Tadka in a vial

Last week, Sardar Pav Bhaji at Tardeo had some unusual visitors. They came in large numbers, from five countries, but that’s not why the waiters lurked around stealing curious glances.

To be fair to them, they aren’t used to guests who sniff 30 vials before they start on their meal. Even after the pav bhajis came, the visitors unabashedly raised the plates to their nostrils — it seemed the sniffing just wouldn’t stop.

When they did get down to devouring the city’s favourite fast food, every morsel would be followed by furious note-taking.

The restaurant’s owner, however, didn’t mind the bizarre experience. (I don’t think I mentioned how the pav bhaji was also poured into glass flasks attached to vacuum tubes).

Some day, in some part of the world, when you bite into pav bhaji flavoured chips or dig your fork into pav bhaji pasta, you’ll know who to thank back home.

Making that possible will be Klaus Gassenmier, Maureen Tan, Thomas Chai, Manoj Degwekar and Jeff Peppet.

All of last week, the flavours teams from Givaudan, the world’s leading flavour and fragrance company, toured Mumbai and Delhi to analyse and document popular dishes, study authentic cooking techniques and trap their aromas and flavours.

These are the men and women who create the very convincing flavours in your ready-to-make soup powder, coffee concoctions beverages and confectionaries. And they were out of their labs and on Mumbai’s streets to understand the flavours of the city’s food and reinvent them.

Sardar Pav Bhaji, Pure Pur Kolhapur at Mahim and Crawford Market’s Zaffran played hosts to the group.

Destination Mumbai
After Gabon, South-east Asia, Brazil, Columbia, Argentina and France one wonders what took the flavourists 11 years to reach India. Their first flavour trek goes back to 1999.

“The curiosity about Indian cuisine abroad has really peaked only in the last few years. However, I must admit that India’s diversity in terms of its food, too, was a bit intimidating to research. We’d all heard how every dish changes in taste and preparation technique every few yards in a city like Mumbai,” says Jeff Peppet, global director of marketing communications.

He helps me grab a seat next to the flavourists who, for the record, are still sniffing the pav bhaji. I decide to keep my curiosity in check for a while and tinker with the vials. The labels read Green, Green-earthy, Potato, Fried, Roasted, Nutty, Sulphury-vegetable Creamy-sour, Yeast, Coriander-leafy and — I solemnly swear I’m not making this up — Sweaty.

These are all descriptors — artificially created aroma molecules from various foods over time. You’d agree that even two trained professional flavourists would be unable to “correctly” describe something as highly subjective as taste. These descriptors serve as a common language, a code for flavourists to rate foods scientifically.

While flavourists do the olfactory analysis, Gassenmier, the analytical scientist, traps the pav bhaji’s many aroma and flavour molecules in a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS).

The apparatus will help him break them down into individual molecules which will be further identified, analysed and stored in the company’s database. When the flavour company’s client wishes to design a product, the application team and the flavour creation experts will pick and choose from the extensive database to mix, match or even invent a totally different flavour.

Gastronomically yours
“Go on, try it. It’s not what you think it is,” says Peppet, watching me warily eye the Sweaty descriptor. I pick the Green-earthy first. If I wasn’t looking at the vial in my hands, I would have thought that I was standing amidst farm-fresh greens. Or, chew on this — thanks to the Creamy or Fatty descriptor, my brain feels my tongue rolling over sinful lashings of butter where there are none.

Sweaty, by the way, is the rather salty smell of cheese just about to go bad. Flavourist Manoj Degwekar smiles at my grimace. “That’s the occupational hazard of being a flavourist — you never know what you’ll end up tasting to keep your job.”

Degwekar and Prakash Raote, the two flavourists here at the Mumbai trek haven’t travelled with Peppet’s team over the last 11 years. In other words, they weren’t there when the team hopped over Gabon’s rainforests in a hot air balloon every morning.

An inflated raft would be suspended just above the trees and the hired locals would pick tropical fruits and flowers for research.

The result: red berries that tasted like raw meat, tree barks that were unmistakably mushroomy, oniony and garlicy. The products: a beverage in the US with the captured taste of tea flower and four flavours of fruits now being sold successfully in Vietnam as candy.

Consumers, after all, love the excitement of a new flavour mixed with something familiar they’ve tasted before, says Peppet.
 
Point. Click. Smell
The world’s favourite flavours are citrus, coffee and vanilla and these are being constantly researched. What is unusual is spending years in China to capture the molecules from an authentic Sichuan hotpot.

Or making Thailand and Korea home to arrest the flavours of Nam Prik Pow and Khemchi Jengol. I am handed the Virtual Aroma Synthesiser (VAS), a device which allows the creation of flavors in real time, according to exact customer specifications. It has a card inserted into it.

As I press a button, I get the unmistakable aroma of ingredients being stir-fried in a steamy wok. I press another and the fragrance of lemongrass wafts by.

The team has to stomach quite a few surprises for these Aha! moments. Tan, the application expert, remembers the study of a rooster dish in Japan.

“After the dish is cooked, it is customary to place it so that the rooster’s private parts are all cut up and displayed to the guest! I wanted to turn my face away – instead, I studied it as if my life depended on it,” she says. Peppet had a similar cultural shock in Vietnam, but wants it kept a secret. 

So what left the scientists and chefs stumped in India? The tadka over the Rajasthani Kadhi at Zaffran it seems. Just how do you capture the aroma and flavour molecules of something that needs to be poured over a dish immediately after being heated to the optimum temperature?

I am guessing they managed it because Gassenmier who doesn’t usually look away from his GSCM, actually managed to sit back and take in Zaffran’s ambience.

Tan says: “Mumbai’s cuisine has lent itself beautifully to the study of spices. I could see that the time spent on the dishes is more than the average, but the flavour totally makes up for it. Somehow it always does…”

We call it the Great Indian Culinary Trick.