five and three did not work, but maybe something, then you're trying to figure out why it didn't work. Sorry about the slide. And it's not a very weird thing to do. So here, let's do something right now. Let us create something, let's say for sauces, right? We can do one right now as we go. So if you were making soups, let's say we make soups. What are the things we can make soups with? Let's see if I can get something on the chat. I'll start putting on a few. Pumpkin, right? I'm gonna add, I'm gonna add pumpkins. I'm gonna add tomatoes. Let's see, we can do spinach. We can do what else? Sorry? Grated coconut. Coconut, okay. And let's pick some. Creaminess to the soup, when you need, so it's coconut is a fantastic thing to add to. Yeah, no, no, I'm trying to give through, picking our bases. So for, yeah, so we'll use coconut milk here. We'll use cream, we'll use, let's say cornstarch. So these are your thickening agents. Your thickening agents are these, you're using something from here. And then let's say if you're doing seasoning, you have thyme, you have thyme, you have rosemary, you have oregano, you have garam masala. Then let's say you can add Sriracha and spice, spice. And then you can add cumin, coriander, and then you need your aromatics. And for your aromatics, we have ginger, we have garlic, we have onions, we have carrots, we have celery, okay? So yeah, we just made this up as we went. Now, if you're gonna make a soup, you can pick one from here, right? You pick one of your vegetables that are making a soup with. Let's say you have potatoes, potatoes, yeah, you pick one or corn, you have corn, you have peas. You take one from here and then you prepare it. If it's peas or corn, you're going to kind of roast, you're gonna cook them a bit. If it is spinach or any of those greens or kale, kale is another one, you're going to kind of blanch them maybe if it's pumpkin or potatoes, you're gonna probably gonna bake them. However, you pick one from here. Then you need your aromatics. You pick one, you pick two, you pick all of them if you want, right? And then that's what you're gonna blend together. Then you bring your thickening agent. You either add cream, you add coconut milk, you add cornstarch, that's what thickens it up. And then you pick what seasoning you want on it in addition to salt and pepper, of course. But then now based on what you picked, you have a different soup, right? And this is the analytical way of looking at it is where there is no set recipe, right? There won't be a recipe that says pumpkin soup with coconut milk, garam masala and celery. Why not? It'll taste good. Trust me, I have actually a video that's coming out. I still have an editor, but did a lot of coconut milk in pumpkins and it makes a brilliant thing. Or let's say if you're doing a corn soup, actually you can start seeing this. So one of the most famous soups you will get in Indochini's cuisine is your sweet corn soup, right? So you have corn, you have peas and corn, you have cornstarch. They'll add a bit of cumin coriander and you'll have garlic in it. That's your sweet corn soup or your pea soup. So I think you're seeing the table you've just drawn up, you're still seeing the slide. Oh my bad. Oh, what do I do? I've been furiously typing away for the last five minutes. Like an idiot. The end result rather than the process. Yeah. Oh, okay, one second, let me do this. Let me move this guy to here, here. Okay, better? Yeah, I think so. Okay, so sorry about that. I didn't realize what was happening. So yeah, so you're picking something from here. You're picking one of your vegetables, you pick whatever you want is your thickening agent, you pick what you want for your aromatics, you pick something for seasoning and that ends up being your soup. So the same logic that we applied to make chutneys, you apply that to soup, you apply that even to curries or a lot of your gravies because you know you have a fixed set of gravies or like for example, in a lot of Southern Indian cooking, like torans or things that you know, you're gonna use grated coconut, you're gonna use cumin, you're gonna use asafoetida or king, I'm gonna call it king for now on. It's way too many alphabets to pronounce. That's what you use and then you just start changing the vegetables in your toran and it's a different one each time. It may not be the way your mom, your grandmom has made it, but it is now your way of making it. Same thing goes for a lot of these or at least what is sold as Indian food in a lot of restaurants these days. Like you know, there is this one common orangish base and sometimes it's more red than orange and then you have a variety of things that are floating in it. Sometimes you have mushrooms floating in it, sometimes you have paneer floating in it, sometimes you have chicken floating in it, sometimes you'll have anything else but it's that same gravy or the same base and you're just adding things from the side. So if you start thinking or attacking a recipe that way, you will come up with your own variations and as you look at this Excel sheet that we just came up and like as we went, you can make at least 50 to 60 different types of soups right here, right? You're just making different choices and if you remember permutations and combinations, right? You're choosing something in, you choose something from here and then that's how you go. That's the, as far as choosing ingredients, these are the different ways I used and I kind of encourage people to do because again, you're not sticking to what someone said but you're discovering your own base. Now that we've done ingredients, we've looked at tools, one of the things we wanted to, we should probably talk about is our friends' time and temperature, right? And time and temperature play a very important role in whatever you cook. So you'll have things which are slow roasting, you'll have things that are quick boils, stir fries, but it's time and temperature, it's a combination of both of that is what is doing it for you here. Now there are three things, at least when you're looking at temperature that come in and those are denaturation of proteins, mailed reactions and caramelization, right? So now the native form of a protein, if you think about it, it's a three-dimensional shape and that's what the protein has for normal functioning. Now this structure can be disrupted by heat or by acid and then when that is disturbed, the protein is supposed to be called as denature, right? And the changes in the shape of protein alters the taste and texture. So that's what happens, let's say if you have your searing chicken or meat or something like that, the protein is getting denatured and that's what gives it that taste and texture versus eating raw meat. Now different proteins, they need denature at different temperatures, but mostly they're between 50 to 70 centigrade, right? Let's take egg whites, since we've been talking about eggs for a while now, eggs begin to denature around 60 centigrade or 140 Fahrenheit. And that's when you break an egg, it's transparent, but then it turns white because the shape of the denature protein is no longer transparent to visible light. In meats, however, there's a protein that's myosin and that denatures around 50 centigrade, 120 Fahrenheit or so. And another protein actin, that begins to denature around 65 centigrade, 150 Fahrenheit. And most people prefer meat cooked at, it's cooked such that the myosin is denatured but the actin is still native because that's that mix so that it doesn't get too rubbery but it's still cooked and so on, right? That's how protein is denatured. Now, Mayard reactions, Mayard reactions happen in foods that we eat all the time. We just don't realize them and we just don't know what they're called. Now, a Mayard reaction is the Browning reaction that gives foods an aromatic and a mouthwatering aroma, right? It is usually triggered by heat and this occurs when an amino acid and a certain types of sugar, they break down and recombine into hundreds of different compounds and the byproducts of this are smells and they depend upon the amino acids that are present in the food that are being cooked. For example, now chicken is getting roasted that crispy skin and the smell that is brought on by a Mayard reaction. Now, in most culinary processes, Mayard reactions start getting noticeable around 154 centigrade, 300 Fahrenheit and it depends upon the pH of the chemical reagents that are in the food and how much they are, right? So, which is why, if you are cooking, let's say if you're cooking meat below 150 Fahrenheit, you won't see any Mayard reactions and again, it's important because water boils at 100, that's why you don't see any Mayard reactions when you're boiling something in water because it's only, it caps out at 100 but then these start occurring at 150 and so on. Caramelization is that next step going ahead, right? Caramelization occurs with the breakdown of sugar, right? And very much like the Mayard reaction, it generates hundreds of compounds, they smell delicious, which is why, you know, caramelization smells so good. Baking is one of the biggest examples of that. Your whole house smells wonderful. Now, pure sucrose, right? That's what you have in your granulated sugar. That caramelizes between like around 160 to 200 Fahrenheit or like 320 to 400 Fahrenheit or sorry, 160 to 200 centigrade and that brings out all your rich flavors and therefore in a lot of baking, you will see a lot of baking is happens around the 190 plus in centigrade or 375 and above. A lot of baking will happen around 400 Fahrenheit because you'll have this brown exterior and whereas if you're baking something, let's say below 170 centigrade or 350 Fahrenheit, you'll be, they'll be less browning. That's because the caramelization isn't occurring. So cookies and so on, you'll see be baked at higher temperatures versus, you know, things that you don't want them to go that way you bake at lower temperature like butter cookies or something because you don't want the butter to kind of burn out at that higher temperature. Now, when you look at that as we simply mentioned baking, you have heat transfer, right? And heat transfer is important because whatever we are cooking, you're imparting heat to, you know, you're the eggs or whatever you're trying to make and there's different ways of how this heat is imparted, right? So you have conduction, convection and radiation. Now, in conduction, these methods are where heat is transferred directly by contact between the food and the hot material, you know, like eggs meeting a hot skillet, that is conduction. Now this causes the thermal energy from the skillet to be transferred onto the egg and the neighborhood molecules and therefore that then equalizes the temperature because the entire egg is meeting that surface at the same time. Now sorting, searing, all of that is conduction. Convection, however, is where the heat is transferring through either, through a medium, right? So either air or water or oil or something like that, right? So baking, roasting, boiling, steaming, all of these work on that same principle of a hot material is what is imparting, a hot medium, sorry, is imparting the heat. So in baking and roasting, it's the hot air, in boiling and steaming, it's the water vapor or in deep frying, it's the hot oil, right? And then in these, you can put them as two different methods, that is the wet method and the hot method, right? The wet method has water and oil, whereas the dry heat method is, you know, you're baking, roasting and so far. Now, what happens in the wet methods is, in the, especially like boiling and so on, they don't reach the temperature required for Mayard reactions or caramelization, right? Versus, technically, if you do, if you pressure cook, you can still get some Mayard reactions going. But a lot of your flavorful compounds from Mayard reactions, you'll see them in grilling or oven-roasted items, versus seeing them in something that's stewed or braised or so on. So if you're steaming carrots, they won't see any caramelization, versus if you're searing the carrot or you're baking or broiling the carrot or so on, right? And the broiled carrot, that charred flavor that you get on a boiled carrot is very different from what you get from a steamed carrot. Just try it, it's a mind-blowing experience, what that simple carrot can do in both these different mediums. And then you have radiation, right? Radiation is the heat that is transferred via electromagnetic radiation. Now, it doesn't always mean, it doesn't always mean a microwave, but it could also be from charcoal. So when people do a lot of grilling and so on, it's the hot coal from below that's getting, the hot coals, the hot air comes up and that's what's heating things, like when you're doing a tandoor or something like that, or also microwaves where you're using electromagnetic waves to kind of cook. Again, last week, we had a kitchen chem prof who did a brilliant session on microwaves. I don't wanna go too much into that. I think it's available on the archives on the Kilter website. But however, whatever method of heat transfer you use, again, it's just important to come to think about what are you trying to go for? Let's take that example of the carrot, right? You can boil the carrot, you can sear the carrot, you can grill the carrot, right? You can do all three things with that same carrot. And it's a very nice experiment to try out because the taste will differ in each of these. Now, the steamed carrot will be a lot softer, but it'll be cooked and you'll, but whereas the seared carrot, it'll be harder, but you'll have a nice sear to it because of the skillet that you had. And then when you're putting it into the oven, you get a nice char, but it loses a lot of the water, so you'll see kind of shrink a bit and so on. So it depends on where you wanna use it. So if you're gonna make a soup or something, char the carrots and then puree them together, you'll have that smoky flavor in that in there. And the worst is if you're going to make like a Thoran or something like that, you wanna taste the carrot, you wanna be shrunk into nothing, right? So that's when you'll see steaming your carrots along with, or if you're making like a Parkusli or whatever you wanna do, that's where you would see those things. So you can choose your methods of heat transfer, but again, they all, because of the temperatures, the maximum temperatures and they can impart, that's what happens. The thing to consider here is oil, I just mentioned, right? So water, because it caps out at 100 centigrade, it doesn't, you cannot get any browning going, but oil, because the smoke point is a lot higher, that's why you see a lot of frying happening in oil because you can impart a lot more heat to what you're frying versus boiling it or anything else. And oil, obviously, the fact gets stuck to what you're making, so your budgie or something like that. And then obviously impacts a lot of flavor from the fact, but you're using oil more for cooking it, but sometimes it's also a taste enhancer. I just wanted to leave you with one last thing, and that's about the different temperatures and so that you can kind of get an idea of what we do and you have a mental idea of when you're trying to make something or planning out your next dish of what you want to see, because you pick your temperatures accordingly, right? So now proteins, for example, at least in meat and fish and so on, when people are biting into them, you don't want to chew too much, right? It's that total chewing work or the total texture preference, and that's what you want to bring down, which is why you're de-natured or you're cooking your protein. And that temperature that we just spoke about happens around the 104 Fahrenheit, 122 Fahrenheit or 40 to 50 centigrade mark. And this is when the myosin and the collagen will de-nature, but the actin will remain, and therefore meat, especially red meat, will have that pinkish color, which people kind of prefer. Eggs, they're set around at like 62 centigrade, 144. And then eggs are my favorite, and clearly you can see I've mentioned it so many times in this entire session, because I feel it's like the wonderful of the kitchen. They have a light part, they have a dark part, and they bind the entire culinary world together, right from baking to cooking to frying. They're used in savory and sweet foods. They are binders, they are rising agents in souffles and cakes and so on. They are emulsifiers, if you're doing like a meringue or sauces and like a hollandaise sauce or something. And if you're making like a custard, the eggs is what gives it the structure. Also in ice creams, you have eggs. And all of this doesn't even touch the flavor of, and we're not even talking about a simple cooked egg. That itself is a different flavor bomb in itself. So that's why I love eggs so much. And now the most heat-sensitive protein in egg is your over-transferrin, right? And that denatures around 62 centigrade, 140 Fahrenheit. And another protein, the over-albumin, that denatures around 80 centigrade. And these two proteins is what you have in your egg whites, right? So you have your over-transferrin, that's like 12%, and your over-albumin is 54% of the egg white. And this is the difference between like a soft-boiled egg and a hard-boiled egg, right? So if you get that egg up to let's say 80 centigrade for a sufficient amount of time, that white is cooked at that temperature, but the over-albumin proteins remain, and therefore, your egg is still in a semi-liquid state. It has become white, but it's in semi-liquid state. That's what you get with soft-boiled eggs, right? So that's kind of important because depending on what you're trying to go for, you have the temperature gradient in your mind. And then let's say collagen. Collagen denatures at around 68 centigrade. And this is the most common type of protein in connectivity shoe, right? And there are different types of collagen in animals, but the difference between different types of collagen is the temperature at which they denature, right? Now, in cooking, you'll see collagen is in, especially with cooking meats and so on, and the tendons and the skins and the muscle networks, you'll have it, and it is tough, right? And so it becomes palatable only when it gets a certain temperature. That's the temperature that you're going for. Vegetables, however, are slightly higher and it's the starch that breaks down and kind of gelatinizes. That's what makes vegetables taste good versus raw. So vegetables, a lot of vegetables at least are compromised of carbohydrates, like cellulose, starch, and pectin. And unlike the proteins in meat, which are very sensitive to heat, they can, you know, a lot of too much heat and your chicken can become like shoe leather or something. Vegetables are more forgiving, right? Vegetables are more forgiving even at higher temperatures and that's, so for example, one of the things, it's very common is that when you're making potatoes, like when you're trying to roast potatoes, one of the things to do is to like add a pinch of baking soda, kind of parboil them and then peel and then kind of put them on the stove. Because what that does is pectin, like I mentioned earlier, the baking soda kind of breaks down all the pectin. So then that kind of creates ridges on the surface of your potatoes. So then when you take that parboiled potato with baking soda in it, and then when you use it on your skillet, you get your roasted potatoes a lot better than just, you know, and they cook a lot faster also because they're already parboiled versus dicing up your potatoes and then waiting and then, you know, constantly scraping your skillet. So cooking starchy vegetables, you know, it just like potatoes especially, causes the starches to gelatinize. And in the raw form, the starches are semi-crystalline, but then cooking melts them down and then they're easily broken down by a dish. So you can eat raw potatoes, but then you eat too many raw potatoes and you kind of feel weird versus cooking them down or like those potatoes is a common staple, at least in my house, like rasam and like the potato curry is what, you know, it might go to when my mom used to make them is because now they are, you can eat a lot more of it than trying to eat like a raw potato. And like with most other reactions in cooking, at the point at which starch granules gelatinize depends upon not just temperature, it also the type of the starch because different and the length of the temperature of how much it's given to, also depends on how much moisture there is, right? So don't hold me to, oh, you know, you said it's 70 degrees centigrade. Well, that's generally around which and differs by vegetable to vegetable, but for a rough idea, keep that in mind. And then made reactions. We just spoke about made reactions, made reactions happen around 310 Fahrenheit, 154 centigrade, and they aren't solely depend upon temperature as well, right? There's also other factors. Now alkaline foods, they undergo made reactions more easily like egg whites we spoke about. They can undergo made reactions at a lower temperature or higher pressures of like a pressure cooker. And the amount of water and the types of reactants occurs also kind of affects your made reactions. Now, therefore, let's see. Oh yeah, sugars. So sugars gelatinize, caramelize at around 180 centigrade and that's what we spoke about in baking as well is that you see at the temperature, you actually see a bit of both made reactions as well as caramelization and that's happening. And a lot of your baked goods, the enjoyable aromas that you get have that. And so for example, coffee or roasted nuts or some of these other ones also, you see that temperature is what is giving you all of that.